I’d like to hope that academics are aiming for a level of understanding above that of a typical user on an Internet forum.
All academic works have a right to reply. Many journals print response papers and it is a live option to submit responses to critical papers, including mine. It is also common to respond to others in the context of a larger paper. The only limit to the right of academic reply is that the response must be of suitable quality and interest to satisfy expert reviewers.
All academic works have a right to reply. Many journals print response papers and it is a live option to submit responses to critical papers, including mine. It is also common to respond to others in the context of a larger paper. The only limit to the right of academic reply is that the response must be of suitable quality and interest to satisfy expert reviewers.
This sounds like… not having a right of reply? The right means a strong presumption if not an absolute policy that criticized people can defend themselves in the same place as they were criticized. If only many, not all, journals print response papers, and only if you jump through whatever hoops and criteria the expert reviewers put in front of you, I’m not sure how this is different to ‘no right of reply’.
A serious right would mean journals would send you an email with the critical paper, the code and the underlying data, and give you time to create your response (subject to some word limit, copy-editing etc.) for them to publish.
A serious right would mean journals would send you an email with the critical paper, the code and the underlying data, and give you time to create your response (subject to some word limit, copy-editing etc.) for them to publish.
I generally agree with this to the extent that the person authoring the reply had a strong basis for standing—e.g., the published piece represented a direct and sustained criticism on their previously published piece. I would not extend it to cases where the person authoring the reply was more of a third party, as in the story Richard shares here. I am unsure about extending it to cases where the challenged work was not published in an appropriate journal in the first place. It seems a bit odd to guarantee someone journal access to defend work where there is no clear reason to believe the original work was of journal-level quality in the first place.
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.
Realistically, it is almost never in an academic’s professional interest to write a reply paper (unless they are completely starved of original ideas). Referees are fickle, and if the reply isn’t accepted at the original journal, very few other journals will even consider it, making it a bad time investment. (A real “right of reply”—where the default expectation switches from ‘rejection’ to ‘acceptance’—might change the incentives here.)
Example: early in my career, I wrote a reply to an article that was published in Ethics. The referees agreed with my criticisms, and rejected my reply on the grounds that this was all obvious and the original paper never should have been published. I learned my lesson and now just post replies to my blog since that’s much less time-intensive (and probably gets more readers anyway).
I’d like to hope that academics are aiming for a level of understanding above that of a typical user on an Internet forum.
All academic works have a right to reply. Many journals print response papers and it is a live option to submit responses to critical papers, including mine. It is also common to respond to others in the context of a larger paper. The only limit to the right of academic reply is that the response must be of suitable quality and interest to satisfy expert reviewers.
This sounds like… not having a right of reply? The right means a strong presumption if not an absolute policy that criticized people can defend themselves in the same place as they were criticized. If only many, not all, journals print response papers, and only if you jump through whatever hoops and criteria the expert reviewers put in front of you, I’m not sure how this is different to ‘no right of reply’.
A serious right would mean journals would send you an email with the critical paper, the code and the underlying data, and give you time to create your response (subject to some word limit, copy-editing etc.) for them to publish.
I generally agree with this to the extent that the person authoring the reply had a strong basis for standing—e.g., the published piece represented a direct and sustained criticism on their previously published piece. I would not extend it to cases where the person authoring the reply was more of a third party, as in the story Richard shares here. I am unsure about extending it to cases where the challenged work was not published in an appropriate journal in the first place. It seems a bit odd to guarantee someone journal access to defend work where there is no clear reason to believe the original work was of journal-level quality in the first place.
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.
Realistically, it is almost never in an academic’s professional interest to write a reply paper (unless they are completely starved of original ideas). Referees are fickle, and if the reply isn’t accepted at the original journal, very few other journals will even consider it, making it a bad time investment. (A real “right of reply”—where the default expectation switches from ‘rejection’ to ‘acceptance’—might change the incentives here.)
Example: early in my career, I wrote a reply to an article that was published in Ethics. The referees agreed with my criticisms, and rejected my reply on the grounds that this was all obvious and the original paper never should have been published. I learned my lesson and now just post replies to my blog since that’s much less time-intensive (and probably gets more readers anyway).