{"id":9446,"date":"2017-10-03T20:55:25","date_gmt":"2017-10-04T01:55:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=9446"},"modified":"2017-10-04T07:14:44","modified_gmt":"2017-10-04T12:14:44","slug":"the-colonization-of-scholarly-publishing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2017\/10\/03\/the-colonization-of-scholarly-publishing\/","title":{"rendered":"The colonization of scholarly publishing"},"content":{"rendered":"

For those following the debate over the article “The Case for Colonialism,” the following adds little new. It’s mostly a way of summarizing the issue and collecting some useful links in one place.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

There’s a lesson for academia in the flare-up<\/a> over the Third World Quarterly<\/em> article “The Case for Colonialism” by Bruce Gilley. The article was published after undergoing peer review in which multiple reviewers recommended its rejection. One of these specifically rejected its publication as a “Viewpoints” article, which in the journal’s lexicon designates articles that are more in the vein of an opinion piece than a scholarly research piece.(Reading it online, however, I didn’t see anything indicating that it wasn’t a scholarly research piece. And I saw all the trappings — format, footnotes, etc. — that indicate that it was such a piece.)<\/p>\n

There’s no doubt in my mind that the article is shoddy scholarship and deserved to be rejected. The letter, signed by over 10,000 signatories, calling for its retraction made that case. (That Noam Chomsky, among others, declined to call for that is interesting. Chomsky wrote that “what I publish offends many people, including editors and funders of journals in which they appear.” My own sense was that the demand that the editors of TWQ be “replaced” went too far, as that kind of demand only plays into the right-wing political machinations that the article seemed to be geared for.)<\/p>\n

More importantly, however, critiques of the article have shown how shoddy it was. If you read only one article on Gilley’s piece, read Nathan Robinson’s demolition of it in Current Affairs<\/a>. (But there are plenty of others, even on the political right<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

On the other hand, a reader unfamiliar with scholarship on the history of colonialism could easily read it and think: yes, he’s probably right — the field has been tainted by knee-jerk anti-colonialism (of the sort that academia reeks of, or so the story goes) and it’s time to clear that up. Thanks, Bruce, for doing that. (I’m being facetious: that would be an utterly misinformed reaction, but precisely the kind Gilley and his backers might have been hoping for. More on that below.)<\/p>\n

The main question is: why did the editor-in-chief, Shahid Qadir, decide to publish it after its seemingly unanimous rejection by peer reviewers?<\/p>\n

Qadir’s own account suggests that he did what many a journal editor might have done (I speak from my own experience here): take the reviewers’ comments into account, ask for specific revisions, and then, upon getting the revised article, make a decision based on his or her own reading of how the required revisions were addressed. Qadir claims that one of the peer reviewers recommended “minor revision” as opposed to the other’s rejection recommendation, and that it was therefore up to Qadir to consider the conflicting reviews and make his own decision. That decision was for a “major revision.” If that is true (and some critics are skeptical of that account), the decision looks, in retrospect, as a brutally misguided one.<\/p>\n

The other explanation that’s been offered is that both the article and<\/em> the decision to publish it are part of a broader phenomenon by which scholarly publishing has been commodified — or, in effect, colonized — by neoliberal market standards and practices. Gilley’s piece and its publication could, in this sense, be seen as the perfect case against<\/em>\u00a0this kind of neoliberal colonialism.<\/p>\n

In their piece “Clickbait and Impact: How Academia Has Been Hacked<\/a>,” Portia Roelofs and Max Gallien make precisely this case.\u00a0They acknowledge, on the one hand, that the article<\/p>\n

“is a well-planned provocation, an argument that feeds off the criticism it is designed to create, and references it as evidence of the prevailing \u201corthodoxy\u201d. If this sounds familiar, this is exactly the same strategy with which the alt-right movement has hacked its way into public debates.”<\/p>\n

More than that, however, they argue that the article “represents the culmination of broader trends in academia: from marketisation, to impact, to the promotion of artificially adversarial debate.” Their account here is worth quoting in full:<\/p>\n

“From the late 1990s, universities have been under pressure to operate more like businesses. Rather than existing in their own comfy bubble, politicians demanded that universities face the bracing winds of the market and earn their keep. Students became consumers, big companies increasingly set the agenda for publicly funded research, and academics were to be subject to the same accountability and incentives as, say, a call-centre worker. Academics have to publish. In order to rank articles against each other, the world of academia had to create a universal way of quantifying how good an article is: hence the citation index. Indexing platforms like\u00a0Scopus<\/a>,\u00a0Web of Science<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Google Scholar<\/a>\u00a0record how many other articles or books cite your article. The idea is that if a paper is good, it is worth talking about. The only thing is, citation rankings count positive and negative references equally.”<\/p>\n

