Eira TanseyDecided that effective immediately upon a request for a review of an academic manuscript, I will no longer be a manuscript reviewer for a fully paywalled journal unless I already have access to it through a professional association. I no longer work in academia, and so the gift economy of peer review already is difficult for me to justify in my current role, but the fact that I can no longer access journals due to institutional paywalls is all the more reason to withhold my labor.
Also: I fucking hate the tenor, style, language, and pseudo-authority of most academic writing. But the largest crime of most academic writing is that it's BORING. I'd rather offer to be a second pair of eyes for a friend writing an explosive blog post than something that might get a handful of citations on Google Scholar over ten years.
Harish Narayanan@TeamMidwest So, so boring.
@harish the longer I am outside of academia the less patience I have for it. I still barely have a grasp on "epistemic" and the thing that triggered this vent was an invitation to review something that had five different mentions of epistemic in the abstract alone. I just can't.
@TeamMidwest I’m glad you’re standing up and saying no.