You know when people are being mean. They always say use a title. Tele­graph com­munit­ies ed Shane Rich­mond takes issue with Neil Thur­man’s — make that Mr Thurman’s — study on UGC, which is avail­able here. He calls it flawed. It isn’t flawed, of course.

It was done at a cer­tain point in time and things, under­stand­ably per­haps, have moved on. Call me a ped­ant, but I’d say a flaw implied a fail­ure in meth­od­o­logy not a fail­ure in time.

But Mr Rich­mond — maybe I should say Shane — has a point. Most of the work on this study was done between 2004–6. The dates are all scru­pu­lously recor­ded. The delay is not because Neil works at snails pace, it’s because the work was done for sub­mis­sion to an aca­demic journal, and aca­demic pub­lish­ing is a slow old busi­ness. If it had been com­mis­sioned by the Tele­graph, it would have been avail­able rather more swiftly.

Aca­dem­ics who want research careers need aca­demic pub­lic­a­tion in peer-reviewed journ­als. People will often talk to aca­dem­ics only on the under­stand­ing that the work is not pub­lished for some time — espe­cially where there are per­ceived issues of com­mer­cial rivalry.

And so one of the costs of thor­oughly checked, impec­cably con­duc­ted research is time. Things change. Mat­thew Gentzkow authored a fas­cin­at­ing (ok — for this non-economist — excru­ci­at­ing) study on pay walls that would have been a massive boon to the Wash­ing­ton Post if it had appeared a few years earlier than 2007, when it finally made it into the pres­ti­gi­ous Amer­ican Eco­nomic Review.

Does aca­demia need to speed up? Per­son­ally, I blog — and I like the peer review pro­cess of an open and con­tested online space — so I guess that makes me a cer­ti­fi­able speed freak. But life is not always lived in the now…