As is becoming my habit, I'm going to try in a short essay to be persuasive about an uncomfortable idea.
I finished my doctoral thesis last November; defended and passed. There are revisions still to be done this spring - an odd process if you ask me; you'd think passing was passing and the deed was done - and I'll be committing a fair amount of agony and irony to that task in the coming weeks.
As part of my post-doc self-induced therapy, I set about trying to understanding systematically for the first time what precisely academic journals are. A little bit like examinations in school, journals are gatekeeping devices run with a surprising amount of mystery and even mysticism. To hear colleagues are conferences talk about their latest publications, one would think there was a shamanic quality to the editors and reviewers - these very real, fallible humans are suddenly detached, floating orbs of authority, apparently tuned into something greater and more powerful than a submitting author can hope to access, and its only through their divine guidance (i.e., feedback) that authors can struggle to make their work suitable and acceptable for greater sharing.
The bottlenecking character of capitalist society can nowhere be escaped. At all turns we choke one another with ritualistic subordination. We are addicted to this in part because in the rare times we are masters of the process, it is intoxicating. Think for a moment of times you served as a peer reviewer or conference committee member. The sick joyful power of rejection is too satisfying to the reptile portions of brains. We'll accept a thousand rejections in life if it means we can at least once or twice exercise that same domination over others.
Not to lump academic journals too closely to other forms of hierarchical abuse; but we can't go far in analysis without acknowledging peer review's fundamental kinship with teachers failing students, abusive lovers suddenly disappearing, or older siblings stealing toys. That some fields practice extra patience and generosity towards identified 'junior' scholars tells us not that these seniors are just, but that the system they participate in is essentially unjust. Handicaps in sports are not altruistic, they are revealing of the unbalanced competition driving the enjoyment of the sport.
In defense of competition, peer review
The sadistic urge to hurt others is, I contend, at the heart of peer review. If we did not enjoy it, we would not do it for long. That so many scholars openly dislike the way rejecting others makes them feel does not outweigh the trained professional obligation (and private intoxicating power) that demands they dole our rejections anyway.
Enough said in that direction; the process is pleasurable pain-giving, and the product is an imagined high degree of quality. We imagine, through rejecting others, that what they come up with next will necessarily be better, since struggle implies effort and effort ideally yields more results. Keep grinding the stone until a sculpture emerges. Keep tilling the land until the rows are straight and perfect. Keep revising your paper until a coherent argument emerges.
Contemporary society operates at such a high scale of complexity and alienation that we must arrange in person conferences to get in touch with one another at all. We attempt to express ideas of such abstract detachment and skilled articulation that oftentimes we sound muddled and confused even while reading our own work aloud. Our only antidote to the complexity that we accept so that we can have nice material things, is to force one another to try again, again, and again to make our work slightly better.
Think to when schools still taught handwriting: a basically stupid but necessary rote practice that was meant to allow students to express themselves at length in linear fashion. That students are perfectly able to express themselves orally, physically, and emotionally without handwriting was irrelevant to the complex systems requiring a population who could read as well as write. Computers and typing did not make handwriting obsolete; they dug it deeper into our imaginations of reality by automating and thus making somewhat magical the process of writing. I can type many times faster than I could ever write, and the suite of extra-structural features computers offer my writing (from dictionaries and thesaurus to now LLMs that can do my thinking for me, on the cheap), only makes writing feel more magical and thus more naturalistic, and thus more inherent or necessary for life. It all becomes very falsely intuitive very quickly. We forget we ever had to learn to type, just as we forget we had to learn how to tie our shoes (eventually AI might tie our shoes for us, too - a topic for another essay).
So it goes, in grander but uglier scale, with peer review: from learning handwriting to learning article writing, we students who chose this life of intellectual drubbing keep toiling away until producing rejectable ideas becomes so common that it feels natural, and made so magical by routine and technical affordance that it feels inevitable: of course I write peer reviewed papers, I've always done so, this is my career and destiny, this is my real voice.
