Peer reviewing

[Mark P. Line]

I've been following this thread from the sidelines but with great interest.

On the specific topic of this thread, I would point out that today, we
have journals covering many theoretical camps, and good articles can
almost always get published in an established journal. That was not always
the case, and in those days the peer review process was abusive. Other
things being equal, I'm with Martin on this one simply to minimize the
probability of future abuse. (For that, in fact, Martin's proposal
probably doesn't go far enough.)

But that said, I think the discussion seems to be skirting a much larger
issue: Why do people go through all the delays and rigamarole to publish
articles in old, established, expensive print journals in this age of Web
2.0, feed aggregators, tweets and iPhone apps?

The answer, I think, is *prestige*. But prestige evolves over a
catastrophe surface, and the academic community can confer prestige on, or
deny prestige from, any publishing vehicle that it chooses.

If, say, all the academic linguists who are subscribed to FUNKNET decided
to get together and start an online, peer-reviewed journal or two, it
wouldn't be that hard (compared to, say, arguing about how many phonemes
there are in Tok Pisin). The community could confer prestige on these
online journals by using them in their hiring and tenure decisions (which
is, I think, how the prestige of established print journals is
manifested). At the same time, the community could deny prestige from the
old, inefficient print journals by failing to use them in their hiring and
tenure decisions.

Sometimes we forget that it's really just one academic community -- one
community that does all the research, all the thinking, all the writing,
all the reviewing, all the accepting and rejecting and all the general
editing. Everything except the printing and distribution: That's still
done by publishing companies that really have nothing at all to do with
the academic community.

So at the end of the day, it's all one community and it can do whatever
the hell it wants.

-- Mark

Mark P. Line
Polymathix



Martin Haspelmath wrote:
> Bill Croft wrote:
>> But the main value for "revise and resubmit" is that one doesn't know
>> how much an author really will revise the manuscript. Not
>> infrequently, I receive "revised" manuscripts which had significant
>> problems where the author has merely added a few footnotes to the
>> original submission. In those cases, I do feel that I have wasted my
>> precious time, as Lachlan puts it, and I will recommend rejection.
> What Bill describes as "the main value" of R&R is the main problem, in
> my view.
>
> In the cases mentioned above, the author probably limited herself to
> adding a few footnotes because she simply didn't agree with the reviewer
> that "the manuscript had significant problems". And often the author is
> right, not the reviewer. Reviewers are not more knowledgeable than
> authors; in fact, they generally know much less about the paper's topic
> than the author.
>
> But predicting whether the editor will overrule the reviewers or not is
> very difficult, so should the author resubmit? This is extremely tricky,
> and I think many papers are delayed because the author is at a loss what
> to do: Follow a reviewer's proposals she is unhappy with, or try a
> different journal?
>
> So I think a new approach that only has "accept" and "reject" would make
> everybody's lives easier.
>
> Martin