Peer reviewers are exhausted. It's common to spend *months* inviting reviewers, getting refusals, inviting more, maybe 12 or more, then 2 agree but 1 doesn't complete, so you go again. That's why your paper is in limbo. I'm very sorry, it's awful, but it's also an untenable academic labour issue.
It seems to be largely because the big publishers/journals won't ask anyone who isn't tenured at an R1, which is a very small group of people. I know lots of qualified people who never get asked.
I have never had a tenure track position, and have been in an alt-ac job for the last five years. I still get asked to review articles in my field, and FWIW, I usually say "yes" because it's a good way for me to stay connected to the field and up to date on the scholarship.
Maybe it depends a good deal on the field.
It must. I’ve been reviewing since I published my first paper as a grad student.
Same. Not even in the global north and I do get review requests. I am in the social sciences
Sounds like you need some more peer reviewers... Are peer reviewers paid? or are you surprised that, in an economy where young academics are more and more asked to work for free on the promise that maybe they will get a contract, people avoid free labour?
This 👆
Can confirm. I receive an average of one review request per day. It’s an impossible deluge and sometimes I don’t even get around to declining, which I then feel guilty about.
As an academic, frankly I'm tired of doing free work. Would be nice to get even $50 for taking the time to read a book and review it.
And now you even have to fight the publisher half of the time just to get a print copy of the book.
Editors are trying their best to maintain the scholarly infrastructures of knowledge exchange. It's not easy or feasible for most to set up open access elsewhere. Our journals, whatever their myriad faults, have helped sustain fields over years and decades.
The black box of academic publishing is dark inside indeed - and I've not even mentioned Manucript Central yet - but it also contains other academics doing their best as editors to steward your work with care and respect.
Oh god Manuscript Central 😳🙄🫣😱
Thanks for this amazing thread, Ben. In Spain, the DORA movement, the Diamond Route, and OA have gained traction. For example, in our research evaluations (conducted every six years by the Ministry), open-access publications earn you extra points. For publicly funded projects, only OA is accepted.
Thanks to this, university-led journals (with no APCs, OA, and no deals with big tech) have gained relevance and improved indexing. It's not a solution to the avalanche of AI-generated submissions or to many of the broader issues in academic publishing [...]
[...] but at least big companies are not profiting from our labour.
This is heartening news! Once the university system / admin can assure scholars that OA publishing won't hurt career progress (and there are people to point to as examples!), then change can pick up speed.
In our last editorial we imagined how bad academic publishing might get, and hopefully how it might come out better www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
I like this potential outcome! The ego problem driving manuscript mass-production is real. And it’s gross. And it’s a waste of everyone’s time.
Would you say the average first submission is of much lower quality now vs when you received 200 submissions? I suspect more is at work than AI… my experience as a reviewer has been frustrating lately too. Lots of sloppiness and lack of attention to detail. People need to publish less and better
They cannot. The system is incentive and not value based.
Aren’t we the system? Maybe we need to change and start caring more about quality and not quantity…
Who is we? I am not we, and I am not the system :))
Scientists in academia - the people the post was directed at I guess
I was just talking to a colleague today about bypassing the publishing industry. We do all the unpaid labour anyway, and we don't get paid for the content, and it's going to be sold to "ai" companies anyway, so let's just make books ourselves, slap ISBN's on them, and then put them on our CV's.
@alusuralwusta.bsky.social does this and it has been very successful as a result. Online and open access.
Do you work in Europe? Many academic posts are tied to publishing in indexed journals. So publishing in alternative places would not help you get a contract or promotion. It's super sad,but a structural reason for stickiness of existing scholarly infrastructures.
I once suggested to the Chief Executive of one of the Research Councils that they should have their own non-profit journal for reporting outcomes of research they'd funded, with reviewers drawn from their peer-review college,with credit given for reviewing papers the same way as for grant reviewing
They could then impose the rule for assessing track-record in grant applications that no applicant could be penalised for publishing in their journal rather than any other. He said it was an interesting idea but his main priority was to get JeS working properly
Well, JeS is no longer in use (for better or worse) so maybe it's time to suggest this again?
