I’ve just been alerted to this argument concerning peer-review via a message on Crit-Geog-Forum
And one of the commentators on that sent a link to this piece in the Times Higher.
There’s one key thing that these kinds of comments just don’t get (although there is the afterthought that “and we also hope people will review our own work when the time comes”). It’s not editors or publishers who create the need to review, but authors. And it is authors that we ask to review other author’s work. It’s not a simple monetary/time economy, but an exchange economy: I submit and expect to be reviewed; therefore I will review work that is submitted.
I wrote about this two years ago as an editorial which is available (open-access) here. As I said in that piece
every paper you submit to a journal creates the need for referees, and thus the exchange economy – one might even add the moral economy – is that you then act in turn as a referee. It is not just accepted papers that create the need, and it is not just one submission and one report, but three times as many. If we all did that number, averaged out over time and a range of journals, the system would work. When we don’t, it breaks down. Hence the delays in the review process, and the number of requests you are likely to get if you are a good, dependable, prompt referee.
and
This is not an argument about whether peer review is the best way to assess whether a paper is worth publishing: such debates have been had elsewhere. It is equally not an argument about the wider political economy of journal publication, including questions of charging for journals and the politics of state-funded research generating profit for private corporations. But it is an argument about how – if we decide that peer review is the least worst option – it needs to work.
We changed the conditions of submission to the journal at the same time. These now read
Submission of a paper implies acceptance of the following conditions:
(1) the paper reports unpublished work;
(2) the paper is not being submitted to any other journal;
(3) you are fully authorised to submit the material for publication;
(4) you agree to act as a referee for other submissions to the journal, bearing in mind that each submission generates the need for three reports.
(5) if accepted, the paper will not be republished without the consent of the publishers.
I won’t pretend it’s transformed the willingness of people to review, and we still have some papers that are far too long in review, with many many requests to get three, or sometimes two, usable reports. But I hope it has made explicit what surely should have been recognised all along.
The Ed Technie blogger, linked to above, is at least consistent. If you only publish in open-access journals, it seems fair to only review for them. But if you create the need for reports by submitting to peer-review journals you have got to be willing to review for them in turn. There are some really good people out there who review far more than three times their own submissions – I’ve keep a log in the past three years, and recently compared it to a colleague who had me beat – but there are equally an awful lot of free-riders.
The best comment on the Ed Technie post said this
When I peer review, part of the motivation for me is to reinforce my faith in the system – I treat other researchers papers in the same way I’d like my own to be judged.
That sounds more like it.
