It’s time to stand up to the academic publishing industry

26 Comments

The author states that in other industries experts are paid $1,500, but fails to give even one example. Why guarantee an academic reviewer a flat rate of $500 an hour? Where is the value? Why are students paying for academic review? Shouldn’t that be a part of the tuition? If the author could please,please direct me to the industry that will pay me $1,500.00 an hour to review an academic paper, I would be forever grateful. You should see my student loan debt for law school. Did I pick the wrong industry or what? I want the $1,500.00 an hour job. Thanks in advance.

Seriously, how can anyone take Ms. MacDonald seriously when she opens with outrageous, even comical, unsupported facts?

We cut the examples of the types of consultants who make big money – acccountants, lawyers – due to word count, but at one point had that in there. We are also suggesting $500/review, not per hour.
We realize this is perhaps unrealistic, but we are trying to draw attention to the larger issue at hand – that of publishers becoming rich off of free labour. It’s a ridiculous situation.

J.L. Cook, we are certainly not asking that students pay for peer review, but we are suggesting that perhaps academic publishers (not textbook publishers) should. I also want to note that we are not advocating that academics themselves receive direct payment from publishers, rather we are arguing that funds raised from peer review services be used to support research activities. In our article, we state “And what if the funds raised were used to help subsidize the costs of research and of building an open access system – run not by for-profit companies, but by our postsecondary institutions?” We also say, “[Funds] could then be put back into the researcher’s own research fund, administered by the universities they work for.” In other words, we are advocating that these funds go back to our universities so that they can be used to fund more research. The purpose of our article is not to find a way to increase academic salaries. We are instead suggesting that academic institutions charge publishers for peer review services as a way to get publishers to contribute to the production of the products that they sell.

Nobody would pay academics for peer review. Here are my own views on this. https://forbetterscience.com/2017/08/24/the-costs-of-knowledge-scientists-want-their-cut-on-the-scam/

In my view, the disruptive potential of Open Access remains underappreciated, as it represents a paradigm shift away from the status quo in the publishing market: http://openscience.com/open-access-journals-rather-than-reviewer-fees-are-likely-instrumental-for-changing-power-relations-in-the-publishing-industry/.

I agree that we are generating content and doing other work for an industry that has an absurd profit margin. It’s a shame when the big players buy out all the nice society journals and flog them for profits, but $500/review would just result in unscrupulous people haphazardly reviewing as many papers as they can, among other scams.

This is all well and good, but until senior academics, the ones who make the decisions about hiring, tenure, and grants, start rewarding publication outside the top journals of our fields (which like it or not are the titles owned by corporations), it’s still career suicide to reject the old publishing model.

This is unfortunate but true: the younger researchers who are mostly likely to precipitate change are unable to do so, because pursuing that path will simply make employment that much harder. It’s nice to think we can play the game as a means to an end then change it from the inside, but this is probably unlikely. If you find success in this system there is little incentive to change it or deviate from its parameters and metrics of success.

We all know IF etc. are bogus, but the bean counters need simple metrics to judge researchers by. My only suggestion is not to get too hung up on these aspects of research.

Completely agree with you both. We are trying to start the conversation at our instutituion about tenure committees juding at the article, not the journal, level.

A well-meaning article that is fundamentally flawed, alas.

To start with, publishers are not dependent upon the quality of their peer-review process; they are dependent upon the impact factor of their journals. The latter metric measures just about nothing and certainly quality, but researchers, as authors, have become dependent upon this metric as they are routinely evaluated by their institutions and research funders by where they publish rather than what they publish. A recent article in Frontiers ( https://doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00037) by Bjoern Brembs even demonstrates that prestigious journals struggle to reach average reliability! And the peer review process at nature is carried out by a bunch of salaried, recent, Ph. D’s, rather than the best experts in the many fields that this publication covers.

The second problem has to do with the proposed solution. It might be worthwhile to investigate whether there might not be a competitive advantage in paying for reviewers for publishers. After all, the dearth of reviewers is one of the problems publishers claim that they are facing. Why not offer money to reviewers as presses do for monographs? And they could easily pass on the cost to the buying parties (libraries). if an average article costs $5,000.00 as has been mentioned in a number of forums, adding $500.00 (10%) is a detail quickly absorbed by “customers” (i.e. libraries). And if they could thus attract the “best” reviewers, they could undercut the peer review process of competing publishers. In the plogical perspective flowing from the article here, where appeal of journals is (wrongly, to repeat myself) connected to the “quality” of their peer review, this should translate into a strong argument in favour of the publisher paying his/her reviewers. In other words, the very logic proposed in the article should lead to the conclusion that publishers should have tried this strategy a long time ago.

The problem with the availability of peer reviewers is not money. Most scholars would not feel the need to try picking an occasional $500.00 for a peer review (especially if their salaries are viewed as not inconsequential, as is the case within the article). Scholars would do peer review far more readily if they could get symbolic capital credit for doing so, and this is amply proved by the F1000 Research device that has been set up by Vitek Tracz (https://f1000research.com/). I recommend listening to Tracz’ lectures that are available on YouTube to understand how his ideas work out (among several, I recommend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccbqcPmloSc and the older (2015) conference in Paris: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQfKdTDqjmI).