I mean, isn’t this just recreating the wheel? This is why colleges and universities sponsored journals and why we have academic presses for books…that is (was?) the system
Perhaps, but most of the college-sponsored journals belong to predatory publishers now, and even before they did the only incentive they could offer to authors was the prestige (whether nebulous or problematically quantified) of publishing with them.
Research Council journals would be able to offer the incentive that the publication would definitely count for their next grant application. Whether that would be sufficient incentive I don't know. REF could likewise guarantee to treat publication in them as equivalent to any other journal.
That assumes, of course, that research councils and UK government regard breaking the power of elsevier etc as a desirable outcome, which is far from certain
Open Access is at least becoming a thing, mainly because big grant funders - especially the EU for STEM - insist on it.
Jumping in with context from a large-scale research center in Germany: for the purposes of funding agency reviews, any article published in a journal with impact factor <7 is ignored entirely.
We're working hard to change that, please talk to your institution about signing coara.org or check whether they are signatories already. There are also national working groups and other ways to get involved I've seen institutions go from asking applicants to sum up IF to more reasonable assessment
it's a hyper capitalist racket, and the fact that ***academia*** (full of all those gigantic galaxy brains) collectively still hasn't managed to burn it to the fucking ground says a lot about how deep these exploitative structures run
Yes and we need to work to each of our strengths. We need to work together but also separately at different threeads. I'm in an AI dept so my voice here blew this up. Others can help too. Otherwise we're basically witnessing the end of academia. bsky.app/profile/oliv...
No, I'm in Canada. My understanding--and you clearly know a lot more about this than me--is that it's not impossible to make your own journal, get an ISBN, and get it indexed. A colleague did it many years ago. That said, I don't know how much work she had to do to make that happen.
I can guarantee it took a lot more work than that, especially if the journal lasted beyond the first year or so - when you can still call in favours from friends and the goodwill that comes with an exciting new project. Getting journals indexed is really quite hard and needs…
… several years of stats to prove continuity as well, and then if your numbers drop off you have to re-apply to get re-indexed. And there is always the matter of hosting fees, because journals that are on university websites have a habit of disappearing if the relevant staff…
… member leaves/ retires or if there is a rebrand. And if you run a journal for free you still have to have editors and copy editors and proofreaders and if the publisher isn’t paying them and you don’t have paying subscribers someone else has to. Universities used to…
… allow staff time to do this kind of thing but not any more, outside of Oxbridge/Ivy and equivalents.
You are correct and I—with colleagues—did this: entanglementsjournal.wordpress.com the archive is here. It was a struggle to get indexed bc of our explicit political choice not to reproduce structures from existing systems that aren’t working as well as they should & can be damaging (peer review).
The experiment lasted 4 years bc it was entirely voluntary & a labour of love, & I,for one, burnt out. Our experiment was cutting edge appearing just before a movement towards more community led peer publishing and things like @openbookcollective.bsky.social took off…
…— who are amazing and it’s been a total pleasure to see them make tracks here. There are others too such as Common Place and a number of other journals who took an indie route who you can find as co-authors here: commonplace.knowledgefutures.org/pub/y0xy565k...
I agree with the follow up post that this is a labour issue and I think as academics we have bought into the prestige economy of publishing hook, line & sinker, and once in it’s hard to untangle without consequences.
Have a look at scipost physics. They did all that. An insane amount of work, very difficult to find funding. Their entire financial balance can be found on their site.
Journals get ISSNs (Serials) not ISBNs (Books). Setting this up is the easy part, and libraries can often set up the journal platform. Getting indexed in, say, Scopus is the hard part, and it can take years for new journals.
And in a lot of the Nordic countries it's not just getting indexed, it's getting ranked on the Norwegian register.
But yes, that structural barrier is real and heartbreaking. "Why do we keep publishing in this broken system?" Because it's what our departments recognize.
so ORGANIZE this is a labour issue - collectively, you are NOT powerless stop upholding systems that exploit you, chew you up and spit you out ... and that steal and lock away the knowledge you create from the rest of us out here
It's been done and it works. Reach out. recognitionrewards.nl
More here too www.nwo.nl/en/recogniti...
That is certainly a chosen logo. No ring, but the legs make it obvious.
