[Corpora-List] Corpora Digest, Vol 52, Issue 27: publishing lists of rejected and accepted papers

[Krishnamurthy, Ramesh]

> "This list is an example of researchers who are freely sharing information"
Yes, and it is also an example of how contributions are spontaneously and subjectively "ranked" by others,
as reflected in which posts get replied to and which do not? What sort of discussion would this be if
reviewers/editors/publishers/moderators were allowed to decide which postings would or would not get posted?

I see no reason for using terms like 'failure/rejection' at all. If academic work is about cooperation
and not competition, and we never know where the next 'bright idea' is going to come from,
then shouldn't all contributions be made equally available, and precisely not left to a handful of gatekeepers?

Why not allow the quality/relevance/significance of a publication to be decided by individual interested parties,
by the number of downloads, and not by institutions and organizations with anonymised blank faces?


> "Everybody, including the  reporters, can see what happens."

This is precisely what I am urging for academic work as well. We may be missing important contributions

because of the stifling nature of "peer-review".



It is not only junior researchers who suffer from this problem. Both John  Sinclair and Robert de Beaugrande,

whose work I esteem highly, encountered serious difficulties.



best

Ramesh Krishnamurthy
Visiting Academic Fellow, School of Languages and Social Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET
Room: NX01. Tel: 0121-204-3812.
Director, ACORN (Aston Corpus Network project): http://acorn.aston.ac.uk/
Corpus Analyst:
(a) GeWiss (Volkswagen Foundation) project: http://www1.aston.ac.uk/lss/research/research-projects/gewiss-spoken-academic-discourse/
(b) Discourse of Climate Change: http://www1.aston.ac.uk/lss/research/research-projects/discourse-of-climate-change-project/
(c) Feminism: http://acorn.aston.ac.uk/projects.html
(d) COMENEGO (Corpus Multilingüe de Economía y Negocios) - Multilingual Corpus of Business and Economics: http://dti.ua.es/comenego
(e) European Phraseology Project: http://labidiomas3.ua.es/phraseology/login/login.php
-----------

Date: Mon, 17 Oct 2011 08:16:57 -0400

From: "John F. Sowa" <sowa at bestweb.net<mailto:sowa at bestweb.net>>

Subject: Re: [Corpora-List] Corpora Digest, Vol 52, Issue 27:

      publishing lists of rejected and accepted papers

To: corpora at uib.no<mailto:corpora at uib.no>



On 10/17/2011 3:32 AM, Anne Schumann wrote:

> I personally feel that science is quite a competitive area and there's

> no shame in publicly announcing results (as is common practice in

> sports or music competitions).



First, there is no comparison between the two.  Sports events are explicitly designed to be competitions for the entertainment of the spectators. Everybody, including the  reporters, can see what happens.



Second, science by nature should *not* be competitive.  Most of the best science is cooperative.  This list is an example of researchers who are freely sharing information.  Whatever competition arises is caused by the limited resources available for slots in a schedule or funding for grant proposals.



Third, I recall some horror stories from one institution that had a policy of making a linear ranking of all researchers.  It created a cut-throat competition, in which some people actually sabotaged some of their neighbors' projects.  The anecdote I heard was that somebody loosened the joints in some chemical apparatus and caused a small explosion when it was used.



On 10/17/2011 4:46 AM, Patrick Paroubek wrote:

> The publication of statistics on the papers published raises already

> enough controversies in the world of science without adding the

> possibility to create more by giving the means to people to generate

> statistics on the near misses at job applications.



I completely agree.



On 10/17/2011 7:38 AM, Leon Derczynski wrote:

> If there's a malicious reviewer for your topic on the board for

> Prestigious Journal A, being able to submit to Prestigious Journal B

> will serve to both get one's work reviewed fairly and maybe even

> perhaps appropriately reduce the quality/volume of work published in A.



Most reviewers aren't deliberately malicious, but a perfectly fair review of innovative ideas is very difficult.  It is hard enough for a young researcher to get into a field, and a few accepted publications can help.  But it is counterproductive to burden them with a record of rejections that might not be justified.



That raises the question of objective vs subjective criteria.

For most sports events, the winner is determined by some objective score.  But others have judges, who are sometimes biased or prejudiced or inexperienced.



I recall one Olympian skater who switched from figure skating to speed skating with the explanation "I don't want to participate in any sport that has judges."



On 10/17/2011 8:06 AM, Anne Schumann wrote:

> it would seem fairer to me, if the authors also had a right to anonymity.



Fine.  Let's agree that the scores of the rejected papers be published, but without listing the titles or authors.



John



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