On refereeing

I'm not sure why I haven't bothered to comment on this before; but I have just received yet another peremptory demand to referee an article for an academic journal. It came via boiler-plate email, demanding a report within 30 days, or that I go to a website to excuse myself...

It creeps up on us. I remember, 30-odd years ago, how flattered I was to be asked to review an article for a journal--and to be paid for it. In 1978, I received £25.00, for reviewing one such article. How things have changed!

Let's be clear. The "request" I received has nothing to do with the journal itself. It is entirely a manipulative bluff on the part of publishers who have cornered the market in journals, with an amazing business model:

• The content is provided for free.
• Publishers may even demand that authors or their institutions pay for publication, at the rate of hundreds of dollars per page.
• The editors work for free
• As do the editorial boards
• And the referees
• And increasingly the journals are not even printed in hard copy
• And subscriptions are bundled together so that libraries which want just a few useful ones are compelled to accept a lot of dross as well--and to pay for it. At least they no longer have to find shelf space for it.

He's writing in the context of academic publishing in science, but David Colquhoun has a coruscating expose of the scam here: scroll down to the "Extortionate cost of publishing" sub-head for the most relevant stuff.

• Be amazed at how much just one university (UCL) is paying these publishers! And then...
• Discover how little most journals are read--in many cases not at all.

George Monbiot made similar points in the Guardian here.

It occurs to me that the situation makes a nonsense of any attempt to incorporate "impact" as a factor in evaluating research within the "Research Excellence Framework" (the notorious new system for assessing the quality of research in UK higher education institutions). 


I'm really glad I am no longer in the rat-race--going to enormous lengths to produce article no-one will read. My stuff is not peer-reviewed pre-publication (although I get plenty of feedback afterwards) but it reaches a lot more people (more than the median annual usage of the Elsevier journals taken by UCL, every day). But the cartoon minutes of the panel DC attended (brilliant idea, incidentally) sum it up;

Of course there is a radical alternative--it addresses most of the problems, but doesn't actually publish anything...

On the "fetishization of citation"

Thursday's keynote at ISSoTL10 was by Jude Carroll, whom I met for the first time face-to-face after scores of email exchanges. She is best known for her work on dealing with plagiarism, of course, but in this case she was addressing issues around a transcultural approach to curriculum issues.

I was delighted to hear her inveigh against the "fetishization of citation". I've also touched on this issue here. Jude went so far as to say that this obsession with "correct" referencing was a phenomenon of the last ten years, and implied that it was symptomatic of a crisis of confidence on the part of academics in their own authority in a post-modern world. It's not so much an issue in the STEM* world, where there are real, objective and positivistic criteria for judging ideas. Like, "does it work?" If it does, who invented it is a matter for the historians and the (patent) lawyers.

Moreover, it is an approach which devalues the contribution and opinion of the student herself. Jude's piece suggested to me (she may well have said something like this, but I don't want to put words in her mouth), in the context of the internationalisation of the curriculum, an inability to handle the different ways in which prior knowledge is or may be dealt with by students of different backgrounds and from different disciplines.

She played with the manner in which direct quotations from other scholars had been used in presentations within this very conference.

Which set me thinking about the concurrent sessions I attended, and the ways in which such scholarly material had been incorporated and used. I caricature slightly when I say there was in a number of them a ritual obeisance to the literature, as part of what was frequently explicitly identified as a "literature review" section (many papers followed the traditional pattern of a published research paper or dissertation). Nothing wrong with that, except that in Perkins' term, the knowledge was often "inert". Not much was done with it. It was introduced in order to confer academic respectability on the session and then--with some notable exceptions, of course--it just lay there...

I think I detect that this is becoming ever more common, possibly because of search engines; it is so easy, with basic search skills, to go straight to an article in a peer-reviewed journal which bears in some measure on your subject. It will probably be a contribution to a discussion, in your own discipline, and very up-to-date. And it will probably say very little of interest, or ever have been heard of by anyone else. Your session may be the only citation it will ever get!

I actually made a note of several promising leads, and since getting back I have followed up some of them, to my disappointment.

I would have been much more interested in people making use of some "golden oldies" (my preferred strategy because I was always too lazy and too easily bored, and too busy, to keep up with new stuff unless someone used it or recommended it); or illuminating their arguments from parallels outside the immediate confines of their own disciplines.

In a "soft" discipline like "education", it is all too easy to build foundations merely on successive bundles of reeds, rather than rocks. But one may feel the need to be seen to be imitating academics in harder disciplines.



* Science. Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.