Becoming Editor: Or, Pinocchio finally notices the Strings

Abstract

This paper uses my experience as an academic journal editor in order to reflect upon the social arrangement that brings academics, universities, states and knowledge capitalist organizations together to produce the contemporary academic journal and access paywalls. After some consideration of the history of publishing, I analyse the market for articles like this one, and consider the consequences of the ranking and monetization of journals, papers and citations by different agents. As I do this, I insert various biographical reflections on the relationship between 'editing' and being 'edited'. The overall aim of the paper is to suggest that this set-up actually has some very negative consequences for taxpayers, academics and students. It encourages the overproduction of academic output because it turns it into a commodity which is traded, whilst simultaneously tending to discourage forms of knowledge production that fail to fit into the boxes which have already been established for them, whether in terms of content or style. I conclude with some thoughts on open access journals, and their limits.

Seduced by Technology? How moral agency is mediated by the invisibility of everyday technologies

“…Our exemplar everyday setting, academic knowledge production, has been well documented; however, our discussion of the manner in technology mediates moral choices in knowledge production opens new vistas. Rather than position academic knowledge production as a highly determined, politically contested arena where the institutionally powerful not only win but fix the game (Parker, 2013), or as an objective, value-free, scientifically driven quest for truth (Hillman & Rynes, 2007), we steer a new course. Our postphenomenological approach shows how technologies can mediate our moral subjectification, and how this mediation changes with visibilities associated with positionality and temporality, as we act each day.…”

Critical essay: Blinding faith – Paradoxes and pathologies of opacity in peer review

“…at others’ expense ’ (see also Rennie, 2003) – the expense incurred being the invisible receipt of incompetent, high-handed or even abusive editorial conduct. On this point, I would question Lipworth and Kerridge’s (2011) claim that editors possess the power ascribed to them when, arguably, such ‘power’ is temporarily loaned to editors by publishing houses or learned societies (Parker, 2013). The central point being made by Lipworth and Kerridge (2011), nonetheless, is that routine editorial exercises of power, including those that established and now perpetuate blinded peer review, operate to exclude, discredit and suppress more transparent (e.g.…”

“…Maintained through editorial ‘control mechanisms’ (Berger and Luckmann, 1967: 78) often imposed by publishers (e.g. non-disclosure agreements; Parker, 2013; Willmott, 2021), opacity in evaluation processes is legitimized not only by its normalization but also by ostensibly ethical principles, such as those of anonymity and confidentiality.…”

“…Peer review that is blinded, as Fuller (2000: 87, emphasis added) notes, ‘miraculously discriminates important from unimportant research as the overall result of a set of privately taken decisions in referee’s reports’ whose opacity publishers as well as editors and reviewers are more than content to maintain. This entrenched arrangement has, arguably, enabled, and perhaps encouraged, editors to present and conceive of themselves as benevolent guardians, rather than unaccountable overlords, of scientific fields (Wellington and Nixon, 2005) – as displayed in self-congratulatory ‘Meet the Editors’ and ‘Manuscript Development’ events hosted by journals and/or their publishers (see Parker, 2013). Reflecting upon the role of reviewers in relation to editors, Zuckerman and Merton (1971: 96, emphasis added) ruefully comment:.…”

The (academic) society of the spectacle (of publication)

“…Yet this is not vanity publishing, in the sense that authors don't directly pay for their work to be produced. Instead it's a combination of state funding and student fees which effectively provide the money that allows for the labour of editing, proofreading, typesetting, printing and/or the maintenance of websites and marketing (Parker, 2013). As has been demonstrated on many occasions, multinational knowledge companies are a major financial beneficiary of this activity, because they sell the words that academics produce, as well as the technologies that allow journals and their articles to be produced and ranked, and allow for academics themselves to engage in this comparative ranking on a personal basis (Harvie et al 2012(Harvie et al , 2013.…”