Slow down

To go always faster, always farther. Similar injunctions are regularly heard, and one knows the principle of competition that grounds them: even when taking part of the leaders, one has to fight against oneself to excel. Here stands the quality of the real “winners”. Such a motive would go back from the sources of liberalism and many devices of the new public management so that they pervert areas of work that were still spared, like the scientific world to take a totally random example.

Here we are in the office of an academic publisher, where such a headlong rush seems to be incarnate in the furniture itself. The taxonomy clearly distinguishes what is “urgent” from what is “very urgent”, from what is “very very urgent”. This is a nice way to qualify the requirements of a schedule that is always more tied to manage the flux of manuscripts. Nothing new after all: the race for priority is at the root of the scientific enterprise since its beginnings in the seventieth century. Hence the obsession for publishing faster and higher, so that some charge headlong, even if it means to bypass the necessary conditions. Conversely, others urge to slow down. On the other hand, too few seriously consider the category “too late”. A radical option and yet salutary to be pondered over… and to be inscribed into infrastructures to make visible and archive this part of the scientific work.