With the virtual replacement of paper publication by
electronic (online) journal publication, and the coincident emergence of open
access, university libraries, in addition to archiving, are now equipped to
administer both peer review service and journal publication for the research community
that they support. Even most of the key
personnel and expertise — authors, editors, and reviewers — already reside
there. They always have.
Surprisingly, however, commercial publishers still have
almost complete control over the publication of university research. But the wheels are in motion for radical
change [1]. Researchers, through a consortium of university libraries, have the power to take over this control with ease —
by just deciding to do it.
Both stand to reap major cost savings. But even more importantly, a transition to libraries as the principal publishers of university research would open up a badly needed escape route from one of the most crippling limitations on the progress of science and the advance of knowledge: impact factor (IF) elitism.
Elitism is nothing but varnished bias, dressed up to look
innocent and desirable. But bias is the
enemy of science, and stifles the pursuit of knowledge. It is a baffling twist of irony, therefore,
that researchers today are born into a ‘publish or perish’ culture where the
central mission is for elitism [2]. This is vigorously indoctrinated by many journal publishers
and their editors that are more concerned about preservation and elevation of
journal impact factor, and competing with other journals for IF status, than
they are concerned with dissemination of discovery. High impact factor generates profit for
commercial publishers because there is a market willing to pay dearly for it: authors clamouring to find ways to pay for high
article processing fees to open access journals; and libraries gouged by high
journal subscription fees for reader access.
This market system—founded upon and sustained purely by elitism—breeds
two chronic problems associated with the traditional peer-review model:
Draconian pre-publication peer review filters
Many
editors routinely instruct their editorial board members to reject good papers
and accept only the ‘best of the best’. Often
they endeavor to disguise this elitism with claims of limited page space for
traditional paper publication (despite that virtually no one reads from paper
anymore). Insistence on keeping the
space limitations of paper empowers them with a gate-keeping censorship tool
for maximizing journal impact factor. Even
when libraries cancel paper subscriptions to save money, their electronic
(online only) subscription costs usually remain ridiculously high.
These
unscrupulous rejections by elitist editors delay publication of meritorious
research, or leave it unpublished altogether, unavailable to science, lost
entirely from the pool of knowledge.
Rejection of their good papers also transforms authors into apathetic or
petulant reviewers, conditioned to retaliate with nominal effort, or with aggressive,
biased reviewing (recommending in turn the rejection of good papers by other
authors), thus maintaining excessively stringent peer review filters [3].
Publishers
and their editors love this — a self-sustaining mechanism for protecting and
inflating IF status, further reinforced
by a long-standing tradition of blind and voluntary (free) peer-review. Because reviewer identities are secret, and
the contents of their reviews are not public, callous and aggressive reviewers
can ‘hide’ behind anonymity. This also enables
them to exercise power over colleagues — power to approve manuscripts that
support the reviewer’s own research and reject those that conflict with it, or
those authored by competitors. This in
turn gives editors another tool for rejecting good submissions without
‘looking’ elitist — because they can conveniently ‘pass the buck’
to the anonymous negative reviewer. And
because reviewing is voluntary, with no significant reward for good reviewing
service, there are no deterrents for bias, no accountability, and hence no
quality control.
Author addiction to chasing impact factor
Young academics are now routinely lured into a culture of
chasing IF as a metric of merit. Despite
its poor record for measuring this [4],
‘impact factor mania’ [5]
persists, essentially because (as yet) no other alternative measures are widely
perceived as equally effective for bolstering academic reputation / status. In many cases, this addiction leads to exasperation
and burn-out, thus breeding susceptibility to academic misconduct. And when exposed, this results in lost public
confidence in the integrity of academic research and the value of funding it.
