Scholarly publishing and practices

November 13, 2018

Fakery and reviewing

I often feel the lowest place on the totem pole of academic life is occupied by reviewers (well, maybe letter writers sometimes co-habit that rung too but I’ll stick with reviewers for today). Among the endless, repetitive but largely invisible tasks that faculty perform, reviewing articles is one that we feel obliged to do but secretly wish we were asked less to complete.

The main problem is the task is thankless. We all claim to believe that peer-review is important, we hang recruitment and promotion decisions on the outcomes, and smugly dismiss venues that don’t enact it properly, yet we give little or any incentive or reward to those who provide this apparently essential service.

In this light, is it any wonder we have fake news and poor research outputs? Investing the time to thoroughly and fairly evaluate a paper takes you away from other work. In most reputable journals, at least two, often three, external reviewers are sought for each paper. Given the fact that only some proportion of papers will prove acceptable for publication and you can start to see the problem here. For every author, we require three reviewers and an editor to make a decision, and yet it is usually only the successful author who gains any credit in this transaction.

Personally I am tired of receiving papers that require me to put more time into reviewing than the authors apparently put into writing them. Given a rational cost-benefit analysis, I can’t really blame an author for trying, but I do expect the editor to at least do some first-level culling to make sure the reviewing request is warranted. I learned this week that the term for this is ‘desk reject’, the process of declining a paper before a reviewer sees it on the grounds that it’s not a good fit or perhaps is just crap. We need more of this.

Every week I get requests to review, edit, write letters of support (but so few requests for letters of rejection, sadly) or increasingly, offers to submit my own ~~crap~~ paper, for quick review in a new journal coming out next week. This is what we’ve become, an industry that extracts profit from the output of scholars who trade in the currency of repute. At such times, differentiation through quality is all that matters, but the best arbiters, the reviewers who ensure the separation of the wheat from the worthless, are working thanklessly, backstage and below minimum wage. No wonder scholarly publishing is in a mess.

October 15, 2018

Publication phishing?

Received a nice invitation today from the American Society for Information Science and Technology journal to submit a paper and to join the editorial board. Sound like a journal you know? Me too but no, it’s not JASIST. It’s ASIST, a previously unknown entity trading a little closely to being over the line, one imagines. Take a look at their web page. No, they are not even close to American, if the editorial board is anything to go by. Clever or deceitful? I expect you know the answer. What’s next, a new journal entitled Natures? Sign me up.

October 5, 2018

Grievance Studies and the Academic Hoax

Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship

Read this and weep — laughter? tears? your choice really. Personally, I’m glad folks do this from time to time as it reveals something of the flaws in the system. Two things to note. As I teach my Understanding Users class, humans have to organize a lot of data coming at them quickly, and they do this by mobilizing the rapid, sometimes automatic categorization schemas in their heads. When something looks kinda real, and one has no real reason for doubting authenticity, then you organize your thoughts around it and move on to the next data point. In this case, the reviewers likely received what they assumed to be a genuine paper and allowed their own automatic processes for reading and deciding to publish or not to kick in without too much effort. It’s lazy but it’s human. So, no, it is not too surprising this happens and people can fool the process.

Second thing — it takes some brave folks, particularly untenured ones, to tackle this kind of project and risk censure and disapproval from one’s community for dragging them into disrepute, allegedly. I don’t share that view, I think Pluckrose, Lindsay and Boghossian might be targeting low hanging fruit given the choice of topic, but they raise genuine questions about scholarship and editorial practices in some parts of the academy that deserve attention.

May 23, 2018

Do professional associations matter anymore?

As part of my taking a fresh look at career options, I have been asking myself if it really matters what professional associations I belong to now. We are told repeatedly as young academics that membership of the right associations matters, helping you find a community, offering a conference venue or related publication venue, and so forth, which might be partly true but only partly.

As renewals have come up for a few, I’ve decided to let my membership lapse. I take a look at what the association claims as benefits for membership and then ask myself if I either receive or avail of said benefits, and if so, are they worth the price of admission? These days I am beginning to think the answers are negative.

Sure, as a former president of ASIST, I have a tie to the organization that is difficult to sever, and I know the challenges of even sustaining never mind growing membership. But over the last 15 years I maintained membership of more than half a dozen associations, at a cost of well over $1000 a year and I now question just how much value there is in this.

Not to pick on any one society but I’ve let my ALISE and SLA memberships elapse. The stated benefits of these organizations are not great: a mix of some I barely use (e.g. access to a limited scholarly journal, possibility of being considered for an award (as if!) or membership of a SIG) and those I’d never use (membership lists?). Yes, a discount on attendance at conferences, usually the equivalent of membership dues, offers a wash but if I don’t attend the conference there’s not much going for this either.

SLA claims to offer a bit more than most, to keep members ‘ahead of the learning curve’ and advance career options, but I can’t say i experienced too much of this, but then maybe that’s just me. When I told them upon receiving my reminders to renew that I found the cost-benefit ratio to be too small they just politely told me ‘thank you’ and that was it. Fair enough, what association has time to deal with such members when there’s committee meetings, resolutions to draft, learning curves to keep ahead of, and awards to hand out.

The real point though is just what can associations offer in this age? Yes, they’ll cling on as long as they are running financially viable conferences which they can price to encourage membership but this is hardly the purpose is it? Rather than hide behind cliched mission statements, repetitive presidential editorials about ‘excitement at developments in the field,’ associations need to renew their purposes and deliver value beyond the old formulaic benefits. In the information space, one might really think a group that pushes harder for greater educational quality might gain some traction. What a pity those claiming to do so seem to be distracted, shuffling task forces and committees in mundane attempts at survival.

June 27, 2017

Another ALA down

Chicago in June is a pretty good location for a conference, even if the basic quality of food in the downtown area belies the other impression of the city as a truly impressive cultural center. ALA in town means thousands of people hauling bags of free books and pens around the streets, less like plundering hordes than old sherpas, but that’s what some folks go for surely, all the goodies they can grab. Someone should ask the airlines if the weight of personal luggage shifts up significantly on return flights this week – in the age of big data, this should be easily established.

Yes, there were guest speakers…very expensive ones, typically designed to deliver reinforcing rather than challenging speeches, and the usual too many sessions to be easily navigated (my strategy of avoidance is the best source of cognitive comfort in such circumstances). What does bother me most is the real purpose of this gathering and the enormous expense involved. Over 20,000 attendees across all days adds up to significant revenue for some, and those attendees I spoke with seemed happy, as I am sure were the hotels and bars in Chicago given the crowds but as I reflect on the last few conferences I’ve attended, and this most recent ALA in particular, I do wonder what purpose is served by such gatherings?

I know people will argue that meeting is vital to the functioning of the association and that yes, it can be fun to meet up with folks, but who pays for this and who profits? Moreover, what is the point of endless council meetings which seem to spend an inordinate amount of time passing motions, often not particularly related to or informed by the practices of librarianship? When I ask practitioners, I am usually politely chided that academics either do not understand or ‘should’ attend to show support. But what is it that we are supposed to be supporting? ALA always makes grand statements of intent, mission, vision, advocacy etc but what does it really achieve? And I’m not just picking on ALA, though it is a big, fat, easy target. I could say the same of most association meetings. At scholarly conferences we argue that we are sharing research, but to be honest, some venues are not even good at serving this function. But why ALA? We are facing a near crisis of fake news, loss of faith in rationality and the commercialization of access to information, but it’s hard to see much urgency in the response of professional organizations. Oh nevermind, an sure Hilary will make us all feel a bit better about it.