Peer review and insults

My last post concerned peer review and its importance in academic publishing, and how some dodgy journals that claim to be peer-reviewed will in fact publish anything  – literally, anything – without any review at all.  But as Will Oremus wrote in “This Is What Happens When No One Proofreads an Academic Paper” (Slate, 11 Nov 2014), even reputable journals sometimes don’t maintain a rigorous peer review process. How this snarky private comment got past the editors, reviewers, typesetters and publishers of Ethology, not to mention the authors of the article, is hard to understand. The lessons – employ a top-notch editor or proofreader, and never insult someone in digital media or print unless you’re happy for it to become public!