Testo originale in italiano

The challenge posed by the special issue ‘Publishing after Progress’ of Culture Machine is both necessary and liberating. Is it possible to deconstruct, bypass, and finally overcome the forms of academic and scholarly evaluation as we have known them since at least the founding of the first modern scholarly journal in the second half of the seventeenth century? I have been asking myself the same question for twenty years. Of course, this is an extremely complex question: to touch the method of scientific evaluation is to question the foundations of the fragile academic edifice. But in the current situation of global imbalance in scientific production, where epistemic capital is concentrated firmly in the hands of the Anglophone West, such a shift can no longer be procrastinated.

This is why I accepted Rebekka Kiesewetter’s invitation to participate in this exciting open review experience. Engaging in an open review means, first of all, to give up much of our academic ego – a healthy exercise. It means abandoning the sacred peaks of objectivity behind which we hide false rituals such as ‘double-blind’ and other narratives we tell ourselves – lying – that constitute the guarantee of seriousness, rigor, and professionalism of our research work. I cannot say whether the ‘social distancing’ peer review model ever made sense, truly protecting and encouraging innovation and originality in research. Honestly, I doubt it. What is clear, however, is that today this model constitutes one of the main instruments for the preservation and perpetuation of the power of academic castes, which, for the most part, use peer review as a ‘surveillance and punishment’ tool.

Some will cry, ‘but only anonymity guarantees freedom of judgment!’ Such a lament reflects an unhealthy conception of science, not based on confrontation, but on denunciation and removal of arguments that are indigestible to the mainstream. Taking responsibility for one’s own ideas (and one’s own ‘judgments’) should be the only acceptable form of competition within an intellectual context. Do we really want to advance research? Let us challenge ourselves: as authors and as reviewers, as publishers and as editors. Obviously knowing that in an imperfect world there are no perfect solutions. And that rejecting a publication or receiving a rejection are part of an arduous, often painful, process of intellectual growth (for both sides!). But this process should be one that is dialectical, transparent, and renounces the mere unilateral exercise of power. Would it really be so terrible to turn a review into a negotiation?

This is why I asked the authors of the paper assigned to me to meet online after I sent them comments on their work. This resulted in an exciting (at least for me!) discussion of more than an hour, in which we interacted constructively and contributed to the improvement of the final paper. But above all, I learned a great deal about the Latin American open access (OA) scenario which is part of my research interests. In the end, it seemed to me that the real beneficiary of this exchange was more me than them! Face-to-face interaction with the authors we are evaluating, especially in certain cultural settings, can be a source of awkwardness or even embarrassment. In my case it was both instructive and revealing. At the videocall participated other members of the Redalyc research team, and this presence is something you can’t evaluate, and nonetheless is part of the ‘invisible web’ from which all scientific work emerges.