Reviewing and Ethics in the Online Academy

Abstract

This commentary paper reflects on what I have recently learned from being involved in the Editorial Development Group established by the journal EPAT (Educational Philosophy and Theory) and its owners, the learned society of PESA (the Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia). Besides disseminating the experience of this group, the paper suggests there is a link between the ideas of ‘netiquette’, the online academy, and the ethics of reviewing.

Keywords:

• anonymity
• editorial education
• ethics of reviewing
• netiquette
• online environment

Introducing the Editorial Development Group

EDG stands for the Editorial Development Group of EPAT (Educational Philosophy and Theory), the journal owned by PESA (the Philosophy of Education of Australasia, see www.pesa.org.au). Since a low point in the early 2000s, when membership dropped to less than 20, PESA has grown strongly over the past decade or so, currently boasting a membership of nearly 200, including a diverse range of educators interested in the philosophy of education from around the globe, while remaining dominated by academics from the founding nations of Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. With the sure guidance and boundless energy of Executive Editor Michael Peters behind it, EPAT has gone from strength to strength alongside PESA, and today ranks highly as one of the most successful educational journals, with 14 issues a year, now incorporating the arts-focused ACCESS, regular special issues, and with exciting plans to feature diverse forms of scholarship. As part of PESA’s wider strategic plan for the next phase of its history, Peters recognised the need to grow the base of editorial expertise and respond to the coming challenges and opportunities presented by cyberspace, and the transformation by open access of the traditional economy of academic publishing (Peters, 2009). One response he made was to seek support from the PESA Executive to establish an editorial internship group, which he gained in December 2012.

The EDG began operating in early 2013 using a University of Waikato Moodle site, which most of the EDG accessed as external users. Peters initiated a process of collaborative reviewing as editorial education, to be the first project for the EDG. One of the more experienced members of the group reviewed a live manuscript, and Moodle was used to post and discuss both manuscript and review. The EPAT Managing Editor took responsibility for posting files on the Moodle site, and communicating by email as necessary with individual EDG members. By this means, three papers were reviewed over the course of 2013. At the annual conference at the end of the year, a spontaneous dinner meeting was held to discuss teething problems with the process, including mild IT hiccups, and a suggestion for the steps and timeline to be notified in advance to make things easier for participants. At that meeting, Peters appointed two members as co-leaders, suggesting they develop the group further over the following year. One of those two people was me. Some new members joined at Peters’ invitation, either at that conference or shortly thereafter. From the conference onwards, I have worked closely via email and internet phone calls with the other co-leader, including Peters in the operations of the EDG, but not referring to him unless we felt we needed his advice.

At the start of 2014, I took over responsibility for the collaborative review project, creating a secret Facebook group as the new online platform for posting files and discussions. Documentation was written to explain the group and the review project, and in collaboration with the Managing Editor, a modified review process was developed, consistent with journal policy, and coherent with the conditions of the EDG work. A timetable for the steps in the review and discussion process was agreed on to ensure timely decisions were returned. Mundane detail aside, the following section notes some ideas about the essence of reviewing, catalysed by this experience of leading the EDG collaborative review project.

Reviewing 101

When we start reviewing, it can seem like a mysterious process. At some point after completing our doctoral degree, having had a journal article of one’s own published, an email message arrives asking one to review the attached manuscript, and detailing the timeline and process. The instructions for how to actually do the review could be limited to as little as two headings to write under, such as ‘comments to author/s’ and ‘comments to editor (not shared with author/s)’; and a choice of decisions, typically: ‘accept as is; accept with minor revisions; accept with major revisions; or reject’.

Several aspects or aims of an academic review may be listed—firstly, and most obviously:

1. Technical aspect or accuracy: the correct recommendation is made for valid reasons.

   This depends on satisfaction of the prior aspect:

2. Judgemental aspect: the reviewer has read and understood the paper fairly and adequately.

   As a written product, there is inevitably the following aspect:

3. Linguistic aspect or voice: style of writing and presenting a review unique to each reviewer.

   The above three aspects combine to determine the following:

4. Pedagogical aspect: efficacy to help the author improve the paper to publishable standard.

Broken down in this way, we can say that the task of an academic review is to read the manuscript i.e. (2) and write the review i.e. (3), in such a way as to achieve both the specific aim (1) and the larger aim (4) of the academic blind peer-review process for publishing research. Underlying each of these aspects, as with all complex professional tasks, is an ethics of reviewing on which the remainder of this section focuses. One recent article gives a useful survey of relevant literature, mainly from management and related disciplines, on the ethics of academic review processes (Comer & Schwartz, 2014), while focusing on the problem of humiliation in peer reviewing.

In this article, Debra Comer and Michael Schwartz explore the reasons why academic reviews are often needlessly ‘vituperative’, such as the fallacious, but apparently widespread idea that ‘being mean’ equates to academic rigour, and the negative effects of this culture, such as authors who disengage from publishing altogether after receiving discouraging reviews of their work. The anonymity of the peer-review process makes it easier for reviewers to speak harshly to the author of the manuscript, identified only by a number. The anonymity of the Internet has recently served to intensify this effect of disengagement from each other as human beings and moral agents, separated physically across the globe as we often now are. The authors also note that under pressure of time, reviewers may unconsciously resent the paper they feel forced to review for the good of their academic CV, and vent their frustration in the cutting remarks they make about the quality of the work.

