Read on Twitter
Terrible response. What a debacle. I need a drink to rethink my life choices. Taken at face value (which I am skeptical of doing), it seems damning for journal peer review as a concept. 1/ https://twitter.com/PsychScience/status/1275162883928752128
Bauer says that the review process was sound, but incomplete. That they don't offer opinions, but this paper sucks. That they support academic freedom, but they should have rejected it for being racist. This is the morass of both sidesism that our leading journal has sunk into 2/
Bauer "vigorously defend the editorial process" but notes they failed at evaluating validity, reliability, claims, implications, generalizability. Somehow Bauer places these concerns under the umbrella term of 'sensitivity' as opposed to the more familiar 'basic peer-review' 3/
Extraordinarily, Bauer states the reviewers pointed out all the flaws that came up post-publication, then in the next sentence stated they published anyway b/c "throughout the process of review and response to review, the authors defended the measures." 4/
Bauer states the reviewers were positive. In spite of raising all the concerns. And one was a stats expert. And somehow, all this positivity turned into 3! rounds of revision that eventually involved EIC Lindsay. I'm not an editor at PsychSci, but that's not how it goes for me 5/
And the solution- recruit perspective pieces to start a debate. Giving racist papers more oxygen. Oddly, Bauer suggests that if they had seen a perspective, maybe they'd have retroactively rejected it after all. B/c six! people weren't enough to see what a dumpster fire it was!
