How to shape academic freedom in the digital age? Are the retractions of opinionated papers a prelude to “cancel culture” in academia?

Aggressive Measures, Rising Inequalities and Mass Formation During the COVID-19 Crisis: An Overview and Proposed Way Forward

“…This one-sided approach led to mass starvation in Russia and also, when the Chinese Communists adopted the same approach, starvation killed 30 million people (Kean, 2017). Favoring one ideology at the expense of other views can lead to unwanted outcomes (Joffe, 2021;Rittberger & Richardson, 2019;Schippers, 2020;Schippers & Rus, 2021), for example, using free speech to shut down free speech (Motta, 2018;Teixeira da Silva, 2021). The resulting "cancel culture" may frighten other academics who will then be careful in speaking out and/or publishing on certain topics (Rittberger & Richardson, 2019) Extreme centralized decision making has other disadvantages, including diminishing democracy, diminished freedoms, and threats to human rights (Della Porta, 2020a;…”

Digital Modernity

“…The version of record is available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1561/1800000031 them (Bouvier and Machin, 2021). The perception that those denounced tend toward the political right (itself contested - Cook et al, 2021;Norris, 2021), while academics tend toward the political left, confuses the debate still further; academic communities have been accused (by both sides) of bad faith research and illegitimate suppression of free speech and academic freedom, and so the status of academic literature (and practice) is itself in question (Read and Leathwood, 2021;Rom and Mitchell, 2021;Suissa and Sullivan, 2021;Teixeira da Silva, 2021).…”

Rethinking the use of the term ‘Global South’ in academic publishing

“…Academia is in a state of great transformation, if not revolution. Whether that is a state of cancel culture, 9 political correctness, or intellectual eradication is not yet entirely clear, but terms that classify human intellect based on a meaningless two-tier North-South divide should be abolished. If there is a need to characterize academics or institutes of higher education for bibliometric or other scholarly purposes, that need can be effectively met at different levels -individual author, journal, publisher, or country -without having to cluster them on either side of a North-South axis, especially when characterizing them with a term such as 'predatory' , which is being used in a derogatory sense and is causing academic divisiveness.…”