‘Sheer nastiness’ may be even more of a problem in book reviews that appear in academic journals (Peters, 2014, p. 176), given their public nature and apparent status. Yet without checks on their writing, or right of reply, such reviewers can become ‘like snipers’ (p. 175). EDG founder, acclaimed author and leading educational editor Michael Peters, used writing to work through his ‘angst’ at a negative review of his recent book in a prominent journal, commenting:

As an editor, I do believe that critical and negative reviews need to be scrutinized carefully, although I would not want to prevent the publication of a critical review if it met standards of fairness. I tend to favour the right of reply also. (Peters, 2014, pp. 176–177)

Comer and Schwartz argue that to write humiliating comments in an academic review is a form of immorality, calling on the virtue ethics of philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, who wrote about the ‘masks’ we assume by the very act of writing. Murdoch’s philosophy is based on an all-compassing virtue of ‘the Good’ which acknowledges that ‘goodness requires humility’ (Comer & Schwartz, 2014, p. 149). Comer and Schwartz conclude that reviewer humility is the antidote to author humiliation. Humility balances the power that an anonymous reviewer holds to humiliate a manuscript’s author with little thought, and without apparent consequence. Humility helps the reviewer remain responsive: to the authors as moral agents, to their efforts to write the manuscript and to what they are trying to achieve.

Clearly, then, to be a reviewer, it is necessary to have expert knowledge about the discipline in which the journal is publishing research. But to be a good reviewer, that expert knowledge must also be coupled with humility, which in the case of the academic reviewer could be expanded in more detail to mean, among other things, a desire to serve the author/s of the manuscript that has kept us at our desk a bit longer today, and a love for one’s field of research that extends to the community of persons who support and co-construct it with us.

Netiquette

The academy of the future is here, as open-access transforms publishing, MOOCs transform pedagogy and academic communications become ever-increasingly digital and web-based (Cope & Phillips, 2009; Gardner & Green, 2014; Whitworth & Friedman, 2009). As academics in education, we use digital tools, such as computers and online platforms, as means to do what academics once did by hand or in person—rather than being interested in the Internet, apps, etc. per se. Unsurprisingly, therefore, discussion of professional etiquette in the new digital academy has not been widespread in education (Wegerif, 2013). We can, however, turn to the field of information technology studies, where a useful term in this area is ‘netiquette’ from ‘internet etiquette’ (Albion.com, 1990–2011), and a book of this name, originally written in 1994, has been freely available online since 1997 (Shea, 1997).

The anonymity of the internet, referred to above, has resulted in new phenomena such as ‘cyber-bullying’. There have been cases of suicide and murder in which social media and other digital communications, such as text messaging, have played a part. Of course these are the most extreme examples, but most of us would know of cases of unpleasant (or worse) uses of business email communication. Email is used everywhere in the academy, yet there are few if any opportunities in our workplaces to learn about email etiquette. The theme of anonymity connects the etiquette of communicating through email and social media to the above discussion on the ethics of reviewing. One feels a diminished sense of personal involvement and responsibility when addressing someone unknown or far away, connected only by email. Disconnection from the other person, or from the events behind their email message, increases the tendency to be dismissive of their demands on our time and attention.

As a form of business communication, email contains several inbuilt traps. Firstly, sending an email does not mean that the other person has received it. Secondly, conveying important information buried inside a long email message is problematic. Thirdly, it is easy to unintentionally give offence, and equally easy to unnecessarily take offence, from the way a message is worded. Dealing with tricky situations by hiding behind the anonymity of email is tempting when our schedule is crowded, or we are not feeling confident, but there are times when it is better to just pick up the phone. Email suits instant messaging that is impromptu and interstitial to one’s main tasks for the day, dashed off rapidly for efficient exchange. Email is also perfect for exchanging Word files, such as the many versions that go to and fro when one is working on an essay with a colleague or student. But email is also regarded as an audit trail, and can count as legal evidence. Netiquette, both the concept and the book, is a useful guide to ethical emailing, and also applies to other online messages on Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Netiquette is relevant to those who work in an online environment, which means all of us these days. But as author Virginia Shea notes, netiquette’s first and central rule, which echoes the above analysis of best practice for peer reviews, is simply an updated version of the ‘golden rule’ often taught to children in the sing-song form, ‘do as you would be done by’:

Remember the Human: When you communicate electronically, all you see is a computer screen. You don’t have the opportunity to use facial expressions, gestures, and tone of voice to communicate your meaning; words—lonely written words—are all you’ve got. And that goes for your correspondent as well. When you’re holding a conversation online—whether it’s an email exchange or a response to a discussion group posting—it’s easy to misinterpret your correspondent’s meaning. And it’s frighteningly easy to forget that your correspondent is a person with feelings more or less like your own. (Shea, 1997, p. 35)

Conclusion: Ethical Academics in Cyberspace

Forging an academic career, under the multiple pressures and whirlwind changes of today’s neoliberal online academy, is an on-going, sometimes daunting challenge. At least some things never change: the same old rules about politeness, and being slow to take offence, still apply in cyberspace. Beyond rules, the ethics of the online academy call for the wisdom of humility, which superintends both the diligence of scrupulous politeness and attention to detail, and an imagination powered by love for both humanity and knowledge. This wisdom is needed in order to bridge the gap created by technology, even bigger than gaps created by physical distance and the written word, between us and those whom we address. It ensures our words are educational in all senses. Best daily practice for academics is to aspire to operate from this ethics in every communication, though since we are human and therefore not perfect, surely none of us could actually achieve to that level. Remembering that this wisdom exists makes us not only educators, but philosophers of education.

The EDG is valuable because it provides a space where emerging academics can: learn from each other about basic academic functions e.g. getting published and reviewing manuscripts; form online professional networks that help to overcome geographical or disciplinary isolation; collaboratively develop new ways of using online tools and protocols in academic work; and get to know other PESA people to a degree that otherwise would not have happened. It is probably the last of these outputs that will, over time, prove to be the most important to assure a flourishing future for the society of PESA, the journal EPAT and the discipline of philosophy of education itself, down under.