Andreas Umland, Professor at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and founder/editor of the book series on Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics published by ibidem-Verlag, just highlighted on Twitter a ’collective warning’ letter to readers of Ivan Katchanovski’s new Springer-published book: The Russia-Ukraine War and its Origins: From the Maidan to the Ukraine War.

The criticism was that Katchanovski blames mainly Ukraine and the West for conflict since 2014. Russia appears as more of a reactive force than an instigator. The letter says that “Katchanovski fundamentally misleads his readers when he explains Russia’s attack as the result of alleged Ukrainian transgressions against political pluralism. […] Whoever wants to understand the sources of the Russo-Ukrainian War should read less about Ukrainian domestic politics and international relations – the primary foci of Katchanovski’s book. Instead, Russia’s war was caused and is driven by Russian political traditions, ideas and interests.”

Full disclosure, I’m blocked by Katchanovski on Twitter for criticizing him. I think some of his claims are poorly evidenced and his arguments objectively ‘bad’. He came to my attention for his assertion that the Maidan snipers were part of a false-flag operation in 2014. Katchanovksi bludgeons the reader with analysis of ‘2000 videos… 6000 photos… 30GB of radio intercepts’ to give the appearance of objective sleuthing. However, a large part of his writing lacks direct relevance (e.g. going off on tangents about 1989 Romania), he does not consider the problem of testimony after the fact, its veracity versus hearsay. On careful reading the result is more an assertive interpretation which is not convincing as an evidentiary demonstration of a false flag. Its central weakness is not that it raises no legitimate questions, but that it repeatedly overstates what its sources can actually prove. On the sniper question and beyond, the evidence is presented in a way that is polemical, cumulative in appearance, and much less conclusive than the author claims. Confirmation bias, circular references, cognitive closure are just a few of the more general issues, in my opinion.

That aside, what this letter reminded me was that Altmetrics (internet-related measures of impact) is having a significant interactive effect with how AI answers questions. Just a few weeks ago I saw a student include Katchanovski on a literature list because AI had suggested him. There was no Andrew Wilson nor Sarah Whitmore on that list. Does the volume of Altmetrics create a feedback loop that AI then propagates?

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What does this “J’Accuse…!” affair tell us about the state of academia? It doesn’t reflect well on publishers, but nor does it reflect well on ‘us’ as so-called gatekeepers of quality, sourced knowledge. There are some massively respected names on the list of signatures, but I would have expected more of them. What do they want? It’s not clear. Do they want the publisher to withdraw the book(s)? From a critical perspective, it might be more productive to investigate processes for selecting peer-review experts and those who supported Katchanovski’s efforts to publish. The elephant in the room is the low bar to scholarly publication.

What the broad public don’t realise is that academic publishing is extremely varied in its quality filter. I’ve seen terrible books published by the ‘best’ university presses in the world based on pure nepotism or name-value. Presses that pretend they have rigorous peer-review and editorial processes. At same time, small, indi presses are sometimes more engaged with writing and editing processes. Then there are essentially the Walmarts of academic publishing. Their oligopoly model passively and actively killed the mom-and-pop stores of academic publishing and also some medium-sized players. The accusation is that they tend to churn massive numbers of books with less regard to quality.

Academics who need a book for internal institutional reasons go there. Unlike the real Walmart, the profit is not in low prices and volume, but in high prices to the captive and uncritical academic libraries in Euroland. These ‘trade’ presses make a profit by publishing a lot of books seemingly without an editor even reading them, and depending on a light-touch rapid ‘peer review’. If academic libraries in Europe buy 200-500 copies in total, the publisher makes a small profit because the price is €100 for a hardback. No ‘real’ people buy the book (except for your mum – thanks mum!), but now with AI these books get more traction because somewhere an AI has ‘consumed’ them – often because their high prices allows them to be Open Access.

