Potential problems with a journal dedicated to controversial results

Valid criticisms, I think. I suppose the intention is that peer review will be sufficient to weed out the crazies* (maybe the reviewer's names should be made public ?). I'd like to see what happens : maybe it will degenerate into farce, maybe it will produce something interesting. The journal itself is the experiment...

* Cough cough TIME TRAVELLING ALIEN OCTOPUS cough cough cough...

There is one major problem here though :

For the reader of a paper, attaching authors to papers is important to help them decide how seriously to take the results. Here the difference between anonymous and pseudonymous authorship becomes important: if an author uses the same pseudonym over a period of time, the academic community can begin to get a sense of how good their work is (consider the Bourbaki pseudonym, which has been in use long enough to get a track-record), but if a publication is anonymous, the audience must rely solely on the credibility of the publishing journal and its editors.

What about the content itself ? Judging the content by the author is something we'd do well to avoid. Maybe all papers should be anonymous for six months after publishing, or something. I dunno. Anyway, I'm curious to see what happens with this.

"The Journal of Controversial Ideas ...proposes to allow academics to publish papers on controversial topics under a pseudonym. The hope is that this will allow researchers to write freely on controversial topics without the danger of social disapproval or threats. Thus the journal removes the author’s motivations, conflicts of interests and worldview from the presentation of a potentially controversial idea. This proposal heralds the death of the academic author – and, unlike Barthes, we think believe this is a bad thing."

"Defenders of The Journal of Controversial Ideas see it as a forum for true academic freedom. While academic freedom is important, it is not an unlimited right. Freedom without responsibility is recklessness. It is a lack of regard for the danger or consequences of one’s ideas. True academic freedom does not mean that writers get to choose when to avoid controversy. The pseudonymous authorship proposal allows authors to manipulate the credit and blame systems of the academy in the name of academic freedom."

"When it is working well, academic inquiry is a conversation. Researchers make claims and counterclaims, exchange reasons, and work together to open up new fields of inquiry. A conversation needs speakers: we need to keep track of who is talking, what they have said before, and who they are talking to. Pseudonymous authorship is an opt-out from the conversation, and the academic community will be worse off if its members no longer want to engage in intellectual conversation."


http://theconversation.com/the-journal-of-controversial-ideas-its-academic-freedom-without-responsibility-and-thats-recklessness-107106?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook#Echobox=1542706990