I'm coeditor of one journal and serve on the editorial boards of
a few others. When an article is published in a scholarly
journal, it is not simply an exercise of 'free speech' by an
author, it is a sort of collective recommendation and endorsement
by the editors, not of the specific content, but at least that
the work adheres to some public standards of good scholarship in
its methods. Readers place a certain trust in a journal not to
publish things it would be a waste of time to read or take
seriously. If Stone wants to offer his opinions to the world, he
is free to do so, by vanity publishing, or just by slapping a
homepage on the web and advertising its existence and content.
The no one else shares intellectual and scholarly responsibility
for what he wrote; no one else is vetting his scholarship for me,
and if I read it, I buy a pig in a poke.
There may be good pigs in some pokes, and I poke in there
sometimes to let serendipity find me. (I even advocate adding
random retrievals to computer database searches, with some levels
of control and relevance.) But when I want a higher probability
of finding reliable scholarship, I turn to journals I trust; and
I cancel my subscriptions if they let me down too often.
JAY.
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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
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