In so doing, we make in this complex world a community of shared pain and misery, shown clearly as painful by those rare moments when something good happens. A nice conference presentation, perhaps. A shared laugh over coffee. Better yet, a genuinely good idea from a scholar that others can use in making themselves feel they better understand something. The life of a scholar is one of perpetually asking the same questions in the wrong way until we get so old that we are too tired to be actively curious and retreat either into hedonism (I can picture the tenured class at exotic conference hotels) or philosophy (the real life lived quietly by middle-list citation authors around the world).
The abuse becomes the shield; to defend peer review is to say that at least the religious think they find god. Like a lottery, or a US American class system, a few privileged scholars rise to the top of the field and reap most of the benefits, but seem unassuming and grounded enough that the rest of us imagine we might be them, if we could only crack open the secrets of academic journals and peer review. A more honest version of peer review are the competitive corporate kitchens of many post-wealth nations, where chefs can pretend to be creative tyrants ruling over an entire portion of known meals. This is great entertainment, nearly as fun to me as watching top-cited scholars give public talks, weaving like gymnasts through their ideas, invariably outdated and out of context. I like top scholars, like we all probably do, because it's fun to see people be rewarded for naked arrogance. There is a thrill in it, like reality TV show winners.
To the Journals, though
Top scholars are fun to watch, perhaps less so to read, because they are human and have all the wrinkles, bald spots, fat legs, and foggy eyes you'd expect from people rapidly becoming the grandparents of their respective fields. As hypnotizing as they can be, they are still human, and when you see that untucked shirt or loose hair, those clunky shoes or smell that old fashioned perfume or cologne, you get that nice whiff of humiliated humanity and don't feel so far from the ground. We are all jet lagged, hung over, or nervous at international conferences. We are all ever in danger of death and irrelevance. At best, the best thinkers have five good ideas. And frankly, that's enough. We're in this together, and if we all put in five, we'll come out with more.
The journals, though, are inhuman, and much harder to look at. Editors are ostensibly human, though in their ritualistic roles as email correspondents, come off less like humans and more like guards at the gates of heaven (or hell). There is a chill in the air surrounding peer review. We are not chummy drunkards or coffee addicts huddled in conference halls or faculty hallways here. Instead we are nude divers at dawn eyeing the big, beautiful cold bay waters, genitals shrinking and mouths drying up at the idea of jumping in. We know we must - we must publish or perish - yet the prospect feels worse in its reality and physicality than the abstract concept of death. Sometimes I'd rather go die than send my rejected article out to another journal. My ego doesn't heal the way my sore back does every morning: I can't stretch and exercise to really renew it. I have to just make another cup of coffee. Is there enough coffee in the world to restore my ego?
The Index
I've written on this briefly before, but my project as a post-doc was to produce a large-scale indexing of academic journals, ranking them by the usual stats as well as listing their known biases and prejudices. In a sense, I wanted to 'humanize' the journals by giving them a shape and texture. Who are the editors, who are the reviewers, and what are their top-cited submissions?
Citations make of intellectual ideas a capitalistic marketplace. They are quantifiable markers of an idea's perceived value by a consumer population. Academics consume, collectively if not individually, massive amounts of ideas through articles, book chapters, books, and conferences. And maybe other things, if they have the time or imagination to wander out of the usual ivory libraries. This consumption creates measurables, and measurables means capitalism. Put a number on anything, and you invite capitalism in the door.
Journals' customers are the masses of unwashed academics. Their clients are the ones they publish. And their owners are the big publishers overseeing them, those making expensive contracts with universities and institutions for the rights to their big, messy libraries of published works. Everything ultimately has to be paid for, since people need jobs at some point in the story. I'm not against the payments, for the record. Frankly put, I'm not really against any of the academic-industrial complex or whatever weird term it needs to be called. I don't know what it would mean to be 'against' it, same as I don't know what it would mean to be 'against' toll roads. They exist no matter how hard I blog.