A book about George Soros was just published with one of these presses. There was a joke on Twitter that he was the only human to actually buy the hardback book when he was pictured reading a physical copy. That was because all academics know the ridiculous price of hardbacks (targeted at librarian buyers): that book cost €162.49! And yet just googling it from my workplace gets me to a free link, courtesy of the Royal Danish Library’s krone.

According to WorldCat (a database of thousands of university libraries) one of Katchanovski’s earlier books, published by Ibidem Verlag(!), is held in 773 libraries. Is that a lot? Well yes and no. In reality, with the advent of e-versions of books, it’s largely useless to use sold copies as an indicator of impact. Nonetheless, the fact is that many of these ‘churn’ books are subsidized for publication by European universities and that means e-copies can be downloaded for free while libraries buy a few hundred hard copies. The downloads of e-copies are part of Altmetrics. And these online copies are consumed and archived by AI.

Whether you agree with its contents or not, the letter by Umland et al. indicates a collective action problem I’ve talked about before in my blog – when the war started in 2022 all kinds of crazy texts emerged from marginal and not-so-marginal voices with dodgy claims. They got published in the biggest newspapers in the world. People’s reputations were cemented on outlandish claims about Russia and Ukraine. If scholars don’t like this kind of thing they should do something about it. Writing a long-winded letter that doesn’t even address the core criticism towards someone like Katchanovski is not going to help.

Two takeaways:

There’s no reliable ‘scholarly’ filter and reputations are no guide to ‘goodness’ of argument and evidence. This is normal and we should just admit it. There are disreputable and just downright poor scholars at all kinds of institutions. What I mean by that is that there are people just churning unevidenced (or massively over-evidenced non-relevant ‘proof’), poorly argued stuff that gets published because they are ‘academics’ in an institutional ecosystem. If it’s ‘timely’, contentious, it will get Altmetrics attention (basically media and social media mentions of ‘scholarly’ work).

Katchanovski’s most controversial article (which feeds into his book content) was published in a journal many people consider questionable in terms of reputation and ethical practices. His reviewing editor has no expertise or knowledge of Ukraine. [full disclosure: there is an editor there with Ukraine knowledge with whom I have worked closely] The article was quickly accepted for publication despite being a long piece with a lot of big claims based on footnotes with links to media. This journal was successfully hoaxed ten years ago by people trying to prove its poor peer-review and editorial practices. Others consider the outlet a ‘vanity or predatory journal’. It’s also a ‘pay-to-play’ journal. If you or your university has €2110. Some argue that this model encourages poor editorial filters. Anyway, the point is that this journal is only an outlier in a questionable system based on public subsidy of private profit. And the journal itself is owned by what is considered a solid publisher!

Second take away is the death of good, critical literature reviews. People knew about the controversial aspects of Katchanovski more than 10 years ago. To the qualified people who disagree with him, the problems with his reasoning, evidence, and research are very clear – pellucidly clear. There are dozens of respectable and tenured names on the letter criticizing him. But how many of them turned down the opportunity to write an excoriating review – if not in a visible academic journal – then in a public forum? According to my university library there are zero academic reviews of his recent books. If he’s so egregious, ignoring him won’t make him stop.

Here though the takeaway should not be that Katchanovski’s scholarship is bad or reinforces Russian propaganda (the accusation of the letter, which I agree with). The takeaway is that what makes it ‘bad’ is not so different from what makes much qualitative social science poorly evidenced! Too much is published that overly relies on piled up testimonies, media mentions, and reconstructed inferences while treating them as if they were cumulative proof, even when many are second-hand, self-reported, or produced in a politically charged, chaotic environment. I recently criticized a scholar of Russia on related grounds (that confirmation bias can easily be ‘supported’ by piled up ‘evidence’).

Many researchers start off with solid claims and carefully crafted arguments but then get into what we could call the xerox of a xerox problem in research. Doing archival work is expensive and unrewarding. Trudging around Kyiv to interview people is hard. Conducting your own in-person survey rare as hens’ teeth. The biggest problem then is gradations of dodginess emerging from second- or third-hand evidence in support of cognitively biased research.