The current model of scientific publishing benefits the business interests of publishers instead of scientific progress. The system is beyond repair and needs to collapse in order to find a new and better one.
Over the past decade, I have been participating rather frequently in the peer-review process as a voluntary reviewer. My path to scientific peer-review was likely the usual one. As a post-doc, I was asked by my scientific supervisor to give my take on some manuscripts he was asked to peer-review, and he acknowledged my contribution in his reports. This, together with my gradually growing list of publications, put me on the radar of editorial boards, who started approaching me with peer-review requests. Over the years, I have reviewed papers for Advanced Science, Agronomy, Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, BMC Biology, Current Genetics, Ecology and Evolution, Frontiers in Plant Science, Heredity, Journal of Plant Growth Regulation, Molecular Biology and Evolution, Molecular Genetics and Genomics, Nature Communications, Nature Ecology & Evolution, Nature Plants, New Phytologist, Plant Biotechnology Journal, Plants, People, Planet, Scientific Reports, the Plant Journal and others. I was not selective in respect to the journal’s impact factor – if the paper fell under my area of expertise or interest, and I had some time to spare, I accepted the request.
I took the responsibility implied in this work seriously. I always read the entire manuscript, including supplementary materials, and I re-read the crucial parts. I have never finished a review in one day, even when I had enough time to do so. I wanted to ‘sleep on it’ and finish my report with a fresh mind cleared from emotions that are sometimes triggered when reading an imperfect text. In my reports, I tried to be constructive, diplomatic, apply the benefit of the doubt and avoid petty or harsh criticism (which I succeeded in to various extents). I have always been aware that the peer-review process is not flawless. In my early days, I was mainly concerned about the possibility of dishonesty, undisclosed conflict of interest or outright intellectual theft on the side of the reviewers, all of which is facilitated by the most common form of the process – the single-blinded peer-review (the identity of the authors is disclosed to the reviewer, who stays anonymous). Since as a reviewer I could not opt for an arguably fairer double-blinded option, I decided to ‘unblind’ myself and signed every single report I wrote.
As implied in the paragraphs above, the amount of work one devotes to the peer-review process can be considerable. While the broad scientific community is fully aware that the activities of a reviewer are entirely voluntary, never remunerated (disregarding waivers of publication fees offered by some publishers to their reviewers), and usually not even recognised (as the reviewer remains anonymous), this kind of altruistic behaviour is often astonishing to outsiders. Indeed, the publishers take advantage of a truly exceptional business model – a scientific manuscript is handled by an Associate Scientific Editor (usually voluntary, i.e., unpaid), peer-reviewed by external reviewers (voluntary, unpaid), while the publisher usually recommends that authors use external paid services for language editing. Even with this rudimentary role of the publisher, authors pay an excess of €3,000 publication fees to make their work available in an ‘open-access’ format (accessible without a subscription) in journals that are increasingly ‘online-only’ (i.e., do not even exist in a printed form).
I suppose the voluntary participation of scientists in this process is in part due to a form of inertia – it has always worked this way, since the times when peer-reviewing a manuscript was a personal honour, a matter of duty in pursuit of science. My personal attitude had a bit of that. But I thought of other possible advantages that peer-reviewing can bring to me. Being a reviewer is like peeking into the assembly line of other labs, giving me the opportunity to learn and come across the newest developments in my field. Signing my review reports could help me – so I thought – build up a reputation in the community, and being reachable in this way could lead to new collaborations. And of course, there was the idealistic and somewhat hubristic notion that as a critical reviewer, one can improve, purify or even control the current scientific thinking.
After about 10 years, the balance sheet is frustratingly negative. On one hand, there is my voluntary time (many weeks of work in total) and expertise, which could have been put to other use. Benefits, on the other hand, are scarce. I have never received any remuneration, financial or otherwise, and while my employer formally recognises that peer-reviewing is a part of my scientific activity, there is no real appreciation of it. For sure, I learned a thing or two and expanded my horizons, but there are other, more efficient ways to achieve that. A few times, I was contacted by authors who expressed a genuine gratitude for my constructive peer-review. That was nice, but no scientific collaboration was initiated. And then there are some really negative experiences. During one particular peer-review, I had a strong suspicion that the whole process (initial assessment of the paper, selection of reviewers, assessing their reports and the authors’ rebuttal and corrections, decision to accept or reject) was handled entirely by a technical assistant without scientific qualification instead of a scientific editor. I therefore contacted the editorial office and asked who was the scientific editor in charge of that particular manuscript. I received no response, and sent my request again. Silence. If my suspicion is correct, such bypassing of scientific editors could be a common and convenient practice of some ‘predatory’ publishers. I do not need to stress how unethical and damaging this could be for the process of scientific publishing. But in the absence of any oversight, how do we even know what practices are employed by those ever-expanding and profit-hungry businesses?
