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Animal Ethics Biosafety Human Research Ethics Research Integrity

Why I Won’t Review or Write for Elsevier and Other Commercial Scientific Journals – The Sciences (T.R. Shankar Raman | April 2021)

Posted by Dr Gary Allen in Research Integrity on May 13, 2021
Keywords: Journal, Research integrity, Research results, Researcher responsibilities

The Linked Original Item was Posted On April 4, 2021

An aisle of bookshelves in a library with sunlight shining in from the end

A few weeks ago, a message pinged into my inbox asking if I would peer-review a manuscript submitted to a reputed scientific journal published by Elsevier. I was tempted. The topic of the manuscript was related to my own research on what happens to wild plants and animals when previously forested landscapes are transformed into large plantations of a single crop species. A quick look at the journal website showed that the journal published quality research and a bunch of academic grandees sat on the editorial board. Their request to me indicated a recognition of my expertise in the field. By accepting to review the paper, I could learn something new, share my expertise and comments with the authors and editors, and add a notch on my academic belt, so to speak.

A great piece and a great effort by an academic to register concern and resistance to the money made by premium commercial journal publishers. Our team shares disquiet about significant profits made off the back of publicly funded research and efforts to make a contribution to the body of scientific and technical knowledge.  We think there is a strong argument for such work to not only be open, but profit-free as well.  We have included links to 14 related items.

And yet, I refused.

Scientists track their credentials and calibre by how many papers they manage to publish in such peer-reviewed journals and how often they are called upon to review manuscripts for them. In brief, here’s the good, the bad, the ugly of it. The good: the process of independent and anonymous peer review serves as a crucial quality-check and enables authors to hone and rectify their work before it is published. The bad: peer review can be a flaming hoop you are forced to jump through, more difficult if you are not a native English speaker, if you are from a less-privileged background, if you are from a relatively unknown institution in the Third World. The ugly: the process can degenerate into a situation where jealous peers and conniving editors disparage your work and obstruct publication, or simply display how racist, sexist and patronising they can be from their positions of power or anonymity. If I did the review, I would not be paid for it—that’s how scientific peer review works—but I could include the journal in a section in my CV listing all the national and international scientific journals that I had reviewed for. I could even register on a commercial website where academics track and showcase their journal peer review and editorial contributions. Still, it was not my skepticism over the peer review process, nor my lack of interest in counting review-coup that brought me to refuse.

Why I Won’t Review or Write for Elsevier and Other Commercial Scientific Journals - The Wire Science
Can scientists who are so meticulous in preparing their papers and so generous with their time in reviewing them for free not find better ways to advance science than relying on profiteering journals?

Related Reading

(EU) Plan S Rights Retention Strategy, Copyright and the Academic Community – Part One – Scholarly Kitchen (Robert Harington | February 2021)

(UK) Sci-Hub: Police warn students and universities against using ‘the Pirate Bay of science’ – Sky News (Alexander Martin | March 2021)

Open-access Plan S to allow publishing in any journal – Nature (Richard Van Noorden | July 2020)

(US) Universities Step Up the Fight for Open-Access Research – WIRED (Gregory Barber | June 2020)

New deals could help scientific societies survive open access – Science (Jeffrey Brainard | September 2019)

‘Broken access’ publishing corrodes quality – Nature (Adriano Aguzzi | June 2019)

Ambitious open-access Plan S delayed to let research community adapt – Nature (Holly Else | May 2019)

(US) Politics and Open Access – Scholarly Kitchen (Robert Harington | December 2019)

(Includes an update 07/06/2019) A report about Plan S’s potential effects on journals marks a busy week for the open-access movement – Science (Jeffrey Brainard | March 2019)

Radical open-access plan could spell end to journal subscriptions – Nature (Holly Else | September 2018)

Europe’s open-access drive escalates as university stand-offs spread – Science (Holly Else | May 2018)

ResearchGate: Publishers Take Formal Steps to Force Copyright Compliance – Scholarly Kitchen (Robert Harington | October 2017)

Scholarly communications shouldn’t just be open, but non-profit too – LSE Impact Blog (Jefferson Pooley | August 2017)

Old Media, New Media, Data Media: Evolving Publishing Paradigms – The Scholarly Kitchen (Joseph Esposito September 2016)

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