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A question of editorial ethics (by Norman Geras and Mark Harvey)

A report in Thursday's edition of Times Higher Education concerns a matter which was drawn to their attention by the two of us. The report says:

An academic has called for authors to have the right to see everything written about them in referees' reports after discovering that positive comments made about a rejected manuscript had been removed.

Mark Harvey, director of the Centre for Research in Economic Sociology and Innovation at the University of Essex, submitted a paper to the Routledge journal Economy and Society last year. It was rejected after being reviewed by five referees, some of whom had been suggested by Professor Harvey.

But by comparing the version of the reviewers' comments he received with those submitted by two of his recommended referees, he found that several positive comments about his paper had been removed.

Professor Harvey told Times Higher Education he feared that the comments may have been removed to justify the rejection. He added that the form for referees' comments used by Economy and Society did not suggest that reports could be edited before being shown to authors.

You can read the rest here. The report concludes by quoting Irene Hames, a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics, as follows: 'journals shouldn't use selective editing of reviewer reports to help them justify or be a better fit for a decision... Decision-making should be transparent.' That is also the view that we urged upon the Managing Editor of Economy and Society, Fran Tonkiss, but so far, it seems, without success. Here we offer a brief account of this episode - which we regard as an instance of academic malpractice, albeit of a low level kind - and follow up by appending the communication we sent to Times Higher Education.

Last year Mark Harvey submitted a paper to Economy and Society for a special issue of the journal that was in prospect and he was invited to suggest some referees for the paper himself, which he accordingly did. One of his suggested referees was Norman Geras, who in due course sent in his report; it recommended publication. In the event, MH's paper was rejected by the journal - a decision that both author and referee have not challenged - but when MH sent NG, by way of information, the copies of the referees' reports he had received from Economy and Society, NG noticed that there were discrepancies between the version of his own report that had been sent by the journal to MH and the integral version of it originally submitted by NG to E&S.

Troubled by these discrepancies, the two of us then wrote to the Managing Editor, Fran Tonkiss, on 18 December of last year. We found her reply to our email patently unsatisfactory, since its main point was to claim that the journal excluded explicit recommendations regarding publication from its digests of referees' reports relayed to authors; but this attempt to account for what had happened didn't meet the case. Not only, as we record in our letter to the THE reproduced below, was a negative recommendation (that is, against publication) left in one of the other referee's reports sent by the journal to MH, but some of the sentences omitted from the edited version of NG's report were simply part of his assessment of the strengths of MH's paper as he saw these, rather than explicit recommendations of publication.

In any event, the further correspondence between us and Fran Tonkiss having reached no satisfactory outcome, generating only a proposal from E&S that the journal now amend its referee report form to reflect its wayward current practice, we decided to publicize the issue by writing to the THE. This is our letter to them, sent on 9 April:

Dear Editor,

Undermining the integrity of peer review

At a time when much importance is being attached to publication in highly regarded academic journals for the purposes of the Research Excellence Framework, we wish to draw attention to a case of abuse of editorial responsibility, undermining the integrity of peer review, in the journal Economy and Society. This would be a serious matter at any time, but is particularly so now given the significant consequences of the REF.

As, respectively, the author of and one of the referees for a paper recently submitted to that journal, we should state at the outset that we have at no stage questioned either the editorial decision to reject the paper, or the right of the editors to make their own decision even if the balance of referees' reports points in a different direction. The abuse of editorial power lies elsewhere. It emerged by accident, in consequence of the particular circumstances of a special issue of the journal for which the paper was submitted and its author invited to nominate referees.

The editorial malpractice came to light when the referee's report communicated to the author was compared to the original version sent to the journal by the referee, and was found to have been carefully doctored in such a way as to support the editorial decision not to publish. Four positive statements had been excised from the report, significantly watering down its positive tenor. Subsequently, another report - also by a nominated referee - was found to have been edited to similar effect. In this case, the sentence following the excision had been amended so as to disguise the fact of an omission from the integral text.

