[Air-L] open-access is the future: boycott locked-down academic journals

[Christian Nelson]

On Feb 10, 2008, at 1:24 AM, Barry Saunders wrote:

> Considering that all you can provide to challenge academic studies  
> are personal anecdotes, I don't really think I need to.

Uh, when did I challenge academic studies? I'm challenging the  
current system of peer review, which naturally leads to the stifling  
of different voices and the voices of folks outside of the editorial  
class in academia.

Sure some of my challenges are anecdotal, but those in the editorial  
class or who are disciples of scholars in that class know these  
anecdotes are not isolated. Further, its hard to collect anything but  
anecdotes because journals don't keep numbers on things like the  
percentage of men and women who submit articles and they don't  
require authors and editors to identify their academic relationships  
to each other. And for good reason.

Nevertheless, I have pointed to much more than personal anecdote. The  
case of gender bias I cited isn't a personal anecdote--it was a cause  
celebre and the victim authors eventually wrote up a journal article  
about the whole affair. In addition, the study I cited earlier, which  
shows a distinct correlation between prestige of author's institution  
and likelihood of positive review, was a variable analytic analysis.  
I also cited the writings of Bourdieu, Mulkay, Merton, etc. which are  
hardly filled with anecdote alone.

C'mon, Aren't my detractors on this list capable of attacking  
anything more than a straw man bastardization of my arguments?