With another journal and publisher, I reviewed a paper that suffered from biased sampling and analysed insufficient amount of data (in respect to the stated objective) with inappropriate application of bioinformatic tools. I argued this led to over-interpretation and misinterpretation of the results. To my surprise, shortly after submitting my critical but measured assessment, I was locked out of the review process. I did not receive the authors’ response, I could not read opinions of the other reviewers, and had no means to follow the fate of this particular manuscript. As far as I understand, I was removed from the evaluation process simply for submitting a negative review.
On several other occasions, I received manuscripts with flaws and weaknesses that were deemed serious enough by the editorial offices to warrant rejection. Nonetheless, some time later, I came across those manuscripts published – in different journals – but in the same form that had previously been exposed as flawed and rejected. Serial re-submissions to different journals following rejections is an understandable strategy for authors who first try to publish their work in the more prestigious outlets, but finally settle down in journals with lower fame and publicity. Most authors would privately admit that ‘good luck’ plays an important role in getting published. It is the luck of the draw of reviewers, who can be strict or lenient, comprehensive or sketchy, friendly or unfriendly for a variety of reasons that should not matter. Resubmissions are therefore common, but besides the vanity race for the most prestigious journals, they also increase the chances for any paper – amateurish, flawed, conflicted or insignificant – to get published eventually. This is enabled by another feature of the system: past rejections and review reports are not carried over when resubmitting to a different journal or publisher. Each resubmission is therefore a free lottery ticket for authors, who pay the publication fees only if and after the paper is accepted. All of this multiplies the workload of the reviewers, and spells farewell to the idea that a rigorous peer-review process improves the scientific outputs overall.
I have made a decision to stop peer-reviewing papers for private publishers. I no longer see any compelling reason to participate and perpetuate a system that is so obviously failing. That is, failing the pursuit of science, not the business model, which is booming. According to a recent study, the number of published articles is growing exponentially – in 2022, articles indexed in Scopus and Web of Science were up around 47% compared to 2016, while the number of practising scientists remained roughly unchanged. Have we suddenly gained an ability to make scientific discoveries much faster? Or did we get 47% smarter in a few years? What is the average number of papers a good scientist used to publish in the 1950s? And what is that number now? Are the papers published today as profound as they used to be decades ago, or have we simply succumbed to the unholy alliance of the profit-driven publishers and the ‘publish-or-perish’ incentives in academia? When these trends are viewed in the context of the reproducibility crisis it becomes obvious that the current system of scientific publishing is broken. I no longer believe that it can be fixed, and I think a collapse is necessary to bring about new, better models.
Building, or even imagining a new model is probably more difficult than breaking the old one. In my view, the deterioration in scientific publishing is in a large part due to the conflict of interest between for-profit publishing and a rigorous, meaningful, reproducible and accountable reporting of the scientific progress. If financial incentives are corrupting research, let us simply cut them out of the equation. Voluntary reviewers and editorial board members are in a very strong position to stand up against the practices of private publishers, simply because without their essential voluntary work, the publishers would cease to exist. The peer-review process, on the other hand, can continue without private publishers. Nothing prevents scientists from peer-reviewing papers on existing non-profit platforms, such as bioRxiv.
Personally, I like the idea that each research institution would have its own non-profit journal where all research of that institute (and only of that institute) is published. Such journals would serve as a reflection of the research quality at the particular institutes, creating pressure to filter out poor quality papers, and would naturally limit the distortions introduced by business interests. But the peer-review process also needs to be changed radically. It needs to be more rigorous, more targeted, transparent and accountable. The idea that two or three anonymous reviewers – possibly lacking relevant expertise and always without accountability – are sufficient to assess increasingly complex and methodologically sophisticated manuscripts that sometimes involve dozens of researchers and terabytes of data seems more and more ridiculous. Often times, a reviewer’s expertise covers just a fraction of the evaluated manuscript, and there is no guarantee that two or three reviewers can jointly assess all the parts. Clearly, scientific papers need to be assessed in their entirety by experts specifically assigned for particular parts who have full access to the raw data and are obliged to replicate at least parts of the analyses; experts whose names and reports should accompany the published papers, granting them both recognition and accountability. The amount of work implied in such a peer-review would be substantially higher than the norm today, which means the effort has to be remunerated. Implicitly, the format of scientific papers would also require some changes and new standards.
I am sure there are many other ideas and considerations. The purpose of this piece is not to offer solutions but to call for an open discussion about the necessary transformation of scientific publishing. My suggestion at this point: let’s trigger the change by declining all requests to peer-review for private publishers.
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