As author and referee, we raised objections with the Managing Editor to what had happened - though in terms only of its undermining the integrity of the peer review process; we accepted both the decision itself and the journal's sovereignty over such decisions. As we pointed out, Economy and Society's Referee Report form clearly suggests to referees that the content of their reports will be conveyed to authors in full, and not in an expurgated version as has happened here. We specifically objected to editing that led to distorting the referee's evaluation in such a way as to support the editorial decision. The Managing Editor's initial defence of this was to say that only statements embodying direct recommendations about publication had been excised. This was false. A negative report contained the sentence (unexcised from the version sent to the author), 'This is not for E & S'. In other words, negative recommendations, supporting the journal's rejection of the article were left in, whereas positive recommendations had been cut.

In subsequent correspondence, the Managing Editor offered two further defences of Economy and Society's handling of the matter: first, that it is normal practice to convey a 'digest' of referees' reports to authors; and, second, that the journal will henceforth alter the wording on its Referee Report form to make clear to referees that that is in fact its practice. We have responded by saying that the alteration would merely give the editors licence to go on behaving as they have in the present case - persisting with the professional malpractice of doctoring referees' reports, while being more open about the fact that this is what they are permitting themselves to do. We pointed out that for peer review integrity to work there must be trust for both referees and authors that any editorial digest is a fair and accurate representation of the original referees' report. The editorial board of Economy and Society undermines that trust, both by the practice we have given an account of here and by their pusillanimous defence of it. We do not know whether this is an isolated case or whether it has become routine at the journal. That is the problem once trust has been undermined.

The two of us have discussed this episode with colleagues at several universities, some of whom have served on editorial boards of equally prestigious journals. Their response has been uniformly one of surprise and shock, and we have been urged to bring the issue to public attention, as we are doing now. We do it with the sole objective of ensuring that Economy and Society and its publisher, Taylor and Francis, will take the necessary and transparent steps to restore the reputation of its editorial processes and peer review integrity. If called on to do so, we can of course make public all the documentary evidence necessary to support our account.

Yours sincerely

Mark Harvey (author), Professor and Director, Centre for Research in Economic Sociology and Innovation, Department of Sociology,University of Essex.

Norman Geras (referee), Professor Emeritus in Politics, University of Manchester.

To some this episode may seem like no more than a spat between oversensitive academics. But others - and that includes the two of us - see it as an important issue of principle. Academics in the UK are currently under considerable pressure to publish in journals, and in some cases their careers could suffer if the papers they submit are improperly dealt with. Fortunately for both of us as senior academics (one of us now in retirement), we are not in this vulnerable position. And we can afford to put the issue in the public domain. In doing so, we hope to make it more difficult for journals to exercise arbitrary editorial power, and hope to contribute to a greater collective oversight of the editorial conduct of academic journals. In the end, it matters for the whole university community what is made public and what is left in the dark. From informal conversation with friends and colleagues we have both gained the impression that untoward experiences in this area are not as rare they should be. (Norman Geras and Mark Harvey)

Nightmare of cruelty

Patrick Cockburn discovers that he is a descendant of James Ramsay, who as a clergyman on the island of St Kitts witnessed first-hand the brutalities and sufferings involved in plantation slavery. Ramsay's An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves, published in 1784, was influential in the opposition to slavery. Cockburn's column is interesting not only for the details it gives of Ramsay's life and of the cruelties he saw, but also in reminding us yet once more of the falsehood of the claim that religion poisons everything. Ramsay was an Anglican clergyman. Longtime readers of normblog may recall the earlier guest-post by Anne Stott, 'Religion poisons everything - except when it doesn't'.

Hounds of Geevor

My, I do like them dawgs...

Here are some more.

Hounds of Geevor: read about them on David Kemp's blog. (Thanks: StM.)

Moonjuice?

Oh no, how are we going to oppose the charge of Zionist colonialism now? There's a team working 'in a shabby Tel Aviv University building' on the project of an Israeli moon landing.

From the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire to Rana Plaza

Further to these three earlier posts of mine, a report by Amy Kazmin in the FT is very much to the point:

Since the collapse last week of Bangladesh's Rana Plaza much of the focus has been on international retailers and what they can do to ensure the safety of the 3.6m Bangladeshis working in a $19bn industry focused on producing clothes for cost-conscious western consumers.

