FAST principles for preprint feedback

There has been strong interest in preprint commenting and review activities in recent years. Public preprint feedback can bring benefits to authors, readers and others in scholarly communication, however, the level of public commenting on preprints is still low. This is likely due to cultural barriers, such as fear by authors that criticisms on their paper will bias readers, editors and evaluators, and concerns by commenters that posting a public critique on a preprint by a more senior colleague may lead to retribution. In order to help address these cultural barriers and foster positive and constructive participation in public preprint feedback, we have developed a set of 14 principles for creating, responding to, and interpreting preprint feedback. The principles are clustered around four broad themes: Focused, Appropriate, Specific, Transparent (FAST). We describe each of the FAST principles and designate which actors (authors, reviewers and the community) each of the principles applies to. We discuss the possible implementation of the FAST principles by different stakeholders in science communication, and explore what opportunities and challenges lie ahead in the path towards a thriving preprint feedback ecosystem.

The Strategy of Improving Complaint Management in Surakarta City Toward Society 5.0-Based Public Service

The organization of public service is not free of public critique. The management of complaint is a factor that can improve public service quality. Complaining is important because it is the public’s expression that can result from public dissatisfaction with a product or a service. Moreover, to deal with Society 5.0 era, the government should provide a system to solve the problem. Therefore, this research aims to discuss the strategies taken by Surakarta City Government in managing complaint in Surakarta City toward a society 5.0-based public service. This research employed a qualitative research method. Technique of analysis used in this study was content analysis technique obtained through literature review. Based on the result of literature review, it can be seen that some strategies have been taken by Surakarta City Government, including, among others: improving the quality of human resource constituting public apparatuses; making policy; and providing complaining media.

Motivation, Satisfaction, and Risks of Operational Forces and Helpers Regarding the 2021 and 2013 Flood Operations in Germany

Pluvial floods claimed more than 180 lives in Germany in July 2021, when a large and slow-moving storm system affected Germany and many neighbouring countries. The death tolls and damages were the highest since 1962 in Germany, and soon after, the crisis management was under public critique. This study has undertaken an online survey to understand crisis management better and identify lessons to learn. It has received a positive interest among operational relief forces and other helpers (n = 2264). The findings reveal an overall satisfaction with the operation in general as well as personal lessons learned. It also reveals shortcomings in many areas, ranging from information distribution, coordination, parallel ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, infrastructure resilience, and other factors. Just as well, areas for improvement of the crisis management system are suggested by the respondents. Cooperation and support by the affected population are perceived as positive. This helps to inform other areas of research that are necessary, such as studies on the perception by the affected people. The gaps in assessments of operational forces and some methodological constraints are discussed to advance future follow-up studies.

When Words become too Violent: Silence as a Form of Nonviolent Resistance in the Book of Jeremiah

Throughout the Book of Jeremiah, the prophet is depicted as a victim of verbal and physical violence to which he often responds with fierce imprecations. My study articulates a basic framework in which these troubling passages can be understood and used responsibly by contemporary readers (“Speech as a Response to Violence”) but then argues that Jeremiah’s prayer in Jer 18 violates the balance and boundaries of this framework (“Speech as a Response too Violent”). Inasmuch as this discussion reveals the problems and potential dangers of speech, I offer a reading of Jer 15–16, 26, and 28 that highlights the prophet’s silence as an alternative response to violence. This silence, I argue, is not a form of submissive suffering but an act of public critique and strategic disengagement. Jeremiah’s silence speaks powerfully and peacefully in his own violent context and, by extension, may speak so also in ours.

