Quality constraints (was: Re: [jox] Mission statement)
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Thu, 23 Jul 2009 20:56:33 +0200
Hi Athina, Graham, all!
Last week (7 days ago) Athina Karatzogianni wrote:
Also, I would like to draw your attention on a significant matter. If this
is a journal of critical study of peer production, we should more than
encourage people that deviate form the established networks and orthodoxies
especially to join us and publish in this journal. In my experience a lot of
colleague's work remains unpublished when it is critical of the journal's
editors or or a dissenting voice to the politics/culture/ideology of the
journal. It is a shame, and we should make a point of changing that. The
quality of a paper and the relevance of it are crucial, and not so much
protecting our own or the reputations of others. This has never happened
between our networks, and it should never happen with this journal.
6 days ago graham wrote:
Mathieu O'Neil wrote:
Regarding an opinion opposed to the editorial line - there is no line so far. Like StefanMn said, if someone advocated a POV that was fundamentally opposed to peer production that might be problematic but I think that is unlikely to happen.
I would guess that it's actually extremely likely to happen: there is a
well-established position which holds that peer-production is a con
designed to extract free labour in support of capitalism, and that
modern capitalism actually depends on this free labour. It's hard to say
what to do about this: the idea is obviously on-topic, but equally
obviously in the context a trolling technique which can potentially bog
the journal down in endless for- and against- arguments. Especially as
the argument can be associated with theses I feel are proto-fascist (I
wrote 'I' because I know not everyone does, but I also know I'm not the
only one to feel like this).
Well, I agree with both positions. On the one hand we should include
articles which are ignored by mainstream but on the other hand not
everything which is ignored by mainstream is worth including.
In practice I guess it will be hard to create an editorial line
upfront. But we should definitely have quality constraints.
Two quality constraints I think we need are
* that someone knows what s/he talks of and
* takes into account relevant points made from others in the same
field.
An article which talks about X but can not define what X is is
certainly outside such a quality constraint.
There were a couple of cases of this already on the list; I feel we
(including me) didn't deal with them well, but don't know how they could
have been dealt with better - both cases generated lengthy flames.
As wrote before: We can simply reject an article so lengthy flames
have no basis.
Maybe
collect such articles and reserve them for one particular edition.
I don't see why we should create a special issue full of what we
consider junk.
Grüße
Stefan
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