something to take note of

[Robert Levine]

Dear colleagues:

You might be interested in the following story. The editors of the
journal Lingua recently instituted an opinion/viewpoints column and
invited us to submit an essay on a topic of our choosing as the
inaugural column. We accepted and sent them a short essay, titled `The
structure of unscientific revolutions', which some of you have already
seen, containing our observations on the wholesale and extremely
rapid adoption of Chomsky's minimalist speculations as the default
paradigm by many derivational theorists in the absence of even mild
debate about its theoretical or empirical advantages. After our piece
was accepted, we made inquiries about how the editors intended to to handle
replies and our response to them. The editors were not particulary
forthcoming, but what emerged was that they had recruited two replies
(in accordance with the number of people who they claim that we
attacked in our piece). At one point we were notified that Lingua
would only publish our responses to the replies if they contained "new
points". We began to feel uneasy and suspected an ambush in which our
piece would be lined up against a panel of recruited
critiques. Subsequently, the editors informed us that our piece would
appear with the two replies, and we could respond, but only in the
subsequent issue. We objected on the grounds that standard editorial
practise in both scientific and general interest journals involves
permitting the authors to repond to critiques of their piece in the
same issue as the replies, and that, while we certainly agreed that
anyone should be allowed to reply, we did not want our piece published
with a series of unanswered replies. A response from us in a
subsequent issue would lose all effect and not be understood in the
context of the original discussion.

A survey among a number of colleagues and friends in the academic and
publishing world confirms that the format which Lingua has insisted on
significantly deviates from normal editorial practise for a scientific
journal. In the end, we decided to withdraw the piece to prevent it
from becoming the target of an orchestrated attack in which we are
being denied an effective procedure for responding. In our view, it is
difficult to escape the conclusion that we are dealing here with an
attempt(perhaps inadvertant) to direct opinion rather than engage in
genuinely free discussion. It is precisely this phenomenon that we
discuss in our paper. Those of you who are interested in the piece can
download it from

http://semantics.phil.kcl.ac.uk/lapp_lev_johns/...ps

And, of course, we do welcome any comments or feedback.

David Johnson
Shalom Lappin
Bob Levine