\n

But this kind of quantification “pales in comparison to what has been done under the ‘impact agenda’,\u201d whereby academia has come to be “evaluated according to essentially the same metrics as Buzzfeed posts and Instagram selfies.” “If your job prospects depend on clicks,” they posit, “you\u2019d be stupid not to write clickbait.”<\/p>\n

A related trend is the reduction of academic debate “to an adversarial ‘for and against’.” “When academia is thus framed as a confrontation, it favours confrontational people,” which in turn “has gendered and racialised effects.” “The sort of sensational articles that get hits \u2013 like Gilley\u2019s \u2013 are those for which white men are lauded, while everyone else is told to get on and do some proper work.”<\/p>\n

No one here is arguing that Gilley shouldn’t be allowed to write what he’s written. There are places for that, and that’s a good thing. It’s just that a piece like this shouldn’t have appeared in a journal that is supposed to be publishing research that has been vetted by multiple reviewers for its quality. The mistake was the editor’s, and the journal’s for not subjecting a controversial piece to the gaze of the editorial advisors who add respectability to that journal.<\/p>\n

The mass resignation<\/a>\u00a0of a large part of the editorial board was, in that sense, a good thing to the extent that it has drawn attention to a problematic manifestation of these trends. How the journal will address that resignation will tell us what kind of journal it aims to be from this point forward.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For those following the debate over the article “The Case for Colonialism,” the following adds little new. It’s mostly a way of summarizing the issue and collecting some useful links in one place.\u00a0 There’s a lesson for academia in the flare-up over the Third World Quarterly article “The Case for Colonialism” by Bruce Gilley. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_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":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[203],"tags":[4455,25106,455084,455049,41464,16843,455082,455085],"class_list":["post-9446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academe","tag-academic-politics","tag-academic-publishing","tag-bruce-gilley","tag-clickbait","tag-colonialism","tag-neoliberalism","tag-scholarly-publishing","tag-third-world-quarterly"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-2sm","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1090,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/06\/18\/case-for-online-publishing\/","url_meta":{"origin":9446,"position":0},"title":"case for online publishing","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 18, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Mount Holyoke College political science professor Douglas Amy makes a good case for publishing online in this piece in today's Inside Higher Ed. Amy is the author of three previous books, The Politics of Environmental Mediation (Columbia University Press, 1987), Behind the Ballot Box (Greenwood, 2000), and Real Choices\/New Voices\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6422,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2013\/01\/16\/the-state-of-academic-publishing-rip-aaron-swartz\/","url_meta":{"origin":9446,"position":1},"title":"The state of academic publishing (RIP, Aaron Swartz)","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 16, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"A few days after Aaron Swartz's suicide -- in part triggered by the prospect of a 35-year prison sentence for making a big stash of scholarly journal articles available to the public for free (!) -- it is appropriate to think about what is wrong with the state of academic\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/11\/Aaron-Swartz-Doc.jpeg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/11\/Aaron-Swartz-Doc.jpeg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2021\/11\/Aaron-Swartz-Doc.jpeg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x"},"classes":[]},{"id":6214,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2012\/10\/08\/tenurepromotion-tip-counting-citations-impact-factors\/","url_meta":{"origin":9446,"position":2},"title":"Tenure\/promotion tip: Counting citations & impact factors","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"October 8, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"When applying for a promotion -- which generally means applying for Associate Professor status \"with tenure,\" or applying for Full Professor (the top of the heap) -- an academic must use any tactics available to make a case for the value of his or her scholarly work. In the good\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10753,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2020\/05\/30\/jstors-open-access-list\/","url_meta":{"origin":9446,"position":3},"title":"JSTOR’s open access list","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"May 30, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"I've posted before about the coronavirus \u201csilver lining\u201d of the (partial) opening of access to peer-reviewed literature that some academic presses have been offering through the Covid-19 pandemic. Peer-reviewed literature is the bread and butter of scholarship, and access to it is not just a perk of being in academia,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8049,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2015\/03\/09\/appearances\/","url_meta":{"origin":9446,"position":4},"title":"Appearances","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"March 9, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"My review of Graham Harman's recent book\u00a0Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political, has been published online in the journal\u00a0Global Discourse. It's part of a book review symposium, which will be accompanied (in the print issue) by the author's reply to his\u00a0interlocutors. The journal has been publishing a lot on Latour's political\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13029,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2022\/10\/12\/sharpening-our-moral-clarity\/","url_meta":{"origin":9446,"position":5},"title":"Sharpening our moral clarity","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"October 12, 2022","format":false,"excerpt":"Indigenous intellectuals like Kim Tallbear see the current Anthropocene crisis (climate change, etc.) as a continuation and intensification of the kind of thing Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans (among others) have experienced for centuries. Her thoughts for Indigenous People's Day, shared on Tallbear's Substack account, are well worth reading. 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