The suggestion that publishers might try to raise their subscription prices, but governments could put a freeze on raising subscription prices is simply (and terribly) naive. For one thing, subscription prices have been rising relentlessly since the late ’70s, i.e. nearly 50 years ago, and complaints have been expressed vigorously for decades, in particular by library associations. Has this led governments to do what the authors propose here? Of course not. In fact, international rules of trade would probably make such a move highly problematic if not impossible.

So, what to do? (and I do not mean here to echo Lenin’s quote of Kautsky). The solution hinges in my opinion on looking where the money for the publishing system comes from: libraries, and, increasingly, research funders (with APC payments in particular). Rather than focusing their acquisition and APC budgets on publishers, libraries and funders, allied with university presses and learned societies, should work together to develop platforms where scholars could publish. Peer review would be part of the process. Journals could continue to exist, but as organs of affinity scholarly groups, not as instruments of sales, and would fit inside the new platforms. Universities and Funders would reorganize their evaluation processes in such a way as to exclude the impact factor (and the H-factor, and any such metric) in favour of actual evaluation of the work done and published. With a system such as F1000 Research, now being adopted by Wellcome Research in the UK, the peer reviewing process is becoming part of the archive and articles, rather than being fixed forever, are exhibiting successive versions resulting from the on-going, open, peer reviews. Look, for example, at the work led by Jon Tennant in F1000 Research. It actually deals with … peer review.

why stop there – why not demand compensation for authors as well as reviewers?

It’s true – though I think most researchers are quite happy to share the results of their work, while the peer reviewing feels more like an additional pro-bono burden.

Thanks for an interesting piece. I’d respectfully submit, however, that the contours of academic publishing vary far more widely than you’ve acknowledged – by discipline, by format, but most especially by publisher type. Here in North America, 125 university presses publish 12,000 books and almost 1300 journals annually – a significant component of the scholarly record. That’s publishing by the academy, for the academy; and it’s pursued on a daily basis by thousands of your like-minded colleagues across Canada and around the world. As with any collective effort, university presses have their shortcomings, but none of the criticisms leveled above really apply to us. We publish in pursuit of mission, not profit; the few of us who manage to generate a surplus either plow it back into our publishing programs or direct it toward other institutionally-mandated objectives. We are an essential – and distinct – component of the ecosystem you seek to improve. I hope that going forward, as you continue to advocate for the changes you’ve articulated here, you will make a greater effort to distinguish between commercial academic publishers and mission-driven academic publishers like university presses; a continued failure to do so would constitute a grave disservice to your allies in scholarly communications.

We publish in pursuit of mission, not profit; the few of us who manage to generate a surplus either plow it back into our publishing programs or direct it toward other institutionally-mandated objectives.

Peter, with all due respect, this is nonsense. University journals publishing is about contracts, period. Perhaps if the money weren’t instead plowed into failing books divisions and administrative salaries, it might be possible to hire more subject-competent manuscript editors and production staff. The now-dwindling (thanks, Navin Gupta et al.) press that I worked at for over a decade was once a sinecure for faculty wives, and the only fiscal change from the olden days seems to be deliberate understaffing to lowball said contracts.

Absolutely agreed – our target here was the Big Five, which is why we tried to work in a process where those who reviewed for OA / nonprofit publishers would be compensated by the holdback from those who reviewed for the profiteers. Thank you for your thoughtful comments.

I find the topic very interesting. I think one problem with the approach suggested is we tend to look at it from a Western perspective.
If only the big companies can afford to pay peer reviewers, it means new journals and journals from developing nations can’t ever get off the ground. Not only that, but they’re not going to reduce their profits, they’re going to increase what they charge universities, making access to the journals even harder for developing nations. This means developing nations will never be able to operate on an equal footing to the West.
The answer has to be an open access model. The TriCouncil could manage a service that houses open access journals and provides copy editors for free (paid by some of the funds currently going to the TriCouncil that get spent on page fees anyway). Both access and publishing could be free (all it needs is a central website). This would reduce costs to universities, to (indie) journal publishers and to scholars. Public access would be free. The TriCouncil could then demand that any publications that come out of their funding be published in a TriCouncil sponsored journal.

The only problem, really, is lack of respect of less-well established journals. Journals have a ranking and an impact factor and academic reward (jobs, promotion and annual review merit pay) is based on this rank and impact factor. Until serious pressure is made to make research open access–e.g. by the granting agencies, change will never happen.

Absolutely. that is a good model from the Tri-Council and seems a good solution. We did try to address the issue of publishers charging more, which I agree is a likely outcome but if we have government price controls (unlikely, but possible) we can try to avoid that. The last thing anyone (especially libraries!) wants is for them to raise their prices even higher. Thank you for your comments.

Universities have a big part in making this work as well.

Indeed, but I’d suggest that it’s by supporting university presses; the one I worked at for a family of society journals was on a strictly fee-for-service basis (and the pay was lousy, but not as bad as the outsourced stuff that some societies offer). Publishing elsewhere seems to me a better angle for “concerted effort.”

