Yeah I agree Richard’s story is about illustrating journal incentives and behaviour, not specially about a Right of Reply. In the specific Leif Weinar case I would say that Will, and maybe CEA, [should] have a Right of Reply, but a random EA person would not.
I don’t think it’s that strange to accept replies for lower-quality work. A newspaper, when quoting the subject of an article saying “the accusations are false and malicious and we are confident the Judge will side with us” or whatever is guaranteeing them space even though they wouldn’t have given the subject a platform normally. The purpose of the reply is to allow readers to better evaluate the criticism, which was deemed sufficient quality to publish, and if the reply is low quality then that is informative by itself. Important to this is that replies should be constrained to a much shorter length than the criticism itself.
The crux for me is whether “published reply in journal” could and would be (mis?)construed by some people as a sort of quality signal.
To the extent that journals are allowing replies-by-permission by third parties, then we don’t want to diminish the value of getting one of those published. As Richard notes, the incentives are already weak. Yet I think replies-by-permission are undervalued already, because I think ~ direct dialog is usually better than ~ talking past one another.
If I were too concerned about this issue for a reply author with standing, I’d probably at least offer to publish an Editor’s Note with a link to the reply author’s off-journal response.
Yeah I agree Richard’s story is about illustrating journal incentives and behaviour, not specially about a Right of Reply. In the specific Leif Weinar case I would say that Will, and maybe CEA, [should] have a Right of Reply, but a random EA person would not.
I don’t think it’s that strange to accept replies for lower-quality work. A newspaper, when quoting the subject of an article saying “the accusations are false and malicious and we are confident the Judge will side with us” or whatever is guaranteeing them space even though they wouldn’t have given the subject a platform normally. The purpose of the reply is to allow readers to better evaluate the criticism, which was deemed sufficient quality to publish, and if the reply is low quality then that is informative by itself. Important to this is that replies should be constrained to a much shorter length than the criticism itself.
The crux for me is whether “published reply in journal” could and would be (mis?)construed by some people as a sort of quality signal.
To the extent that journals are allowing replies-by-permission by third parties, then we don’t want to diminish the value of getting one of those published. As Richard notes, the incentives are already weak. Yet I think replies-by-permission are undervalued already, because I think ~ direct dialog is usually better than ~ talking past one another.
If I were too concerned about this issue for a reply author with standing, I’d probably at least offer to publish an Editor’s Note with a link to the reply author’s off-journal response.