Senior scholars need to start pushing back on requests from for-profit publishing companies. Here’s what I’m doing.
A couple of years ago, Phaik Yeong Cheah and Jan Piasecki published a correspondence in The Lancet (Vol. 399, p. 1601) suggesting reviewers of scholarly journal manuscripts should be paid for their work. The authors indicate it’s estimated that in 2020, over 100 million hours were spent by academics conducting peer reviews with little or no compensation for their time and effort.
In their correspondence, Phaik and Piasecki suggest developing a peer review payment system might alleviate the reviewer shortage and increase the pool of reviewers from less wealthy countries, among other things. This might also help reduce the often long wait times between submission and publication of work.
These would be welcome changes, but there is another reason why the systems should change—they are highly exploitative.
If you think about it, what other profession accepts that people will routinely do their work for free? Do the people at companies like Elsevier or Taylor and Francis work without compensation? I doubt it. Many companies offer a small honorarium for journal editors; thus, they recognize the need to compensate scholars who contribute to the work of publishing companies.
When university departments primarily ran academic journals with financial support from their institutions or scholarly associations, the notion that work like peer review or being a journal editor was done voluntarily to support the field made sense. As a graduate student, I had an assistantship in which I worked as the managing editor of a journal produced by the department to which I belonged.
The editor-in-chief was a professor in the department that ran the journal, and it was reasonable to view this work as part of his job as a professor at that university. I believe he received a course release to compensate for his time editing the journal. The Dean’s office provided funds to support things like printing and mailing that were not covered by subscriptions.
Over the last thirty years, many of these department-based academic journals have either disappeared or been absorbed by large, for-profit publishing corporations that profit significantly, mainly through packaging journal sales to universities. Those companies have developed quite a scam. It works like this.
They often charge authors to publish papers while getting scholars to review the manuscripts for free. Universities and governments fund the research they publish, and publishers charge libraries, many of which are funded by the organizations that produced the research in the first place so that researchers can access the work of others in their fields. Hence, publishers
1) Often charge to publish a paper,
2) Charge libraries (at the institutions that funded the research) to make a paper available to the people who need to read it, and
3) Get scholars to do a significant part of the work—peer review and writing—for free or even for a fee if there is a fee for publishing the paper.
It’s as brilliant as it is exploitative.
What can we do to change this? Senior scholars need to start pushing back at this pernicious manifestation of neoliberalism in higher education. We can do that by refusing to conduct peer review without being paid unless the journal is part of a non-profit organization.
In my case, if a journal published by a department asks me to review a manuscript, I will do so as a volunteer if I think I’m a good reviewer. If a major company like Elsevier asks me to review a manuscript, I will reply by indicating my willingness to do the review, but my fee will be $500/hour USD.
I’ve done this several times and almost always receive a response telling me they don’t pay for reviews because it’s a service to the profession. My response is: “No, it’s not. It’s a service to your company’s profits and exploits researchers.” I also usually ask if anyone in their company works for free. Of course, I never get a reply, but the point has been made.
This approach will not lead to rapid change. Still, if enough senior researchers refuse to be exploited over time, we might see some change because it would become clear that people were willing to review for non-profit journals but not-for-profit ones. I am not actually in favor of a for-fee peer review system, but I also am not in favor of publishers’ exploitation of researchers. The system needs to change.
Unfortunately, I do not believe we can easily return to an environment in which academic departments or scholarly associations run journals; there is too much money to be made by for-profit companies to allow that. Also, the bloat in the number of journals and the expectations by academic administrators that the route to promotion and tenure is through the number of publications one has rather than the quality of one’s publications mitigates against such a return.
However, it’s clear that, when combined with the emphasis on the number of publications for promotion purposes, the for-profit takeover of academic journal publications has created a context that seems designed to exploit researchers.
Scholars without tenure or who are still to be promoted to full professor are not in a position to oppose this since administrators have all the power. Senior tenured faculty can oppose this system and should look for ways to change what represents the systemic exploitation of researchers in higher education.
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Cover graphic courtesy of The Sociology Place.
