To: Professor Horst YarodinonManaging Editor,
Hermeneutics of Hamster Harvesting
Subject: Yet Another Blanket Email Solicitation.
Dear Dr. Yarodinon,
Thank you for your email inviting me to join the editorial board of your new journal, Hermeneutics of Hamster Harvesting. I am truly honoured to be considered for such an august position with one of the innumerable new scholarly journals to be sprouting up throughout academia. However, it is with the greatest regret that I must decline the position. There are three reasons:
1) I can never remember what "hermeneutics" means without consulting a dictionary, and I avoid anyone who can on general principle.
2) There isn't the slightest connection with hamsters in my background, education, research, teaching, publications, CV, or website. The last time I had any involvement with hamster related issues, my parents were laying Mr. Sniffles to rest in the backyard flowerbed. I don't think I've been within a hundred yards of the little buggers from that day to this.
3) I have received so many invitations, to participate in such a wide range of editorial boards (for journals ranging from Advances in Aardvark Agriculture to Zen Zygotica) that I haven't the time to edit a new journal because emptying my junk mail folder is now a full-time commitment.
It is truly an inspiring sign of the boom in academic publishing to see the number and diversity of mass-mail invitations eagerly and indiscriminately clamouring for editors and submissions. It tells me we have transcended the archaic era when journals restricted publication to only those with extensive training and experience in the field. Now dawns a new day when journals (along with conferences) are so numerous that they compete for 'impact' by shoveling anything they can solicit into the academic record. The clutter of mindless blanket solicitations stuffing my email account from people who who wouldn't know my research if it punted them in the grumners, provides a valuable service in helping me to maintain a database of journals I intend to avoid like the plague.
Yours Sincerely
Rosencrantz and/or Guildenstern.
It is the logical consequence of "publish or perish" combined with the revolutionary changes in the price structure of publishing. Create a demand for particular attributes to get into a highly desirable profession (editing and publishing scholarship as a prerequisite for tenure) and make those things economically cheap and the result is predictable. It ain't necessarily a bad thing, but it will have some negative effects. Vetting and selecting will become more difficult, as well as finding people who have read the same material so as to have a conversation on the same foundation.
ReplyDeleteI suspect it might also be a consequence of what is now several decades of teaching students that peer-reviewed scholarly journal articles are reliable sources -- a thing that is in some way valued. Just as earlier attempts to teach logical fallacies in comp classes have led to much more widespread (mis)use of the phrase "beg the question" (students, even quite good ones, remembered the phrase, but not what it actually means, and so go with what it sounds like it should mean -- so much so that I'm now hearing/seeing it misused on NPR and in newspapers of record), I suspect that our attempts to teach about the peer review process have resulted in some alumni entrepreneurs thinking "scholarly sources are valuable -- I bet I can make money from them." I'd be curious to know if they've actually succeeded (though I suppose the subsidy publishers of dissertations -- a related phenomenon -- must also make some money, since they've been around for a good long time, and I'm pretty sure their main motive is not actually spreading obscure knowledge, though they occasionally manage, accidentally, to do that; I've actually cited a few of their publications, with full knowledge of what I was looking at, and making my own judgments of how, and whether, it was reliable, valuable, etc.)
ReplyDelete@R &/or S: nice smack.
@AdjunctSlave: the tricky thing is that, as we both have reason to know, publication even in established, well-respected journals doesn't guarantee entry into the (ever-shrinking) "highly desirable" corners of our profession (though it's certainly increasingly necessary even to get one's foot in the door). If anything, there should be fewer journals (along with fewer Ph.D.s produced). The explosion of academic journals (which is, indeed, partly a result of the lowered costs of creating and distributing one, especially if one goes electronic) strikes me as one more sign that there are a lot of people out there chasing a will-o-the-wisp that is getting wispier by the year, but which we're still, somehow, treating as if it were real and substantial.