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Should Philosophers Referee Papers for Free for For-Profit Journal Publishers?

Brian Leiter

Warren Goldfarb (Harvard) raises an interesting issue:

I was wondering whether you'd like to muse about a topic on your blog, namely, that of refereeing for for-profit journals.  I was just asked to referee something for Erkenntnis, which is a Springer journal.   I began to think, why should I donate my time for no compensation to a for-profit enterprise?  It's one thing when a not-for-profit journal asks (for me, it's usually the Jnl. Symb. Logic, or Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, or Mind), but why should I give my time gratis to help Springer or Elsevier make money?

The culture of journal refereeing as a duty of the professoriate in a subject, without compensation, developed when journals did not make any profit.  It continues only because we are not interrogating the changes that academic publishing has undergone.  (Book refereeing has always been compensated, even from university presses, because the publication was supposed to make some kind of money, even if for a non-profit entity.)  Yet, of course, I don't want to damage the younger people in the subject, who need to be published, even in for-profit journals.

But I am tempted to write back to the editor who asked me to referee, "Please be advised that I do not do any refereeing work for journals published by for-profit entities without compensation.  Are you prepared to offer compensation for this refereeing job?"

I'd be interested in your reaction, and those of your readers if you think this is an issue of general enough interest to discuss on the blog.

I am inclined to think Professor Goldfarb has a good point.  What do readers think?  As always, signed comments will be strongly preferred.  Submit your comment only once, they may take awhile to appear.

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34 responses to “Should Philosophers Referee Papers for Free for For-Profit Journal Publishers?”

  1. Jamie Dreier

    I've thought about this before, and in general Prof. Goldfarb's idea (the one he's tempted to carry out) seems reasonable.
    The biggest sticking point is this, I think: Philosophical Studies is a very important journal. It publishes a large number of papers every year, and it is well edited and high in quality. A widespread boycott against it by referees would be quite harmful to the profession, and more specifically to pre-tenure philosophers who would suffer more from a significant contraction of the space they have to publish.

    Reply
  2. Alva Noe

    To serve as a referee for an academic journal is to perform a service for our professional community, whether the journal is for-profit or not. Most employed philosophy professors do receive indirect compensation for professional service, that is, service record is one factor taken into account when decisions are made regarding rank, salary, promotion, etc.

    Whether or not we have an obligation to referee, and whether or not the job of the referee is frequently a difficult or even unpleasant one, it's worth recalling that the referee's report is in fact a vital avenue of philosophical conversation and so, ultimately, of teaching, learning and research.

    Reply
  3. Michael Weisberg

    Another possibility to consider: One of my chemist friends has a policy of not serving on editorial boards or in editorial capacities for for-profit journals, unless the journal donates n subscriptions to countries in the developing world (where, in chemistry at least, the impact of for-profit journals is most harmful).

    Reply
  4. Michael Rosen

    If you have an obligation to someone, the fact that in fulfilling it you benefit a third party should not normally override the reason you have to do so. Professor Goldfarb's reluctance would seem to me forceful if (a) the obligation you have to your peers and the profession is relatively weak, and (b) you are being wronged by the party whom you are benefiting. Sometimes one has to tolerate injustice to do good.

    Prima facie, benefiting another party by refereeing and receiving no compensation would seem to be an injustice. However, consider things from the economic point of view. The publishing market contains both for-profit and not-for-profit entities, all of whom expect that referees will work for no compensation (or, in the case of book refereeing, for compensation that comes per-hour to way below the minimum wage). If the market is competitive, isn't the presence of for-profit entities making sufficient profits to remain in the market a sign that they are being rewarded for greater efficiency in producing the journal/book rather than the fact that they are exploiting the work of referees? In which case, would we be better off if we ran the for-profits out of town, thereby narrowing the market? That is, of course, a speculation but not, I think, absurd.

    In the end, to my mind, it depends on how one assesses the strength of each claim. But one has to be careful that the aversion to feeling exploited doesn't act as a rationalization for not 'doing one's bit' in a system which, whatever its imperfections, is to the benefit of the profession.

    Reply
  5. Lee Walters

    The business model of for-profit journals is crazy from the profession's perspective. Why would anyone want to support a business practice that, on the back of the unrewarded efforts of the profession, as authors, referees and editors, made money from the institutions that employ philosophers and provide education? I think Prof Goldfarb's suggestion does not go far enough, at least for those who can tolerate the consequences of not publishing in, say, Phil studies.

