[A]nonymized peer-review seemed to bring out something vindictive in almost half of referees.--Kate Norlock.
Perhaps this section is the appropriate place to bring up a very serious point of criticism of the dossier submitted. Professor Schliesser vastly overrates the importance and the scientific interest of his online presence. He is an active blogger, and this is fine, but it is important to conflate this elective activity with actual scientific work....indeed, Professor Schliesser plays a valuable role in the philosophical community, and it will be good to have in this community for many years to come. But his strengths seem particularly compatible with a career profile that is more focused on teaching. In fact, there is every indication that Schliesser's skills as a communicator make him particularly well suited for more classroom interaction, and that in his current position as a research professor he is being kept from actualizing an important side of his philosophical talent.---Referee #2
By the strange laws of blogging synchronicity, during the last 24hrs Marcus Arvan and Kate Norlock have raised concerns over professional referee-practices. (Yesterday's post was also about refereeing, but only obliquely about that issue.) I have about fifty refereed publications (journal articles and book chapters); while I have received more than my fair share of (to use a technical term) idiotic (I return to this below) and blatantly political/ideological (I return to this, too) reviews -- although a small number relative to the more than hundred diligent reports I have received! --, I have not been on the receiving end of vindictive refereeing among them (i.e., designed to hurt, spiteful, etc.). So, from Norlock's vantage point my experience is fairly lucky.
By contrast, my book and grant proposals do receive vindictive reports somewhat regularly (but still not half). In these reports, the proposer's identity -- my track-record, status, promise, etc. -- plays a non-trivial formal role. And here my shadow life as a public blogger is increasingly a presence in reports. (See the quoted paragraph above; I use this example because it turned out to be harmless in that it did not prevent me from obtaining the grant--I also share the referee's commitment to the significance of teaching.) Here's the rub: some such personal seeming criticism is completely licit because under grant-making rules that are common in Europe we're increasingly being asked to show detailed evidence of dissemination, impact, and (public) valorisation of our research (recall). While I wrote some editorials and gave lectures to non-academic audiences before my blogging career, the majority of such impact tends to be a consequence of my blogging profile.
Raising one's public profile (even modestly--I have never been on TV, and do not intend to be seen there) is a two-edged sword: while it facilitates some grant-making, (i) it generates criticism of one's persona among fellow academics in places where one does not expect it (no, I am not talking about anonymous blogs, but rather referee reports for, say, book proposals [that's happened a few times]); this is so, even if you think of yourself, as I do, as one of the gang for ordinary scholarly purposes. (ii) It can generate criticism about one's interventions among non-academics (when I was thought to criticize Dutch xenophobic politicians in a (self-published) editorial, I received hate-mail for a few weeks) [I call this the Socratic Problem].
The unpleasantness is far outweighed by the intellectual benefits, so on the whole I shrug off the vindictive referee reports; publishing and grant-making is, in part, a number's game and the key is to keep trying regularly. Obviously shrugging off vindictive referee reports is easier said than done, but in my case it helps that I have exceeded my professional aspirations.
Be that as it may, as my blog audience swelled, I have had to suppress the desire to start a monthly column in which I highlight the idiotic referee reports I have received and, say, name the journal editors that hid behind them in rejecting my papers. By idiotic I mean showing signs of intellectual incompetence. Again, I don't receive them very often, but, it happens. My reasons for suppressing this desire are entirely prudential [although fit with my larger tendency to try avoid self-advocacy (as opposed to self-promotion) on my blogs]: I wouldn't want to encourage journal editors to start simply desk-rejecting me (if word got out that I would be discussing their editorial decisions); so that's why I am not even offering a veiled example of it here. Even so the idiotic referee reports are especially annoying when journal editors, who have a policy (for whatever reason) of requiring multiple positive reviews, use them as a factor in a reject.
I do regularly receive what I consider political reports where it's clear that the referee simply does not want my position or approach to get a public hearing. (I am not alone in experiencing this; recall this post about Graham Priest's Preface to the second edition of In Contradiction, which discusses the examples he has received.) I infer, but could be mistaken, that this can be due to it being an alternative to the referee's preferred position or intellectual orientation.* Receiving such reports when one is junior can be very discouraging (especially if one has worked hard to add copious footnotes discussing the alternative positions in the field). But here the cunning of history offers some modest consolation: in an age in which citation-metrics play a non-trivial role in promotion (grant-making, lateral moves, etc.) the folk that as gate-keeping referees, police their territory such that no competitors are allowed in end up -- by, in effect, reducing citations to themselves -- hurting themselves in the long run, too.
*Obviously, ideological criticism can be substantive and merited, too. Even so, I have received disarmingly frank referee reports that were not vindictive in any sense, but found some reason to reject that the referee admitted was a matter of style or basic commitment.
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