But Bangladeshi labour rights activists, and their international supporters, say the tragedy at Rana Plaza – which left more than 500 dead after garment workers were forced back to the production lines even after the building developed cracks – has highlighted a simple truth.

They argue that Bangladesh's garment workers, mostly women from poor rural backgrounds, need to organise labour unions that can effectively represent their interests, including their fundamental interest in a safe workplace.

"If these [workers] were able to organise, this [death toll] wouldn't have happened," says Kalpona Akter, an activist with the Bangladesh Centre for Workers Solidarity. "If they had unions, as soon as they saw the cracks they could have raised their voice."
.....
On paper, Bangladeshi workers do have the legal right to form unions, and collectively bargain with factory owners. In reality, attempts to unionise the country's garment workers have been ruthlessly suppressed, with any activist workers hounded out of their jobs, blacklisted or worse, with tacit government approval.

Last year, Aminul Islam, a prominent garment worker-turned-labour organiser who had complained of harassment by security forces, was murdered, and his body - bearing marks of torture - dumped on a highway. His killers were never identified, but labour groups believe his murder was intended to warn potential labour agitators.

Kazmin goes on to note that industrial disasters have often been catalysts for change: 'New York City's 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, in which 146 garment workers - mostly women - were killed in part because fire exits were locked, helped spur the growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union...'

This throws light, once again, on the issue of the freedoms and constraints applying to workers working in unsafe conditions; and it shows also that it isn't specific to the contemporary circumstances of globalization for people to press for better working conditions for such workers. (Thanks: MH.)

Eye off the ball

People who follow Premiership football in this country sometimes fail to notice that there's another competition than the Premier League itself that one needs to try and win. This is the competition to be best in the estimation of the managers of clubs that haven't won. Cue Rafael Benítez (£):

It was Benítez's claim that United are not necessarily the best side in the Premier League that was the most incendiary observation... The Spaniard praised United's consistency and admitted that they deserved to win the title, but argued that Chelsea and Manchester City are their match.

Oh yes, it's a great shame United have been focused on accumulating more points than Chelsea, at the expense of trying to impress the Chelsea manager. Observations on the frailties of human nature redundant here.

On your Marx for 500

Tomorrow is the anniversary of Karl Marx's birth, and political artist Ottmar Hörl has chosen to mark it by encouraging people to have a think about the meaning of Marx's work.

In honor of Karl Marx's 195th birthday, Hörl has spread out 500 plastic figurines of the famous thinker in Trier, the western German city near the border with Luxembourg where Marx was born. Each miniature sculpture, which stands less than a meter (3.3 feet) tall, portrays Marx in the exact same pose, but in different shades of red.

A nifty idea, sure. But what could it possibly mean? "I want to inspire pedestrians to think about Karl Marx in a different way," Hörl explains while his installation is being set up next to Trier's historic Roman city gate, Porta Nigra, adding that the German philosopher has often been misinterpreted.

The journalist reporting this isn't impressed; he sees it as trivializing Marx 'to the maximum'. I don't know. One thing worth noting is that if you try to think about Marx in 500 ways, one for each of Ottmar Hörl's Marx-gnomes, you wouldn't run out of possibilities before getting to the total. People are still arguing about him.

Reading to find life

Some while back I had a discussion here of whether, in order to like a novel, you need to like its characters. I'm happy to see that my view - that you don't - agrees with the opinion forthrightly expressed by Claire Messud when asked about one of the characters in her new novel:

I wouldn't want to be friends with Nora, would you? Her outlook is almost unbearably grim.

For heaven's sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? Oedipus? Oscar Wao? Antigone? Raskolnikov? Any of the characters in The Corrections? Any of the characters in Infinite Jest? Any of the characters in anything Pynchon has ever written? Or Martin Amis? Or Orhan Pamuk? Or Alice Munro, for that matter? If you're reading to find friends, you're in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn't "is this a potential friend for me?" but "is this character alive?"

Gathering at the river 2

From one John Ford picture to another - this one's The Searchers, and 'Shall We Gather At The River' starts at 1.00 minute in.

(Thanks: WT.)

Acceptable utopia

[Being some notes towards a talk I couldn't give.]

