I don't know most of the people involved; but I know some, and others are friends of friends. No particular alarm bells are ringing. (Francesca Minerva's name has been mentioned. I'm not bessie mates with her, but I do know her professionally; she's whip-smart, as well as being a nice person. On the other hand, she does have form when it comes to pressing for anonymity, and I articulated my concerns about her position at the other place... crikey. Five years ago.)
I also know, and know of, a fair number of people who have faced appalling treatment for holding certain intellectual positions or advancing particular arguments. Sometimes, those are positions and arguments that appear in peer-reviewed journals; I would be curious to know how much of the treatment comes from people who've read carefully the peer-reviewed papers about which they're protesting, as opposed to people who are outraged by proxy. (Francesca wrote what I jokingly call The Paper Of Which We Do Not Speak and faced all kinds of abuse for it - much of it, I think, by proxy, after the Daily Mail and then Glenn Beck got hold of it.) Sometimes they aren't positions articulated in journals; several academics that I know and respect have found themselves attacked for what seems to me to be the crime of being insufficiently woke on questions of gender and the law.
Either way, more often than not, as far as I can see, this treatment has come not from universities, but from civil - no: uncivil - society. Universities have, at least sometimes, done the right thing in sticking up for academics. This matters, because people receiving abuse for their positions are obviously people who have not been silenced and who - presumably - count as evidence against the case for anonymity. Still, I can see how people might think that anonymity would be desirable, at least sometimes. And there are anecdotes about people's academic careers suffering because of their intellectual commitments.
And yet I'm unconvinced by this journal, and for a number of reasons.
One has to do with what may be taken to be an important principle of academia: that we're all engaged disinterestedly in the pursuit of truth, and, as such, if an argument is good, then it's good. If a position can be established, we should just accept it. That being the case, there should be no need for anonymity, because what appears in print is not about the author: it's the product of a disinterested line of inquiry, which takes us where it takes us. There's no need to get angry and upset, because things are as they are: the author is a conduit for truth, and the argument is a step on that path. For sure, there'll be people who do get angry and upset; but should we be writing the norms of academic practice to accommodate them? Unlikely. One wouldn't re-write the norms of football just because some people keep breaking the offside rule.
But maybe, the response'll go, this picture is idealistic at best - and it may be Platonic nonsense. Such disinterest rarely (if ever) obtains, and it may be impossible. The principle may be a noble fiction, and maybe we should aspire to disinterest; but it is a fiction nonetheless. Academics do have positions and biases just as everyone does, and it's impossible to separate the personal from the professional, however hard we try. So maybe academics should be able to protect themselves. Except that, if that is true, then there is a case to be made for identifiability, just so that ideas (and the people who promote them) can be properly scrutinised. (Properly scrutinised, mark. This is not a call for, or defence of, harassment.) And if we're all honest about our limits and biases, and if the guiding assumption is that people are working in good faith even when they're committing errors, then nobody needs to worry. Again: some people may break the rule about assuming good faith, but they're the ones who've deviated from academic standards, and we don't need to strive to accommodate them.
This point could be framed as, or is at least related related to, an integrity issue: as Les Green has commented,
if someone wants to present in academic dress an ‘argument’ that homosexuality is an ‘intrinsic moral disorder’, or that the gender pay-gap expresses women’s ‘choices’, I think it would be decent of them to actually own the argument.I think that that's quite powerful - though there may be unusual cases where we'd make an exception (and that journals should be able to deal with ad hoc). That said, the people I mentioned above whom I know to have been at the receiving end of abuse have been perfectly willing to own their positions. And abuse doesn't always get attracted to bad positions anyway: those same people seem to be attracting calumny not because of what they say (which is nuanced and thoughtful) but simply because they say it.
Here's another kind of consideration. Who will submit to an anonymised journal?
For better or worse, academics in the UK live in REF world. One of the measures by which we're assessed - and one of the sticks with which we're beaten - is the number and quality of our publications over a given period. There are lots of problems with the REF, and with the way its run; but let's be charitable to the principle of the thing - that it's a way to ensure quality and rigour in academic work - and also allow that it's run in a way that at least stands half a chance of meeting the principle. That being the case, academics will have an interest in being able to claim their best work as their own. Actually, they'll have an interest in claiming all but their worst work as their own. Anything they can't claim to be REFable would be, on that basis, a waste of time. That would include anonymised work. So there must be a heck of a good reason to do it. Working the other way, anyone who wants to use papers published anonymously for academic recognition would have to de-anonymise themselves. If there is a concern that people's careers may be harmed because of their controversial claims, then that's obviously not going to be an attractive option. Those researchers who do publish anonymously, by the same token, will be harming their own careers - indirectly - by spending time and effort on a paper for which they can't take any credit.
