Re: [jox] Request for comments
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Tue, 21 Jul 2009 21:44:45 +0200
Hi StefanMz, George, all!
Whew - I'm catching up thread by thread so please forgive if my
replies are a bit outdated.
6 days ago Stefan Meretz wrote:
At this point a new idea comes into my mind: We should cooperate with
some OAI server, in order to feed our articles into scientific databases
automatically. Maybe Herbert Hrachovec can help?
This is a very good idea. Herbert could be an idea but I also had
contact with Peter Suber who I could imagine would be very willing to
help.
5 days ago George N Dafermos wrote:
About inviting *other people* to join in the list and in the journal
process if we think they would be interested: I suppose this
ultimately hinges on Mathieu who as the maintainer of this project
(lead editor of the journal) is in a position to assess the value of
recruiting others. Anyhow, I reckon we should be careful not to end
up with a list/editorial group of a hundred people who, having
hardly anything in common, only aggravate the organisational costs
of cooperation, thus encumbering the progress of the project. Also,
we should take account of the effect of such a recruitment on
theoretical coherence.
Valid points. May be we should set some deadline then after which
people are only invited by the existing group?
About *peer review [b] criteria*: My take is that we publish texts
with what - in the absence of a better name - i'd call a 'high
propaganda effectiveness factor', meaning that the texts, through
their analysis, should be opening up new perspectives. To the extent
that our goal is social change, i think it is fundamental to include
not only texts that are well written/researched/substantiated but
also passionate or polemical. I think that online peer-reviewed
journals such as First Monday or Multitudes[1] serve as an example
of how this can be done.
IMHO we have two goals here which are a bit in conflict. On the one
hand I think we really want to appeal to academia - not for an end in
itself but because there are bright people in academia which can make
very useful contributions. Also I would hope that we could have real
research inspired by the journal. For instance I'd appreciate if the
thoughts about `measuring commercial influences`_ could be used by
some researcher to create some empirical data.
.. _measuring commercial influences: http://en.wiki.oekonux.org/Oekonux/Research/MeasuringCommercialInfluences
On the other hand I agree that our work should also have political
impact. Though I don't like polemics very much I agree that for this
the style of an article could be different from a real scientific
article.
Now I guess that scientists and activists are scared away from each
other. Scientists usually don't like to be connected to activism and
vice versa. This is a classical goal conflict and we need to check how
to deal with it.
My suggestion would be to clearly separate the two parts in every
channel. This way we could have both but each party could say that
they are only loosely connected to the other one. Would this work?
Grüße
Stefan
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