I often feel the lowest place on the totem pole of academic life is occupied by reviewers (well, maybe letter writers sometimes co-habit that rung too but I’ll stick with reviewers for today). Among the endless, repetitive but largely invisible tasks that faculty perform, reviewing articles is one that we feel obliged to do but secretly wish we were asked less to complete.
The main problem is the task is thankless. We all claim to believe that peer-review is important, we hang recruitment and promotion decisions on the outcomes, and smugly dismiss venues that don’t enact it properly, yet we give little or any incentive or reward to those who provide this apparently essential service.
In this light, is it any wonder we have fake news and poor research outputs? Investing the time to thoroughly and fairly evaluate a paper takes you away from other work. In most reputable journals, at least two, often three, external reviewers are sought for each paper. Given the fact that only some proportion of papers will prove acceptable for publication and you can start to see the problem here. For every author, we require three reviewers and an editor to make a decision, and yet it is usually only the successful author who gains any credit in this transaction.
Personally I am tired of receiving papers that require me to put more time into reviewing than the authors apparently put into writing them. Given a rational cost-benefit analysis, I can’t really blame an author for trying, but I do expect the editor to at least do some first-level culling to make sure the reviewing request is warranted. I learned this week that the term for this is ‘desk reject’, the process of declining a paper before a reviewer sees it on the grounds that it’s not a good fit or perhaps is just crap. We need more of this.
Every week I get requests to review, edit, write letters of support (but so few requests for letters of rejection, sadly) or increasingly, offers to submit my own crap paper, for quick review in a new journal coming out next week. This is what we’ve become, an industry that extracts profit from the output of scholars who trade in the currency of repute. At such times, differentiation through quality is all that matters, but the best arbiters, the reviewers who ensure the separation of the wheat from the worthless, are working thanklessly, backstage and below minimum wage. No wonder scholarly publishing is in a mess.