This addiction then is what accounts for the exorbitant
costs imposed by many publishers; like drug dealers, they are essentially
‘selling’ an elite status symbol to addicted authors through inordinately high author (article
processing) fees, and hence to libraries through excessive subscription costs. Even many open-access online-only journals (with
their much lower, paperless operating cost) can get away with charging outrageous author fees for access to their much coveted impact factor [6]
Madly chasing impact factor leaves not just authors
fatigued, but also their reviewers — who are also authors, and hence already fatigued
from also chasing impact factor. Total reviewing
time load is multiplied when the same paper is submitted to several journals,
as disillusioned authors frantically ratchet down the impact factor ladder,
wasting time and resources reformatting and re-submitting papers for different
journals (the ‘tragedy of the reviewer commons’). Everyone is desperately overworked. With no incentives, willing reviewers have
become harder and harder to find; they are fed up with providing free service
for journals while their publishers collect exorbitant profits from library subscriptions
and author fees. With never enough hours
in the day, requests to review are declined more and more frequently by more
and more potential reviewers — thus leaving the real tragedy: few papers ever get reviewed by the most
talented and best qualified reviewers.
A better way for the future
Traditional elitist journals are unlikely to take the lead
in efforts to correct the above problems.
It is in their best interests (for corporate profit generation) to keep
the current system in place and to instill complacency about limitations, false
pride in the ‘traditional way’, and false confidence in the view that, although
not perfect, the current system is the ‘best we can do’.
But it’s not. The technology for electronic/digital publication — that first allowed us to abandon paper and thus pursue the benefits of open access — has now combined with modern, easily accessible online platforms (for everything from manuscript submission and reviewer management, to editing tools, website hosting, and pdf article production) to provide the means for dispensing with profit-based commercial publishers altogether. This movement is now starting to gain significant momentum [7] [8], and several institutional libraries [9], including my own at Queen’s University, already host publication of a growing selection of peer-reviewed journals.
Researchers can now easily organize themselves, under an administrative consortium of their institutional libraries, to publish their peer-reviewed, open-access work digitally (online), with author fees kept down to cost-recovery level only — thus leaving more money to support the front-line operating costs of research — and guided by a mission for discovery, rather than a mission for impact factor elitism. With freedom from the heavy cost burden of library subscription fees to profit-driven publishers, university library budgets will be more than equipped to fund their transformation in becoming the principal non-profit publishers of science and other disciplines, and repositories for digital data and other research products. The reputations of universities for accountability and commitment to the pursuit of knowledge will also provide branding that can match or exceed the integrity of the biggest multi-national publishers.
And most importantly, in my view, this new domain for
peer-review publication clears the way to break free from the malignant addiction
to chasing IF. Not all researchers will
be anxious to walk away from elitism; addiction can have a powerful hold. But for the brave and forward-thinking, this
new opportunity will motivate and enable researchers to experiment broadly with
different models [e.g. 10]
for identifying and using peer-review filters that are optimal for the progress
of science and discovery, and to foster a new merit culture based on ‘author impact
factor’ that is earned,
rather than journal impact factor elitism, purchased
from a profit-hungry commercial publisher.
What are we waiting for?
References
[2] Aarssen LW, Lortie
CJ (2009) Ending elitism in peer-review publication. Ideas in Ecology and Evolution 2:
18-20.
[3] Aarssen LW (2012) Are peer-review filters optimal for the progress of science in ecology and evolution. Ideas in Ecology and Evolution 5: 9-12.
[4] Eyre-Walker
A, Stoletzki N (2013) The assessment of science: The relative merits of post-publication review, the Impact Factor, and the number of citations. PLoS Biol 11(10): e1001675.
doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001675
[5] CasadevallaA,
Fang FC (2014) Causes for the persistence of impact factor mania. mBio
5(2):e00064-14. doi:10.1128/mBio.00064-14.
[6] Wright JM (2014)
Open Access and the Public Purse. Academic
Matters July 28, 2014.
[7] Aarssen, L.W.
& Lortie, C.J. 2012. Science Open Reviewed: An online community connecting authors with reviewers for journals. Ideas in Ecology and
Evolution 5: 78-83.
[8] Brembs B, Button
K, Munafo M (2013) Deep impact: unintended consequences of journal rank. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 7:291. doi:
10.3389/fnhum.2013.00291
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