It’s a compelling idea. So many outlier events, both the scary Black Swan-type that N.N. Taleb writes about as well as the simply unlikely, seem to be regular occurences all of a sudden.
Whether it’s Donald Trump’s election as US President, the Brexit referendum, a global Coronavirus pandemic, or even just Leicester City somehow winning the English Premier League football title a few years ago, the world seems to have taken a turn into the unpredictable, the unstable, and the frankly bizarre.
And if we are in a uchronic timeline, is there any way back? We probably aren’t going to be able to reverse time, but perhaps we can leverage the idea of alt-history to understand and manipulate our own reality going forward.
What if academic articles weren’t so long? What if they were like 10% or 15% as long? That’d be easier to read, sure, but equally wouldn’t convey much information. And what if they were published almost instantly? That’d be great, right? No hanging around for months or years after submission?
But what if they eschewed peer review as it is understood, though, and simply published after a couple of people recommended to do so, even if dozens of others had recommended refusal? What if their only criteria was whether it was readable? Would that still sound like a rigorous approach to academic research and publishing? Or blogging under a thin veil of borrowed academic legitimacy?
Recently I have begun receiving spam from Academia.Edu, asking me to peer review papers on a wide range of at best tangentially-related research.
Initially this confused me somewhat, because when Academia began, it presented itself as a kind of social media outlet for academics. However, this soon morphed into a variant of the ResearchGate/Scopus/Orcid model, wherein academics post their research online in the hope of disseminating it more widely.
Academia then introduced a pay-to-play option, which required subscribers to pay a fee to access most of the information which was useful to them, ie statistical information about who was reading their work. At that point, it began losing my interest, and I became less motivated to post my work for free to their site to make them money.
It’s still a useful site, especially for independent researchers, who generally lack affiliation to a university with library subscriptions to the big journal publishers. Like ResearchGate and the others, there’s a chance to find a pre-pub version of an article on Academia quickly when you need to check a citation. But they’re not satisfied with that.
Anyhow, obviously they’ve now decided that the peer-review academic publishing market is hackable, and have gone after it with zeal. What’s interesting is where they’ve positioned themselves.
According to their pitch – for that’s what it is – they’ve launched something called “Academia Letters”, which they bill as “a new experiment in rapid academic publishing.” In practice, this means that micro-articles of 800-1600 words, on ANY topic, are submitted and then immediately sent, IN BATCHES, to potential reviewers. Hence my spam.
An article will be published as soon as two reviewers agree to its publication. There are two issues with this. Literally hundreds could recommend rejection and an article would still be published under this system, entirely defeating the main purpose of peer review. Additionally, the model overtly states that it does not accommodate revisions. It is not possible for a reviewer to recommend that an author revise or improve their work. It must be published as is.
In fact, such is their desire for sausage meat for their academic sausage factory, they openly guide reviewers that, even if they detect a need for improvement, they should still accept it for publication, so long as it is “rigorous and worth reading.”
The deciding factor of whether an article is “worth reading” is something that they set great importance upon. In fact, it’s the only question they want their reviewers to answer. Here is their list of criteria they want reviewers to consider in deciding whether an article is worth reading:
Is the article interesting or thought-provoking?
Is it novel in its methods or conclusions?
Does it counter current thinking?
Is it especially timely?
Does it address a longstanding question or debate in the field?
Would it change thinking on that topic, if it were true?
Is it rigorous and the argument logically sound?
That all sounds good, or at least, it doesn’t immediately raise too many alarms. But an academic article would not ordinarily be published just because it was “timely” or because it stubbornly and crankily ran counter to a consensus of opinion. Worse, Academia manages to lower the bar even further by noting that their site is read by people who include “curious members of the general public”, and hence articles should be assessed for whether ANYONE would want to read it.
In short, here is the dumbing down of peer review, a tragic tribute act run for the profit of a for-profit corporation, and enabled by the free labour of any academic sufficiently gullible, or desperate, to play along, either as author or reviewer.
Academia.Edu want to reduce the length of academic articles to that of the average blog post, replace genuine and fastidious peer review with a single “would anyone read it” criterion for publication, and eradicate the processes of recommendation, revision and resubmission, all in the name of … well, what, exactly? Efficiency? Timeliness? Or their own bottom line as they seek to drive more traffic, and recruit more subscribers?
I really can’t see an upside for academics in getting involved in any of this. It’s a total erosion of all existing standards. And yet, the spam keeps coming…
Happy World Poetry Day. Even in the stasis of global lockdowns, poetry still transports anyone to any time or place, real or imagined, should they only ask. This poem terminates at Lalibela, Ethiopia, sometime in early 2011.
Tej
The dancers shrug off the world. Everything that moves here
moves from the shoulders down. We drink tej and compare with
Fanta Orange. Then dance with the dancers, clumsy, white with brown.
A thousand years past, faith slammed into the rock and kept
slamming. Mountains bore churches. More people came and keep
coming, flecking the hills with fires, life seeking purchase.
We drink tej in the smoke-filled hall and clap to drums,
our sore legs throbbing. Round the fire, dancers shrug off the world.
We drink more tej. They beckon to us, brown shoulders bobbing.
A friend was complaining about struggling with writing a section of work. I upchucked my maudlin all over their social media and now feel shame, so instead I’m relocating it to my own space for self-indulgence. You’re welcome.
Me, most days.
Writing is truly Sysiphean. You spend literal aeons of your life doing it, and when it’s done all you can see are the errors, lit up like neon.
There’s always something. It doesn’t flow. You missed part of the argument. You didn’t know about that one guy who wrote the thing. There’s always something for Reviewer Number Two (accursed be thy name) to crank on about.
Right now, I’m two weeks late with a draft that is already 3,000 words over, and still half a chapter to go. I’m writing at lightspeed and it still feels like swimming through treacle with all limbs bound.
And when it IS done, I will hate it with the passion of a thousand burning suns, because of the pain of writing it, and the acute awareness of its flaws. But yet I’ll still be upset when Reviewer Number Two gets going.
And I’ll still want people to read it, though I’ll never want to see it ever again (yet will be destined to, repeatedly, when the rounds of editing commence.)
Sometimes I think I should take up something easier on the soul.
It takes a brave writer to rewrite the Bible, and perhaps a foolhardy one to invent his own macaronic dialect in so doing.
The latest article on Anthony Burgess’s invented languages at Ponying the Slovos examines how he attempted to evoke the linguistic milieu of the time of Christ in both TV and novel forms.
