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Sadredin Moosavi's avatar

Sadly, the events described here do not surprise me as this type of political correctness and pandering toward particular narratives in the guise of sensitive to protected group feelings has been growing in science for at least the last 20 years. It has become so bad that reviewers self censor for fear of being perceived as bigoted, and perhaps excluded from publishing in the future, or of causing unintended offense. I see this same thing going on in funding review panels as well.

The irony is that the editor's decision to modify a review in this fashion is actually a form of academic fraud and should be called out as such in the same way that modifying one's figures or dropping inconvenience data points constitutes academic misconduct. It appears the only solution to this bias is for reviewers to send the original text of the reviews to the authors...an action that negates any anonymity the review process holds. Personally, I have no problem with this. All reviews should have the reviewers names attached and be published with the article in question as a form of transparency. Keep the editors and journals honest since they clearly cannot be trusted.

The last point is the existence of an apparently secret APA manual being used to drive censorship. Secret rules are foolish as people inherently will violate rules they don't exist...but more importantly, the existence of secret rules is actually cover for individual judgement and malice as no one can then compare the rule to the action to see if the rule is sound and being applied fairly and uniformly. It sounds like this journal should be considered non-academic at this point and be publicly disregarded by the serious academic community. Those who continue to publish in it should similarly have such works excluded from citation as untrustworthy writings that have not undergone proper peer review.

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C. Scala's avatar

Holy shit. I know that this kind of bias and authoritarianism pervade many fields, but this is the first time I've encountered unsanctioned redaction of peer reviews. Sadly, if this piece hadn't described the helpful editor as a woman, I would've guessed it. It seems that, when it comes to eliminating "harm" in the academy, a woman's work is never done. And I say this as an old, cranky woman.

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