If there is some way to be 'against' for-profit academic publishing, I think it begins with a clear understanding of the power structure in play. Academics spent a great deal of time, truly, in near-open competition with one another. Whether this be healthy sportsmanship or vicious gossip, or both at different times, one cannot deny that the very act of writing spurs competition since at least one-quarter of any piece includes citations of others. When I write, I have to see, repeat, and articulate the ideas of my superiors. For someone with as large an ego as my own, this is near-constant torture. Or perhaps, to put it more accurately, for a new but middle-aged scholar trying to find his footing, it's mostly discouraging to add to the large number of citations of peers who are, basically, my own age. I feel frequently out of place, as though I have come late to a life that I love, and found it a bit harder to get started.
The index of journals (and scholars, and conferences) is meant in part to fill in knowledge I might have gleaned from a good ten years of being culturally and professionally embedded in academic life. Academia does have culture. Believe me, as an outsider to everything I've belonged to, academia has one of the strongest and most fragrant cultures one can find, on par with law, medicine, and military. Academia thinks it does not, of course. It thinks itself so diverse and divergent in thought and practice that it can effectively be odorless or, better yet, smell of ideals and utopias the rest of society could only hope to aspire to. Were academia not aspirational, all that digital ink and peer review would only be vain. Let's not admit that out loud; of course academia can and should change the world for the better. Right? Perhaps.
A small life lesson for identifying whether something has a stink or not: I know when I stink when I can more easily smell others. I don't know the science of why this is true. Like explaining wi-fi though, I'm not afraid to make a bad guess. After a long day of travel, say, when I haven't had access to a shower for a while, I notice very clearly in airports or trains the colognes and deodorants of those around me. I imagine the odors puncturing my own stinky bubble that I've been in so long and so slowly accustomed to that I take as natural as anything. Maybe an analogy would be that we can sit in a darkening room as the sun sets for a long while before realizing it, or we can realize it right away if someone opens the door and lets light in.
The lesson applied to academia: for some of the pure-breds, or straight-throughs (i.e., straight through school to professorships) that I've met at conferences can barely smell the cultural odors of academia because it's all they've ever known. I had a friend who lived in a remote village in a foreign country and he was asked if, in his home country, they also had the moon. The number of academic studies rediscovering the moon in other countries is innumerable. Much of what scholars study is, in fact, culture outside academia. We are shocked at illiteracy and aliteracy. We are scandalized by working class poverty. We are indignant at upper class greed. We devise complex self-reflective methods and check our work again, and again, and again, to produce argumentation we think foolproof and tough. We submit it (and ourselves) to anonymous peer review by other pedants, and if we're lucky we are given the chance to revise (to correct) our ideas until they fit the views of others like us. This is how academia culturally reproduces itself, of course. It is also how it actively alienates itself from other cultures of the world. The ultimate end of publishing is not usually greater knowledge for all - after all, only those with subscriptions can access most journals - but rather job security for the precarious overgrown students who have become 'scholars'.
Kicking my prison walls
I'll wrap up soon, because who wants to see a middle-aged man complain about his gilded cage?
Job hunting starts again for me this year, as my limited-term contract comes to an end. I find myself at nearly 40 with most signs of a settled life, yet professionally I can fly into the wind like any 25 year old. It's not merely 'unfair'; it's bizarre. But it's part of the complex society we all get signed up for, and part of the competition defined by its occasional handicaps and hand-outs. I'm not in any weak position, either. I will more than likely be 'just fine'. The 'just fine' status of white men like myself is probably a topic for another essay, worth visiting in full.
My aim here is not to arrive at self-pity and especially not to solicit pity from others. I'm trying to understand journals. They are marketplace objects, gate-keepers operating as extra stages in the professionalization of the student-class, let's call them, deciding who will move into the higher rungs of the ladder - i.e., tenure.