Maybe there'll be one or two people who have a burning sense of justice, and spend time on a superbly-argued piece for which they're going to get no public credit. Maybe they'll want for their paper to have passed peer-review as a badge of honour, from which they can draw private satisfaction. But is that really enough to sustain a whole journal? And for more than two issues?
And a new journal? They could, if they really wanted to, get a throwaway email address and publish pseudonymously in an extant journal. Who'd know?
Moreover, since I suspect that a lot of the pressure on academics to keep silent comes not from the academy, but from uncivil society, and that a lot of it is based not on particular papers but on public engagement outside of the journals (on twitter, speaking at conferences, speaking at public events, though the media, etc), it's not obvious that an anonymous journal is going to solve the problem.
So who would submit a paper? Why? I'm struggling to come up with an answer here, except perhaps that getting a paper past peer-review and into a journal would then allow researchers to cite it - that is, themselves - approvingly. That, of course, simply means that any paper that cites an anonymous paper is immediately going to attract the suspicion that its author is self-citing. And this is possible by pseudonymous publication already.
On top of that, I'm not sure that maintaining anonymity'd be possible. If an academic has a paper that he thinks he could only publish anonymously, my hunch is that everyone in his circle'd know roughly what his commitments were, and so he'd already be facing whatever ostracism he fears, anonymous paper or no. Working the other way, a lot of papers are honed through being given a dry-run at conferences and in seminars. Their content'll be no secret; and a paper that hasn't been through that process is more likely to be flawed because it won't have been chewed over by the time it's submitted. Academics are a chatty bunch, and enjoy a bit of scandal. If someone is playing with a wicked thought, it'll be an open secret sooner or later.
Relatedly, I wonder who decides whether a paper is controversial to begin with. Suppose I submit a paper to a journal and it's knocked back; Reviewer 2 has misunderstood what I'm up to. This sort of thing happens. I, being slightly touchy, decide that the problem is not a misunderstanding (or a failure of argument or an unclarity on my part); rather, it's evidence that my Controversial Opinion is being suppressed, or that the editors are cowards, or something of the like. So I send it to this new journal. But suppose that the problem is simply that my argument is poor. Is there a risk that the editorial process is going to end up swamped with not-even-publishable-in-Spiked conspirabollocks? There must be a chance of that. And a conspirabollicist whose paper is rejected from a peer-reviewed academic journal that promises anonymity is unlikely to draw from that the lesson that his paper is crap: he'll simply insist that he's being suppressed even there.
It seems to me that editors may be faced with a horrible dilemma. Either they can go down the Medical Hypotheses route, and publish more or less anything that gets submitted so long as it's not actionable - in which case the journal will quickly become a laughing-stock and a blot on the CV of the decent people who remain on its editorial board - or they can insist on the very highest standards of probity in order to fend off any possible dismissal - in which case, they risk being overwhelmed by the amount of work required to separate good and important work from garbage. Neither horn of that dilemma is going to bode well for the journal. (Even Medical Hypotheses has modified its anarchism; in passing, I note that its impact factor is in the ballpark of that in highly-respected humanities journals. That's still not high.)
It is fashionable in some circles, both on the left and the right, to decry attacks on academic freedom originating from one's political opponents. Superficially, one can see why. Only this week, students have succeeded - I use that term somewhat tentatively - in forcing Jenni Murray to withdraw from a talk at Oxford. The tabloids, encouraged by certain MPs, meanwhile, have been looking for academics who're too left-wing or pro-European. But it is important to remember that, despite all that, academic free speech is really not under threat. There may be notable exceptions, of course: but they are exceptions. Similarly, we should be worried about what is happening in Hungary, Poland, and Turkey. But Hungary, Poland, and Turkey are not the world, and their governments haven't succeeded yet. And, anyway, an anonymous journal wouldn't make those problems go away, because a government could exert pressure on it just as easily as on individual academics.
So even if there is a problem with academic freedom being curtailed, I'm not sure that it's a big problem (at least in the Anglosphere). Is that complacent? Maybe. But if it is, it's not obvious that anonymity is the correct response, or that a journal of anonymous papers would solve the problem anyway.
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