[Article] Cheshire at it again: "Palaeographic Instruction for the Ischia Manuscript"

[pfeaster]

I would be curious as to how the "Academia Letters" process of peer-review works in practice. This is not a normal journal, but rather a spin-off of the academia.edu website. So it may be misleading to present it as being in a peer-reviewed journal.

Here's an invitation I received from Academia Letters to review a different article, which gives some sense of the gauntlet submissions need to pass through in order to be accepted:

Dear Patrick,

We reach out to members of the community to see if they’re able and qualified to peer review submissions based on their activity on the site.

We'd like to invite you to review the below submission for publication in Academia Letters, a new open access publishing initiative by Academia.edu.

[Title and details of submission given here]

You've written on related topics in [...], so we think you'd be qualified to review this submission.

As we aim to enable lightning fast publication, reviews for this article are open for the next five calendar days. Positive reviews will be publicly visible, along with the reviewer's name. Critical reviews will be shared anonymously with just the author.

If you're unable or not interested in reviewing this article, ignore this email.

The names and comments of four peer reviewers of the Cheshire paper can be viewed on the same page where the paper itself is hosted.  Only one reviewer, with a background in computational linguistics, has taken the time to write more than just a few lines.  He observes that Cheshire's "2019 paper sounds too certain of its conclusions to be scientifically valid (this may be due to the writing style of the author), this [new] text may be the opportunity to provide objective proof for whatever is stated in the original article."  He recommends it for publication but urges that it be expanded with a validation protocol "to provide proof that the translation given is indeed the correct one."  The other three reviews are far shorter but were written by a linguist in Ukraine; a "language enthusiast" in Indonesia; and a "semi-retired business executive" who co-authored the paper previously discussed You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..  I'll quote the shortest of the three reviews in full as an example (ellipsis in original): "This paper questioned and argued the incompatibility of the creation of letter to represent our languages... This paper is good reading and gives us new prespective."