I am an academic editor working with PhD students and faculty. I am often appalled at the low quality of peer reviews and the complete lack of oversight of the reviews by journal editors. A very common situation in my work is that three reviewers will present entirely contradictory opinions, from “makes a significant contribution to the field; publish as is” to “needs major overhaul” and “not suitable for publication.” One may recommend cutting the literature review in half while another recommends doubling it. At least one review will be hastily scribbled and show little evidence that the reviewer did anything more than skim the paper. In many cases the reviewer misses the main point of the paper and asks the writer to add sections that are unrelated to the main topic. Often I struggle to make sense of the critiques of nonnative English reviewers.

It does little good for the author to develop a detailed point-by-point response to the critiques and appeal to the journal editor’s common sense, because it’s highly unlikely that the editor will become involved in the process beyond forwarding emails. Often no reply at all is received from the editor. Nor will the reviewers consider the author’s responses when they repeat the same criticisms in the second round, not noticing that the author made the requested changes. Or, worse, after revisions the paper is sent to three new reviewers who come up with entirely new requirements that conflict with the previous reviewers. Some reviews are just plain cranky, as in “I stopped reading this utterly worthless paper after the second page.”

The process is nothing short of maddening (and many times more so for books than journal papers). While it has stymied many qualified authors I’ve worked with, I’ve also seen quite a few low-quality papers get published that should never have been approved by lax reviewers and editors. I’m in favor of anything that would lead to better-quality reviews and more oversight of the review process by journal editors, resulting in more support to help authors produce quality papers. The stakes are very high for new faculty, whose tenure should not depend on such a flawed system where large profits accrue to parties who don’t much care about people’s careers and whose efforts in the research, writing, and publication process are minimal.

Completely agree. Much of the peer reviewing system is flawed. You raise some very good points, thank you.

1. Peer review is not only for publishers but it also benefits authors and the broader scholarship. A review may often suggest, ‘this is a good manuscript that could be improved with x, y and z’. I’ve substantially benefitted as an author, and seen many of my recommendations adopted by others. These reciprocal efforts are part of the collective process and my manuscript and grant review activities are recognized by my Dean as contributing to my Service duty.

2. An advancing pattern is the transition to digital-only journals, with no print versions. With this, we’ll hope for some cost savings. I support this change and haven’t browsed the journal stacks in many years – my desktop computer is my portal to the literature.

3. The relatively new Publons system seeks to recognize reviewing activities and we’ll see if this helps the system.

4. In contrast to some of the article content and comments, my view is that while the system can be improved, it generally works. I’ve served on the Editorial Boards of five journals and twice as an Associate Editor. In my experience, the editorial group recognizes the challenges with contrasting assessments and from superficial reviews, and certainly is more engaged than simply forwarding emails.

5. I don’t mind the idea of some compensation and this might involve something such as contribution towards future publication costs or open access fees. I might favor that over cash, and $500 seems rather high.

Thanks for bringing this up. In recent years, I have seen this practice of syphoning public money into private hands extend into professional conferences as well. We used to organize them collegially to break even, or to have enough seed money left over for the following year, and minimize registration and other attendance costs, but now many have been captured (or simply started) by “professional” organizers whose end is simply monetary. Other than being a continuation of the same swindle that publishing houses have been using, this new piracy scheme is jacking up our registration fees, hotel rooms etc. to prohibitive levels, and making the number of scientifically worthless venues grow to indecent levels. A telling symptom that you’ve probably noticed is that it’s often cheaper to book the same conference hotel on one’s own than through the conference’s “conveniently” negotiated prices (!). Time to ask governments for legal protection from such predatory practices, both for publications and for conferences.

It is true that if the proposed action is not taken universally at the same time, “it’s still career suicide to reject the old publishing model.” Perhaps we could prepare for concerted action that will turn the model into more life, rather than more death?

How about starting all conferences, and all editorial notes in scientific publications, with an invitation to a pledge,or with the pledge itself, along the lines of: “I pledge, in response to CAUT’s proposal (and my own professional association’s, and … etc…- all the institutions that will have agreed beforehand) to adhere to the global action set to start on … (e.g. two years down the road, to give time to organize) which will require all universities and research institutes, … to start charging fees to publishers for accessing reviewing services of their researchers, which will go into a research fund at the researcher’s institution, minus X% for the researcher him/self. (X could be 0 or greater, to be discussed before arriving at the pledge). Of course the action should take place in every country simultaneously. A feat of organization. But we do have the technical means both for spreading the word and for voting electronically when some such proposal is nailed down.

I thought I would search for something about predatory practices in the academic publishing industry, but thought there might not be much, and BAM! First on the search list was this article.

Great ideas Veronica, and very good points. Thank you!

I love the idea of bioRxiv preprints: it separates the task of communicating your findings from the task of Impact Factor hunting. I really hope that in the near future we will abandon our current archaic system of academic publishing that exploits NIH money (and other agencies’ money) – to find a better system to measure scientific impact. For instance, post-publication review by non-anonymous reviews from an entire specialized community would be an interesting format to test.