One of the journals is a familiar name to any who have followed some of the recent misconduct in the field of philosophy. The current debacle is also discussed over at philosophy professor Brian Leiter’s blog, where he writes: Hypatia, whose reputation was already damaged by the misconduct of its Associate Editors and its aftermath, is presumably finished at this point as a journal anyone will want on their CV. Further links available there: http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2018/10/sokal-hoax-redux.html#more.
That's a shame, since it's the namesake of Hypatia of Alexandria, who tragically became a martyr in the unending battle for knowledge over ignorance.
Increasingly, the academic humanities are a disaster area. Part of it is excessive politicization. Part of it is a sliding scale of academic standards based on authors' gender, ethnicity and political leanings. That's what afflicts Hypatia an avowedly "feminist" journal. (Ironically, Hypatia has long been known as one of the better feminist journals.) http://hypatiaphilosophy.org/ Part of it is that the humanities don't progress like the science, engineering and medicine do. What we get instead are endless new interpretations of what often are the same texts that were known a century ago. And part of it is an academic subculture in which nobody wins professional recognition for agreeing with their predecessors. One wins recognition by being different, by pulling down the sacred cows. (Especially if they are politically incorrect and disliked.)
Here is the full collection of the reader reports from this project. We had discussed an article of similar quality here at DI not long ago. Sadly, that article on fat-shamed squirrels was genuine.
I recently peer-reviewed an article that fit Heirophant’s description above, but was significantly flawed. These weren’t things I disagreed with, mind you, they were demonstrable and amateurish mistakes of historical fact. Fortunately, the journal had high standards, was well-established, and wasn’t driven by a business model to publish manuscripts regardless of quality. I think it was just a couple of months later that the manuscript appeared without any substantial changes in a journal created within the last decade by a for-profit publishing house. As long as people are rewarded with jobs based on volume of publications rather than quality, the quality of research will continue to spiral downward. Tying back into what you were writing above, H., candidates are increasingly hired based on with the volume of low-quality publications in low-quality journals used to ‘tick the box’ and justify the hire. What I’m relating is anecdotal, surely, but there it is.
