[Air-L] powerful senior professors

[Jonathan Sterne, Dr.]

Christian Nelson's understanding of the editorial process seems a bit naive.  First, I'm not sure that open access journals ought to have open source reviewing.  Knowledge is not necessarily democratic: there are people who know more about their fields than others, and frankly, I'd like THOSE people to review my work when I submit it to a journal.  One of the great values of the humanities and social sciences (and indeed all basic research) is that learned people are allow to pursue lines of inquiry whose immediate payoff may not be immediately apparent to others.  Academics should not be subject to popularity contests or ratings.  CNET is very useful for what it is, but it is not a model for scholarship.

More often than not, leading figures in a field don't do a lot of journal reviewing because they're too busy with other kinds of reviewing, like tenure dossiers (this has certainly happened to me, and I'm not even full yet).  I also find that senior, leading figures are just as likely to be MORE open minded to new ideas and new approaches than younger scholars, who may have more invested in advancing or defending a particular paradigm as they establish themselves.  Of course there are also tenured professors who appear to eat their own brains, so I guess we can't generalize too much in this regard.

Open access, yes, but with a solid, blind peer review.  In that respect, IJOC is a fine example.

Best,

--Jonathan