Most tenured professors are the walking dead: their ideas sprung in part from the intensive precarity of the student-class cultures, and having achieved the last and highest position on a very hungry food chain, they lose at a rapid pace motivation to produce any more knowledge. What they know, fundamentally, is that they 'made' it. Everything else is a lot less important.
This happens in any field; it stings when it comes from what should be intellectuals and empaths. All study is about deepening understanding. When wealth invariably stops that search, and furthermore causes mental health issues great and small, it's unsettling to watch the results. Shuffling, creaky voiced scholars sitting on stages at big conferences, whispering or shouting out variations of the insights they had when they were younger and still mostly in touch with real people's problems. Or, better, taking us all down the garden paths that led them to their famous and esoteric insights about contexts few people experience or know much about. It is fun to hear hyphenated terms and unintuitive phrases that describe, like medieval poetry, emotions and effects too myopic to put in one word. Everything must be explained, at length, badly, and thus repeatedly, because what else can a scholar do but talk?
Vulgar Markets
It feels vulgar to call the marketplace of ideas purportedly produced by journals a marketplace at all. It should feel that way, if we have any pretense to ethics and higher values.
But we'll keep reading the journals. We'll keep citing them. How can we not? We're in a race with one another to read and cite more and better and rarer work; to be through our investigations more curious, more cutting edge, closer to the deep truth of whatever is going on at the moment. Fortunately we're not as frantic as journalists, and not as vicious as lawyers. Perhaps we're closest to medical doctors in the sense that we maintain that whatever we do, we do it for the greater good. That's probably why we seek to be called 'doctors' by others - we are meant to do good through learning. And maybe sometimes a few of us do.
For the majority though, and particularly junior scholars like myself, the time spent romanticizing all this reading and writing might be better spent taking cold hard looks at the economy being produced out of our labors. Journals need submissions; the more the better, like casinos in Vegas need betters. Little fish, like me, are good things for journals. I'll be guaranteed to cite their big names, as well as produce works that they can reject, to improve their stats. Like private universities in the US American system (and elsewhere) the applications of the unacceptable masses are what make the reputations of exclusive systems. What is a club without a line outside?
Looking at the journals this way can very quickly deplete some of their mystic power. They want to reject authors. Even if the sentiments of editors run counter to rejection, and they protest that rejection is not their business, the bottom line produced by counting submissions and calculating acceptance rates is a mandatory practice for a competitive journal. By their very nature, institutions are defined by exclusion, not inclusion. The authors who are published form an actually smaller part, I would argue, of the journals reputation. Imagine for a moment if a 'top' journal with a 10% acceptance rate witnessed a 90% drop in submissions. Let's go further and imagine that the 90% of submissions were articles the editors would choose not to publish. What has happened to the journal? They have produced a 100% acceptance rate of the same articles they would have published anyway, but now they look intensely unpopular and somewhat foolish.
Journals require exclusion to function as desirable markets. It's possible what journals publish is 'the best of the best', though I invite the reader to peruse any of their favorite journals' recent issues and list the number of articles that appear interesting. I did this myself last week and was somewhat bored by what I saw. Maybe it was just not my issue, not that week.
What collapses a market? Lack of exclusion. Open it too wide, and it explodes into multiple smaller markets, loses its character, loses its central command. Narrow it too much, and it is a boutique in which just the few really thrive. Most 'top' journals are boutiques; accepting and selling what they deem high-value objects to customers drawn less by the quality and more by the name-brand on offer. Many academics are buying equivalents of name-brand journal articles; we cite them not for their ideas, but for the idea of their ideas.
There is no way out of this for journals; they are markets, forevermore, and will always oscillate between flea markets and boutique shops. For junior scholars like myself trying to get into these markets, its refreshing and strategic to remember that ultimately, it's mostly junk out there.