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.
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.