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