This month’s video is about the reviewers difficult job and what it means for the scientific community.
The reviewer is the gatekeeper of science and not the publisher. The publisher runs a number of displays called journals on which the author’s work gets portrayed to the scientific community.
The reviewer is a scientist with at least a few years of experience in science. The reviewer does it work for FREE. The motives why the reviewer takes this challenging job are different and they depend on the individual. In our video below, we explore those in detail.
During the last decade ONLY, there has been some feeble efforts to recognise the diligent and delicate work of the reviewers. See this article from learning more (Advice for early career reviewers).
To start with, there is an important problem with the way the reviewers are selected. Firstly, there is a massive conflict of interest. The reviewer is an author as well. And at times, for the most experienced reviewers, reviewers can be editors of other journals as well. Not to mention that a reviewer can review papers for competitor journals from different publishers.
The reviewer job is at the same time very demanding, lies at the very least at the edge of ethics, and does not get paid.
Is this arrangement for the reviewers the only one possible? Certainly not!
There is more. Much more. Keep reading!
The reviewer should be a paid job that allows bypassing all the shortcomings of being a reviewer today. In our video this month, we discuss reviewers difficult job, the associated issues, and offer some ideas for possible solutions.
But we probably started from the wrong angle. We should have asked ourselves how much money make the publishers today. They do about 4 billion dollars per year. Given how little they do, that is a massive amount of money.
How much is a paper sold for? On average one paper is sold to the open market for around 30 dollars per copy. Given that there were about 6 million papers published in 2020 and a total of papers available out there for all times of over 120 million, then it is appalling that the reviewers are not paid for doing their job. Instead, they are asked to do what they do in their spare time. This is crazy if we want to make sure that the reviewers do the best they can. Even if they were paid something such as 10 dollars per paper reviewer and there are 3 reviewers per manuscript, that would result in 18 million dollars per year of expenses for the publishers. That is NOTHING for the established publishers. This is less than 1% of the revenues in the scientific publishing industry.
Things get a bit murky if we factor in that most of the time there is no proper screening by the editorial office, a manuscript could go to several journals before it gets accepted for publication. If again we assume 5 rounds of review at different journals before the paper gets published, we have a total cost of review of fewer than 100 million dollars. This is still peanuts: about 2.5% of the revenues in the scientific publishing industry.
Therefore, not making the review process a proper job is unethical. We MUST change all of this. The reviewers should have proper time to do their important work and this can only happen if they are paid. In fact, if they are paid, they can remove other tasks they are involved in for which they get paid to earn a living.
For more on this topic, have a look at the video of this month.
In this month’s video we analyse reviewers difficult job from different angles. As you will learn, reviewers are indispensable for publishing papers. However, the way they operate in a far from being ideal situation.
There are also issues with some reviewers who do a bad job regardless of the fact they get paid or not. This other issue could be reduced dramatically if there were paid reviewers who did this for a living.
Reviewers do a difficult job. If you reached this far, you will have no doubt about it. They are the gatekeepers of science and they do not get paid for the responsibility their work has. Reviewer a paper requires knowledge and a good degree of guesswork to critically assess what authors are presenting and especially what authors do not say.
What can change? A lot can change. Let’s look at some possible improvements. The number of published papers every year is big enough to make of the reviewer a full-time job. This is the first and foremost change that needs to take place. Then, reviewers should NOT review manuscripts of their friends/colleagues. Additionally, to avoid several intrinsic biases (such as this one Bias in single vs. double blind peer review), reviewers should even probably NOT review papers that fall in their same research topics.
Please have a look at the companion video released last month that looks at The MADNESS in Publishing Science Today.
We trust you will find some inspiration on this month video and look forward to going back to the series of videos we started a few months ago regarding how to write compelling papers and how to tackle the large and complex matter of writing your PhD thesis.
Thank you.
