Critics of a controversial paper on forest fires and logging that was published this year by a graduate student at Oregon State University have finally presented their objections in a scholarly journal—which critics of those critics say was the proper venue from the start.

Several Oregon State professors had unsuccessfully pressed editors of the journal Science to suppress or delay publication of the original brief report by the student, Daniel C. Donato, and co-authors, triggering an uproar over academic freedom (The Chronicle, April 21). Mr. Donato examined the logging of trees burned by forest fires, and his study was among the first to document that such “salvage logging” may slow the rate of regrowth compared with burned tracts of forest that are not logged.

Critiques of Mr. Donato’s report will appear in the August 4 issue of Science, but electronic versions have been released early. Besides the one from the professors, Science is publishing a separate comment from a U.S. congressman, Rep. Brian N. Baird, a Washington State Democrat, who criticized statistical methods in Mr. Donato’s paper.

The debate hardly ends there. in a response published by Science, Mr. Donato and his colleagues write that the two critiques “provide no compelling evidence to refute our findings.” Indeed, the professors’ critique states, “We argue that their paper lacks adequate context and supporting information to be clearly interpreted by scientists, resource managers, policy makers, and the public.”