One of the problems is many still benefit a lot from gaming the system, even if it's broken also for the scientific endeavour. Self-serving efforts are prioritised as they are the most rewarded, and until this doesn't change, no "collective" exists (and wanting change is seen as resentfulness).
Talk to the scholarly communication librarian at your institution. They can often help you create a journal.
It’s easy to get an ISBN etc. a A colleague and I did this with a self published research creation project.
If it was a journal it would have been an ISSN. ISBNs are for books. But believe me that’s the easy part of the process.
Whether is “counts” is in the eye of the beholder, but under DORA it should…
I'll ask my chair first, if I ever manage to do it.
Creating your own journal would not help. You need to publish in journals with an impact factor for your publication to count. The impact factors are set for established high-quality journals.
There are plenty of non-profit, academic-led journals. You don't need to start your own journal to bypass the publishing industry. Of course, most of those journals don't have a high impact factor. Which only matters because academia decided that it matters.
Attn: @giffordjames.bsky.social and @adamrudder.bsky.social. See thread starting with my post, above. Interesting perspectives, here!
For scientific publishing, I have an alternative: Oversimplification: FalseScience share.google/zTS7ei9ChnTM...
📌
That's depressing - thanks for sharing! I can't help to wonder tho, what's stopping editorial boards from stepping down all together and starting afresh? It's not unheard of. I'd like to be able to set up a better environment for the new generation of scholars.
Here’s an up-to-date list of so-called journal declarations of independence. Many have succeeded in establishing new journals. Many of the old journals continue on w/ new leadership. It’s a drastic step but an option for journal communities at loggerheads w/ their publishers/owners.
Thanks for sharing - it's what I was trying to get at in a roundabout way. It's a massive jump to resign, there are plenty of challenges but it *can* be done.
@unroll.skywriter.blue
The thread as a shareable webpage: https://skywriter.blue/pages/did:plc:rl2szulxujlgdcmx4avx7jyn/post/3ly7c77ddf22u.
@skyview.social unroll
@skyview.social "unroll"
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Oh, go on - do mention Manuscript Central!
@unroll.skyre writer.blue
@benpatrickwill.bsky.social It seems to me that the new eLife model is aimed at helping with this. I'm curious, would you work for them? Are there open positions? Is it a big pay cut? They have a somewhat high "desk rejection" rate (for a journal that doesn't reject anything) but I'm curious […]
@benpatrickwill.bsky.social For example, I have reviewed for for-profit publishers but feel ambivalent about it in a way I absolutely do not when I've reviewed for society journals or grant agencies. I imagine there are plenty of people who have different rates of accepting review requests […]
@benpatrickwill.bsky.social On the issue of LLM training, while it seems complicated, at least it's a big improvement if authors retain copyright and control over their work, rather than as you say publishers having the right to simply sell packaged papers for the purpose without author consent […]
Has anyone in your situation ever written a list of what tasks/resource/institutions would be necessary for your journal board to decamp en masse to start a new open access journal with a sovereign board owning IP and contracting out tasks to service companies?
(I appreciate that this is a task itself which is beyond any single board, however good its values and intentions are.)
According to the journal’s paper tracker, the reason it took 14 months for the first found of my job market paper was that it sat on the Senior Editor’s desk for 6+ months before he even sent it out for review. (Also, peer reviewers are exhausted. Maybe we/they should demand shorter articles.)
If the business model doesn't allow for paying the people who do the work the business depends on, maybe the business should not be a business.
Many worthwhile activities don't pay money.
Yeah, but those activities don't run off of asking consumers to pay fifty bucks to read an article.
Authors should post a pre-print on a pre-print server (green open access).
Especially if the research in question took so much as a dollar of public money.
I peer review for learned societies and nonprofits. I no longer peer review for for-profit publishers because their highly profitable business model is entirely exploitative.
Maybe you could sprinkle some of that 78 million on peer reviewers instead expecting this work to be done for free
Worked as associate editor for ~8 yrs till 2019. It was getting impossible to find 2 reviewers even then. Each submission was taking longer to even get 2 reviewers to agree. I once got a review back that was a single paragraph & very offensive. Held it back & had to decide based on the other review
I get around 10 requests per week. I couldn’t possibly do them all, or even a fraction of them.
I was once told by a former department chair that reviewing articles should be done on my own time.