Clear and Dear? Peer Reviews...

Reading the articles this week, I certainly found more affinity with Fitzpatrick (2009). Maybe this is because I have no experience in the world of academic publishing, and thus a "freshening" of the publishing system sounds kind of thrilling to a newbie. And why shouldn't it be? Peer review, which is a form of evaluation (and as such, is inherently variable) by other members of a specific community (usually), can always be rebuilt, renovated, and remodeled.

However, although Sokal's hoax has developed numerous discussions about the process of peer review, I think the resulting debates were minimally constructive, and essentially became a series of misreadings about misreadings about misreadings.....("Sokol Affair", 2013). They didn't really move intellectual debates very far. Humanities vs. sciences? Not very original.

There are many issues in this field, including access, cost, peer review (not to mention the complex process of navigating interdisciplinary publications, where the notion of a singular authority on a particular matter perhaps might not exist). Regarding access, I do think that publications should be accessible to a more varied audience (this relates mostly to issues of cost and funding). Access is connected to peer-review - who is included in this process? Some of the examples which Fitzpatrick brings up, including very open methods of peer review, in which there was no incentive to comment (and thus no commenting occurred), demonstrated that the issues of peer review are not simply an either/or kind of situation. Closed, structural peer review vs. open, public peer review are not the only options, and there is a lot of wiggle room in between, so it will be interesting to see what publishing organizations do with this wide open space.

I really think that the object of peer-review should be a constructive one - namely, how can articles be improved and worked on in order to contribute a well-crafted, well-researched, well-argued piece? Of course the term "well" or "good" or "bad" are all subjective terms...although are they? Does "subjectivity" find a place in all academic fields, or is it really just exclusive to humanities and social sciences, which are somewhat vague categories too? And where does subjectivity fit into the information field, which is so interdisciplinary? A dilemma of sorts...Suddenly peer review becomes more complicated than first anticipated!

References

Fitzpatrick, K. (2009). Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future 
     of the Academy. Retrieved from
     mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/plannedobsolescence/

Sokal Affair. (n.d.). Wikipedia. Retrieved November 28, 2013, from      
       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair