[Air-L] Open-What?

[Christian Nelson]

On Feb 8, 2008, at 10:37 PM, Jimmy Wales wrote:

> Barry Wellman wrote:
>> 1. Evil senior professors have more -- rather than less -- scope to
>> publish where they want. So they don't have a vested interest in
>> squelching journals. I don't think somewhat paranoid discussion  
>> about what
>> evil senior professors want and do helps analysis.
>
> I think that's right.  People with established reputations have low
> switching costs.  Young academics may feel forced to go the  
> traditional
> route.

People with established reputations wish to have those established  
reputations last. As senior scholars well know, those reputations  
won't last if they don't make sure their younger disciples take over  
the reins of editorial control. If you think this is paranoid, you  
haven't witnessed what I have. As just one example, I know of a very  
successful senior scholar, who, while he was a junior scholar, had a  
paper of his rejected without review at a top-tier communication  
journal because it "had nothing to do with communication." Imagine  
his surprise when that same editor published an article by one of his  
own students about the very same research question just a few issues  
later. And I've seen a variable analytic article about interpersonal  
communication published in QJS (a humanist-oriented journal about  
rhetoric) just after the editor of Communication Monographs (who had  
published nothing but variable analytic articles during his tenure)  
published a humanistic article about rhetoric that had been written  
by one of the QJS edtior's students. And on, and on, and on it goes.

And if you don't believe me, take a look at the scholarship on the  
sociology of science by folks like Robert Merton, Bruno Latour,  
Michael Mulkay, Pierre Bourdieu, etc. It's not like I came up with  
this out of nowhere.


>> 4. Refereeing also serves a mentoring function.

Sure it does, but not when editors tell you, that they aren't going  
to publish your paper because it comes at the subject in question  
from a perspective that is new and different, period. Yes, that is  
exactly what has happened to me, twice.


>> 7. I'd love to see more journals and other venues. But the day a  
>> journal abandons the refereeing process, is probably the day I  
>> will stop reading it.

So, you don't find wikipedia worth reading, either? Yikes.

Christian Nelson