There are two things that are commonly said about utopian thinking. These are: (a) that it is indispensable to progressive change - by which I just mean change for the better; and (b) that it is dangerous. So why don't I begin by reiterating both of these things, because both of them are true.

(a) Sketching utopian alternatives to the present opens our minds to imaginative possibility, to ways in which we might live differently and better than we do now. This point might seem straightforward, but one must not underestimate how common it is for minds to be closed against radically different alternatives. For many of us the world we know is the only one we know; we can fall into taking it for granted that the ways of doing things in this world, its rules and structures, are the only conceivable ways or the only practicable or efficient ones. In what Marxists sometimes refer to as reification, we turn historically specific modes of life into universal realities or what we assume to be universal and unchangeable. Utopian thinking uses the devices of abstraction, projection, imagination, to challenge the power of the seemingly obvious.

Marx himself was dismissive of the practice of constructing detailed utopias - 'writing receipts... for the cook-shops of the future', as he once contemptuously put this - but there were undoubtedly utopian elements in his thinking. For example, there is his notion of a world that could inscribe on its banners the slogan 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!' Or there is the idea of a society in which alienated labour could be overcome or at least much mitigated, so that human individuals could enjoy, all of us, a rounded existence, and if not exactly 'hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner', then be able to engage in some range of activities, rather than being chained day in and day out to a single narrow function.

How far either of these ambitions is realizable - or indeed desirable - I won't go into here, but it is an old and distinguished purpose of political philosophy (and of literature, science fiction, etc) to engage in this critical, sometimes utopian, exercise, in order to encourage us to question what we are familiar with and its seeming permanence and/or legitimacy.

(b) And utopian thinking can also be dangerous. The conditions in which it becomes so typically involve something like the following: when the partisans of utopia get their hands on political power and determine to carry out their will irrespective of, even against, the balance of popular opinion; in other words, when some would-be project of progressive change lacks democratic support and popular legitimacy and has become the work of a 'vanguard', it can do great mischief and destroy and ruin millions of lives. The pace of change is often then forced, and the impractical or impossible tried against the weight of experience, or what has been tested, or just elementary common sense. Yet because it is supposed to be utopia we have in prospect - the very ideal human society - nothing, according to its partisans, may be allowed to stand in its way. What price some few million lives when the solution of all human difficulties is on offer?

Except this never is on offer: the human condition is imperfect and problematic by its very nature; so we must beware every utopian dream that has become detached from the basic norms of democratic validation and respect for human lives and human rights and civil liberties now. If Marxism has had something to teach about the possible benefits of utopian thinking, it has also, in its more monstrous historical forms, taught us enough and too much about the risks and the costs of utopia when divorced from liberal and democratic norms.

Going beyond those two contrasting truths from which I've begun, I want now to argue briefly for what I think is the minimum condition of any acceptable utopia today, and insist that it has to include an anti-utopian element. The core of it is this: the recognition that human beings are not only not perfect, they should also not be conceived as being perfectible - neither morally perfectible nor perfectible in other ways. As a species we have shown ourselves capable of enormous achievements, both individual and collective, in every sphere: scientific, industrial, technological, aesthetic, cultural, medical. Morally, too, human beings have displayed the greatest in heroism, compassion, altruism, perseverence, and disinterested help to others.

At the same time, however, our moral nature is fragile and it is flawed. Human beings are also responsible for terrible levels of cruelty, evils that defy belief, callous indifference to the sufferings of others. This is not merely the occasional product of 'bad' social conditions; it is a permanent potentiality of our natures, and therefore no prospective utopia is worth even a rusty nail that doesn't build restrictions and limits against that potentiality - not only but at least the traditional constraints of the rule of law and the standard liberal protections of the individual, of all individuals.

For in the very idea of utopia itself are linked both the marvels and the evils lying dormant within human nature. Everything is possible, says the soaring imagination, the imagination of beauty and creativity and wonder. In a manner of speaking, so it is. But everything is also possible at the wrong end, in the eye and the places of human depravity. It was a common wisdom of the Nazi camps: I did not know before that on the human stage everything happens; now I do know. It is a lesson not to be forgotten.