These requirements can be adopted for selecting future reviewers. They do not necessarily have to be retrospective, with the exception of n.3. I think it's important that a reviewer cannot have co-authored a paper with the author in the last 12/24 months.

I won't answer for the others, but I never said or wanted to limit the minimum to 3, just because it's better to be faster (to be honest, it won't change anything). The problem I said is that of motivation. If the same reviewer is asked to review many more papers because the requirement is now greater (e.g., 4 approvals), it surely will be more difficult to find someone with enough motivation to do the job right. Or they will decide to review more papers, but only at the cost that each reviews will be of less quality (because less time has been spent on each of them). The other, related reason is that an article published in OP can't attract so many external reviewers, compared to something published, say, in Intelligence. I'm not talking about the time it takes to review the entire thing, I'm talking about the cost and exhaustion associated with recruitment and the bunch of refusals or non-answers and serial emailing.

Furthermore, why bothering about the time it takes to do the review, at least if it's not more time-consuming than in other journals ? If you're an author who publish many articles, and your article n°1 needs still more reviewers, you can still work on article n°2, n°3 etc. That will not stop you from working, studying, etc.

I don't know what you mean, "limit".

Bad wording, due to my poor english I guess. I meant : "set the minimum to three".

By the way, now that I think about external reviewers, I think the editors should make the following statement in the rules : If the author wants to recruit an external reviewer, he must "Cc" one of the editors whenever he sends an invitation to review.

I know that there is actually a recommendation that an author should make publicly available the email conversation, but I'm not talking about that. I say that an invitation to review must contain a Cc to the editor. First, because it will increase the probability that a reviewer will accept the invitation, and because the editor will know the kind of persons the author is requesting help. I think the author should also say in the mail that the journal allows the author to recruit an external reviewer, and this is why the author sends the invitation. Because otherwise, the guys may not necessarily trust the appropriateness of the journal's policy.

If the author is an editor, I suppose he can Cc the other editor(s).

Generally, except for data (unless the data has sharing restrictions), I don't like being told by the journals that I'm obliged to do "this" and "that" (e.g., give the address, phone numbers, and other informations) but honestly, a mail Cc is not costly, so there is no reason not to do it.

If Emil is willing, I will support his appointment to the position of reviewer for Open Behavioral Genetics. He is familiar with the ongoing debates in this field and has a good grasp of problems in methodology, research design, sampling, etc.

I support Emil as reviewer for Open Behavioral Genetics. He is thoroughly familiar with the important concepts in the field and with its importance.