{"id":2954,"date":"2010-12-31T06:18:51","date_gmt":"2010-12-31T10:18:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/shermandorn.com\/wordpress\/?p=2954"},"modified":"2010-12-31T16:37:47","modified_gmt":"2010-12-31T20:37:47","slug":"humanities-are-behind-the-sciences-in-the-promise-and-danger-of-post-publication-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/?p=2954","title":{"rendered":"Humanities are behind the sciences in the promise and danger of post-publication review"},"content":{"rendered":"

So there's a small scandal because the University of Chicago Press has dished on open-access in the latest Chicago Manual of Style<\/a>. Let me state clearly that the editors of the Chicago Manual of Style<\/em> have it dead wrong in taking a position about open-access within a style guide. This is as smart and productive as trying to stop a freight train by laying copies of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association<\/em> on the tracks. The reason why is not only the philosophy of many humanities scholars in favor of open-access publication but institutional support (which the Manual<\/em>'s editors dislike), the federal government's support of open-access in science grants, the widespread use of arXiv, and the success of PLoS journals.<\/p>\n

Kathleen Fitzpatrick's theorizing about the professional role of reviewing and the possibilities of post-publication review<\/a> is fairly theoretical, but we've seen the ugly side of post-publication review with the evolving controversy<\/a> over Science<\/em>'s publication of Felisa Wolfe-Simon's article on bacteria that may or may not use arsenic for central life processes. [Addendum: see David Kroll's observations<\/a>, which I forgot to link to when writing this.] To be fair, a good part of the hostile reaction appears to have been motivated by NASA's press conference advertising the paper in advance as about "extraterrestrial" life. But apart from possible motives, what we can see is the seamier side of peer reviewing open for everyone to see, sort of like the reversing ("eversion" I think is the correct term) of a starfish stomach in its external digestion process. <\/p>\n

There are fairly serious blog responses to the paper, but even Rosie Redfield<\/a> indulges in vitriol, spending a very long blog entry in substantive critique before describing the paper as "flim-flam" and the authors as unprofessional: "I don't know whether the authors are just bad scientists or whether they're unscrupulously pushing NASA's 'There's life in outer space!' agenda." So much for show, don't tell<\/em> in science writing. The reality is such personal attacks exist within closed review environments, but there's something advocates of post-publication reviewing need to acknowledge in addition to all the other issues involved with reviewing–what if it's the experts in the field who cannot separate the analysis from the attacks? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So there's a small scandal because the University of Chicago Press has dished on open-access in the latest Chicago Manual of Style. Let me state clearly that the editors of the Chicago Manual of Style have it dead wrong in taking a position about open-access within a style guide. This is as smart and productive as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[12,18,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-higher-education","category-the-academic-life","category-writing-and-editing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-LE","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2954"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2954\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2981,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2954\/revisions\/2981"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}