Are Academics Prostitutes

A blog post from AcademicProductivity trundled across my reader this morning in which the blogpoints to a paper in which the author claims that academicsare prostitutes because they modify their papers in response to thedemands of reviewers. I got a sense frisson when I read the blog post andsome of the text that is quoted there from the paper, but then I read thecomments to the blog post, and they are very good at, if you like, pointingout that the paper is a bit weak in it's premise. OK, so I didn't read thepaper, but it seems to presuppose that all editorial boards work in the sameway and all reviewers and equally mendacious. Academic publishing is anactivity of a community and the reviewing process, whatever it's faults, ispart of that conversation. To point out the faults in such a way as thispaper does seems like complaining about norms that are accepted and areperhaps not actually as bad as initially laid out.