There’s been a lot about quiet quitting and great resignations lately. We’re all tired and burned out from the never-ending pandemic and the gaslighting associated with it, compounded with the toxic productivity culture of academia that just seems to continually intensify.
A recent article in Nature Careers discussed results of a small reader poll where academics identified some of the activities they have been ‘quitting’ to ease their workload. Second on the list was peer review. As anyone working in editorial processes at the moment can attest to, it is getting harder and harder to find qualified reviewers to agree to review papers (or to accept editorial board roles).
I’ve heard multiple anecdotes from authors that some editors are now sending desk rejections claiming that the paper is not worthy of review because they couldn’t find anyone willing to review it after an arbitrary number of invitations were declined. This is a spurious correlation and unethical practice, but it’s a clear sign of an overstressed system.
There’s a long history of arguments to boycott peer review, most of them based on flawed logic and assumptions. Some people are now responding to peer review invitations with ‘invoices’, saying they will only review the paper for a specified payment amount. But there are many ethical and practical reasons why peer reviewers should not be paid for their service.
Peer review is fundamental to academia. We rely on it (formally and informally) for most of the activities that build and progress our careers, not just for publishing papers. Yet we often have conflicting perceptions of how we benefit from peer review and how much of our own time we’re prepared to spend on peer review for others.
Despite numerous calls to boycott peer review and many attempts to establish alternative publishing systems, I think peer review is essential to scholarly publishing. But finding willing peer reviewers will only get harder, especially as the long tail of covid impacts on the world grows. So maybe it’s time to reconsider what we expect from reviewers, and how we acknowledge the service.
Peer reviewers aren’t copyeditors or co-authors. They shouldn’t be expected to find every typo, rewrite every clumsy sentence, and find better ways to restructure the paragraphs. I used to spend more time than I needed to doing this in reviews. Now, I mostly ignore the written expression unless it’s clearly impacting clarity and comprehension of the science (every author has their own writing style) and I only point out typos if they’re relevant to understanding the science (comprehensive proofreading should be the responsibility of the authors and the journal’s copyeditors). Journals could ease the burden on reviewers by being much more explicit about what exactly reviewers should and shouldn’t spend time commenting on.
There is a lot of scope for tools and processes that journals could introduce to potentially increase efficiency in the review process. For example, allowing invited reviewers to forward invitations directly to other potential reviewers could be a useful way to reduce the time and effort required to find reviewers. Handling editors don’t know everyone working in a specific field, especially postdocs and PhD students. An invited reviewer may not have the time to do the review themselves, but will likely know at least one other keen person that the editor may not be aware of.
A key point often missing from the public conversation around peer review is that reviewers need to get recognition where it matters. Reviewer certificates from a journal are not going to entice an overworked academic to accept more invitations. An academic’s workload is determined by their institution, not the journals they contribute their expertise to. And most institutions need to do better at acknowledging and accounting for the editorial service academics provide. It’s a service that institutions ultimately benefit from directly and indirectly, through the cumulative impact of journals built on quality reviews, and the international reputation of academic staff that work on editorial boards.
However, at many institutions, there is no formal recognition of academic editorial service. If workload credit is given to some staff with external editorial roles, this is often applied inequitably and associated with privilege. It is taken for granted that academics will just ‘fit it all in’ somehow, leading to more people declining invites because they simply don’t have capacity. Even where workloads are quantified, reviewing and editorial work is often lumped vaguely into an academic’s ‘research’ load competing with their own original research activities. But it’s actually a service role and we need sector-wide policies to acknowledge it as such.
I don’t know what the answers are, but I know this is an issue that won’t go away. More articles lamenting how the system is ‘broken’ will not fix the problem. Addressing reviewer shortages will need a collaborative effort from journals, editorial boards, academics and institutions to support an important academic community service.
© Manu Saunders 2023
(n.b. this post is my opinion, I’m not writing on behalf of the journals I contribute to or my institution)