From the
Editors:
AMD Paper
Commentaries
Once upon a time, scientific knowledge was defined as that which
a scientific community viewed as meeting epistemic, social, and
ethical norms or criteria of reliable and valid knowledge.
The original purpose of scientific letters and journals was to
provide a means for members of the community to publish their
findings, express their perspectives on the findings, and foster
debate.
This is still true, but the one-way communications from authors
to readers that are the dominant form in most scientific journals
inhibit this process of feedback, critique, and debate among
scientific community members.
With the goal of fostering more dialogue within our scientific
community, we are launching a new feature of AMD called "AMD
Commentaries," which will give readers and authors opportunities to
have public conversations about scholarly issues. We invite
AMD readers to collaborate in the process of knowledge production
by submitting comments about published papers in AMD.
Possibilities for commentaries include:
- celebrating and augmenting scholarly discoveries,
- reanalyzing data and coding schemes,
- providing alternative interpretations of research
findings,
- critiquing the standards and values reflected in an article,
and
- identifying and encouraging new lines of inquiry or possible
future research
Those commentaries that AMD editors judge to advance scientific
knowledge will be published as an important scholarly contribution
that others might read and cite. We think that AMD
Commentaries will be a small but important step for advancing
scientific knowledge as it was originally conceived by our
scientific community.
To submit a comment for possible publication in AMD, readers can
click the "Submit Comment" button that is adjacent to each
published article online. Submitted comments will first be
filtered for inappropriate language and content. Then submissions
will go to the article's Editor, who will review the scholarly
content to ensure that its publication is worthwhile.
To launch the "AMD Commentaries" feature of AMD, the Editorial
Team will start inviting two- to-three-page commentaries from
recognized experts or teachers of doctoral courses on the
topic. These commentaries and subsequent responses from the
authors or other readers will be moderated by the AMD Editorial
Team. A "Commentary Alert" will notify subscribers about the
arrival of new commentaries on papers.