Imprimatur as Adversary: Press freedom and colonial governance in India, 1780–1823

Examining cases of libel between 1780 and 1823, this article analyses how the theory and practice of press regulation and governmentality was initially articulated in colonial India, embodied in everyday transactions between the newly invented East India Company state and an emerging newspaper press. While Company officials recognized that scrutiny by a free press was central to establishing their fairly new claims to just governance and public legitimacy, they feared that public critique would destabilize the very sovereign authority that they sought to establish. Concerned with appearing arbitrary, officials developed strategies through which they could demand obedience without necessarily predicating it on censorship. Journalists derived much of their negotiating power from the early colonial state's vulnerability to public scrutiny, but they also knew that the state possessed extensive control over their livelihood. Cognizant of the power and constraints of colonial governmentality at this juncture, they produced their own mechanisms of permissible intransigence. This uneasy equilibrium generated the questions explored in this article: What rights of comment and critique practically accrued to newspapers? What was the legal authority of executive regulations censoring newspapers and how far were these enforceable? Why, in practice, did punishments remain strikingly similar across periods with and without formal censorship? The cases between 1780 and 1823 not only reveal the historical negotiations that structured this foundational—though somewhat marginalized—period of India's press history, but also explain the strategic shifts that followed as, in 1823, the fulcrum of crime and punishment turned away from press censorship and towards press licensing.

The opportunism of populists and the defense of constitutional liberalism

Liberal constitutionalism is under attack from a new breed of autocrats broadly classified as populist. These populists understand the weaknesses of constitutional liberalism and attack their opponents with criticisms that take advantage of internal weaknesses of the theory. But a closer analysis of theoretical framework used by populists to substitute for constitutional liberalism reveals that they are not really committed to populism in any serious sense. Instead, they have abandoned liberalism in the quest for raw power. Focusing on Viktor Orbán of Hungary and his chief ideologist András Lánczi, this article shows how their public critique of liberalism has attempted to wrong-foot their critics and how their recipe for gaining and wielding political power is only populist to the extent that these leaders are determined to (and often succeed in) winning elections. By peeling back the cover of populist ideology to look at the theories of legitimation under which they rule, however, we can see that the new breed of autocrats aims at primarily constitutional deconstruction through the concentration of political power in one leader. This sort of challenge to liberal constitutionalism is easily countered.

Johan Heyns and critique in the Dutch Reformed Church against apartheid: The moderator a prophet?

Johan Heyns was the moderator of the General Synod of the Dutch Reformed Church from 1986 to 1990. This church was known as a moral and theological supporter of apartheid until the 1980s. In 1980 Heyns was, for the first time, involved in public critique against the pro-apartheid stance of his church. He took an influential part in writing a new document that criticised apartheid and was accepted by the General Synod of 1986. Heyns was elected as moderator or chairman of this synod. The years from 1986 to 1990 became the busiest of his life. He became the leader in his church’s defence of the new document Church and Society in and beyond South Africa. In order to get back into the World Alliance of Reformed Churches and to stay on in the Reformed Ecumenical Synod, the Dutch Reformed Church decided to depart from its apartheid ways. Heyns’ message on apartheid was shaped by his Reformed approach to life, in which he chose reform as the method for change.

“[P]lain and passive fortitude”: Stoicism and Spaces of Dissent in Sejanus

In Ben Jonson's Sejanus, performed at court in the first year of King James’ reign in 1603, Arruntius seemingly figures as “Jonson's spokesperson.” While lauding the moral responsibility of Arruntius, some critics have portrayed the Senator as a passive Stoic whose “only outlet is speech.” For a poet who emphasizes the moral and didactic responsibility of authorship, why, then, does his spokesman inhabit a peripheral space in criticism? Critical interpretation of Arruntius depends on the editorial decision to render many of Arruntius’ lines as asides or as public critique, and this editorial crux is examined vis-à-vis early modern attitudes toward public engagement. I argue that the play negotiates the tensions between the patient Neostoicism of Justus Lipsius and politically active Senecan Stoicism. Arruntius navigates those tensions through Ciceronian ideals of friendship, which provide an alternative to the rampant flattery and tyranny at Tiberius’ court. I show that the play responds to larger political anxieties concerning James I's recent ascension to the throne, and that interpreting early modern Stoicism as entirely passive disregards the complex discourse of friendship that permeates the period.