Tom Pepinsky

Month: November 2015

  • The DA-RT Petition

    There is a petition to “Delay DA-RT Implementation.” I have signed it, as have (as of right now) hundreds of political scientists, many of whom are colleagues and friends.

    A problem with petitions in general, though, is that people sign them for many reasons. I always struggle with petitions that have multiple demands or complaints, and this is no exception. I do think that the appropriate guidelines for data access and transparency deserve wider disciplinary discussion, though. And while I think the DA-RT statement is 100% clear that sensitive and/or protected research can be protected…

    If cited data are restricted (e.g., classified, require confidentiality protections, were obtained under a non-disclosure agreement, or have inherent logistical constraints), authors must notify the editor at the time of submission. The editor shall have full discretion to follow their journal’s policy on restricted data, including declining to review the manuscript or granting an exemption with or without conditions. The editor shall inform the author of that decision prior to review.

    …I do worry about the incentives that such a policy may have. Such as, for example, thoughtless position-taking on the methods wars, leading people to argue bizarre things like

    unlike quantitative methods, qualitative methods put the analytical process right up front, in the written piece. Qualitative scholarship already has analytical transparency and, insofar as it is possible, reproducibility.

    The idea that clarity or transparency is an inherent property of a methodology is completely unfounded, which is exactly why current debates about things like active citation exist in the first place.

    I sign the position to encourage us all to get DA-RT right, to ensure that we have a hearing of the balance of costs and benefits. There is a view out there that the requirements of transparency would produce a neopositivist straightjacket, which I think is only true if you insist on it being so. I find myself, on balance, agreeing with the part of Jeffrey Isaac that welcomes deliberation and debate and is skeptical that there is a single model out there that is appropriate for all research endeavors.

    I am not at all convinced, though, with the bigger claim in that piece by Isaacs, that being concerned about replication and transparency amounts to an aspiration to “put some more science into political science so we can science the science.” I see concern as more mundane: let’s make sure that when we publish things that rest on factual claims, we can check them, if at all possible. As for why Isaac and so many others hold this to be inconsistent with the

    value of publicity and of vigorous intellectual engagement – within our scholarly community, among and between diverse scholarly communities, and between the academic world and the broader public world,

    well, I am not so sure. But to be abundantly clear, I welcome that discussion, and I think we need it.

  • Academic Publishers: Speech Acts, Coordination, and History

    From Inside Higher Ed: the editors and editorial board of a top-ranked linguistics journal, Lingua, are resigning en masse to protest their publisher’s exorbitant pricing.

    The editors and editorial board members quit, they say, after telling Elsevier of the frustrations of libraries reporting that they could not afford to subscribe to the journal and in some cases couldn’t even figure out what it would cost to subscribe. Prices quoted on the Elsevier website suggest that an academic library in the United States with a total student and faculty full-time equivalent number of around 10,000 would pay $2,211 for shared online access, and $1,966 for a print copy.

    This is big news, and it’s not the first time that Elsevier has come under criticism (see here). And the plan is a smart one: the editors are creating a new journal called Glossa in an effort to transfer the reputation and quality of Lingua to an open-access model.

    (One peculiar thing is that apparently there already is a linguistics journal called Glossa. I have no idea how that is related to this new Glossa journal.)

    Now, note the following statement in the Linguist List announcement, from Stefan Müller of the Free University of Berlin, which targets any linguists who might agree to step in as the new editors of Lingua.

    You may be flattered by the offer of Elsevier but think twice: the good reputation of the journal was built by researchers like us. This reputation is now transferred to the new journal.

    This statement is what linguists call a speech act. By stating that the reputation has moved to the new journal, Müller attempts to make it so. The perlocutionary intent is to convince other linguists to act in ways that are consistent with Glossa being the successor of Lingua—to submit their manuscripts there, to accord it respect and prestige, and so forth. There are some direct threats to any potential collabos too.

    Being on a newly established board of a journal that remains after the former board moved to Ling-OA will not look good on any CV. I would not hire anybody who did something like that and I would object in any search committee I am involved in.

    Obviously the act of creating a new journal itself will not change reputations, which is why persuasion is so important. The challenges, though, are many. The first is a coordination problem inherent in moving reputation from one journal to another. Let’s say that I would prefer to treat Glossa as the successor of Lingua. But if I am a self-interested scholar, should I submit my manuscripts to Glossa? Only if I am sure that other linguists will do the same, and that they will accord my publications there the same amount of respect that they have customarily accorded to Lingua.

    Is that possible? Some scholars will surely make this switch. But so long as rankings such as the infamous Australian Research Council’s ranking of ALL THE JOURNALS exist, in which Lingua is an A journal and the already-existing Glossa is a C journal, treating Lingua like Glossa will run directly against the professional and financial incentives of many linguists (in this example, the Australians, but surely others in citation-metric-obsessed national university systems too).

    We can conclude, then, that coordination problems will be substantial. But there is a second challenge here too. In the end, somebody is going to end up running Lingua, and the journal will therefore continue to publish, and it will continue to hold Lingua‘s backlist. Even if people stop submitting their best papers to Lingua, and stop reviewing for them, and transfer reputation to Glossa, it will still be the case that every time anyone cites an article published prior to 2015, it will go towards Lingua‘s impact factor and various other citation metrics. Again, so long as academics and administrators accord value to impact factor, we can expect history to make it difficult to strike at the heart of Elsevier’s business model.

    Overcoming the weight of history will be even harder than overcoming coordination dilemmas. If there are any linguists out there reading this, I do have an idea. The first issue of Glossa should be entirely comprised of articles that are citations of Lingua articles.

    Here is an example of what I have in mind. Take the recent article, “The prosodic expression of focus, contrast and givenness: A production study of Hungarian,” by Susanne Genzel, Shinichiro Ishihara, and Balázs Surányi. Glossa should invite Genzel, Ishihara, and Surányi to publish a one-line article of the following type.

    The prosodic expression of focus, contrast and givenness: A production study of Hungarian

    by Susanne Genzel, Shinichiro Ishihara, and Balázs Surányi

    This article is a citation of Genzel, Ishihara, and Surányi (2015).

    References
    Genzel, Susanne, Shinichiro Ishihara, and Balázs Surányi. (2015) “The prosodic expression of focus, contrast and givenness: A production study of Hungarian,” Lingua, Volume 165, Part B, 183-204.

    Now there is an article by Genzel et al. in Glossa. Authors interested in transferring reputation from Lingua to Glossa can cite the Glossa version. Lingua still exists, but if the editors of Glossa are successful at changing reputations, this is a way to strike at the citation metrics too.

    UPDATE

    Via twitter, David Mainwairing observes that Thomson-Reuters might not count these new suggestions as “citable items.” I think he’s got a good point, but the consequences aren’t necessarily that bad—except for in one specific (and unfortunately distributional) sense.

    The main goal is to remove the citations from Lingua. Even if Thomson-Reuters does not consider tiny Glossa articles as citable items, this mechanism does remove citations from Lingua. Glossa would only gain in the metrics through new full submissions—which, if reputation is transferred, will still happen, just more slowly than if Thomson-Reuters did recognize tiny Glossa articles as citable items.

    The problematic distributional consequences are for scholars whose work appears in old issues of Lingua. My proposed tiny Glossa articles mechanism will mean that their citation metrics will suffer so long as Thomson-Reuters does not recognize their new citations. The challenge for the ex-Lingua editors, and for linguists interested in protesting Elsevier through a new open-access, is to think through all of the consequences of moving to a new journal. In a world of citation metrics as administrative shortcuts for allocating funding and prestige, some distributional consequences are unavoidable.