    No one is suggesting that the profession withdraws from providing a valuable service to the profession. As Prof Goldfarb has noted, there are alternatives to publishing in / refereeing for for-profit journals, indeed many of the best journals are not for profit.

    But, as Prof Dreier points out, there might well be damaging effects from a blanket boycott of, say, springer journals. But there is nothing to stop a concentrated boycott of, say, Journal of Philosophical Logic and Erkenntnis. If the boycott was effective in changing the practices of those journals the policy could be extended elsewhere. If not, those who want no part of the present set-up could adopt Prof Goldfarb's idea across the board, safe in the knowledge that this would be unlikely to have the bad consequences suggested by Prof Dreier.

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  6. Laurence B McCullough

    While refereeing for a for-profit journal is not compensated directly, there is indirect reputation and monetary benefit from this aspect of our work: we can and do claim it on our "service" component for advancement and salary increases. Indeed, to be asked to be a reviewer by leading journals may count more as a reputational benefit than an ecnomic benefit. Such work is justifiably listed on one's CV. That one type of compensation is not offered does not mean that there is no compensation, monetary or otherwise.

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  7. Antony Eagle

    I am very reluctant these days to review for (and no longer submit articles to) purely commercial journals, by which I mean, those whose subscription charges are grossly disproportionate to the costs of producing the journal. ('Grossly' is obviously vague, but I suspect we all have a fair idea of which journals might fall into this category.) I think there is not just the question of whether we are donating labour to a for-profit enterprise; there is also, I think, the very real problem that by supporting these journals in this way—submitting our good work, refereeing to improve quality, etc.—we continue to make subscriptions to these journals required by our libraries while simultaneously communicating to publishers that these sometimes significant profits are acceptable to the philosophical community. Our already stretched library budgets are yet further diminished and the ability of our own institutions to adequately provide books and journals to support our own research is diminished. So I'm inclined to think there are more insidious harms to which these for-profit journals contribute.

    So I prefer to spend my refereeing time on requests from journals whose business models don't undermine the profession. I include in this category not just open access journals, but also those closed access journals whose subscription fees help support philosophical societies (e.g., BJPS, AJP, PAS, Mind,…). This policy is harder on the editors of for-profit journals, particularly those with a reputation for publishing good work, and hard for those younger scholars who cannot be as picky about which journals to submit too (I certainly wasn't picky early on). The typically quite speedy acceptance-to-publication time of for-profit journals is obviously an important inducement to people early on in their careers, and something not to be neglected—we can't simply abandon these journals immediately without considering the additional impact on the remaining journals and our corresponding obligations to referee more and more quickly for them.

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  8. John Gardner

    Never mind refereeing. What about the dubious morality of publishing in these privatized journals? I can see that younger scholars may have to take prestigious space where they can get it, but I don't have their excuse. I can disseminate my article-length work pretty easily without the middleman, and without much risk to my career. If for some reason there has to be a middleman, which I doubt, I don't see why it should have my labour for nothing, and hence cream off a share of my university's limited budget, and then rent the fruits of my labour back to me or my university at a commercial rate. That's not a business, it's a racket. I am complicit in its perpetuation every time I sign over my rights to a publisher that is not a University Press or similar. (Which is why I always attach an extra piece of paper to the assignment in such cases, reserving a lot of extra rights!)

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  9. Kirk Ludwig

    It is hard to imagine that compensation for a report would be adequate to the amount of work that usually goes into it, but it would be a big expense for the journals and make them even more expensive for individuals and libraries. Refereeing is a kind of tax on our time, which we pay voluntarily, for the benefit of the profession. It benefits some for-profit entities as well, but the alternative, a fee for report system, would be of minimal benefit for individual referees and perhaps a significant cost to educational institutions and individual subscribers. I donate my time. It benefits the profession. Some third party makes a bit of profit on it. I find it difficult to get worked up about this.

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  10. Eddy Nahmias

    Is there a list somewhere of which philosophy journals are for-profit and which are not? If not, can someone list the main ones here, ideally also offering information about which charge subscriptions "grossly disproportionate to the costs of producing the journal"? Would it help or hurt our profession to drive the for-profit journals out of business by boycotting them (for submissions and refereeing)?

    Reply
  11. Manuel Vargas

    I wish the situation were one where the only objection is that some third party makes a bit of profit off my volunteering time. If this were the case, then I suspect I'd be with Kirk Ludwig on these matters.

    The problem is that many (although presumably not all) for-profit journals charge comparatively high prices to academic institutions for their journals, and this has serious consequences for access to scholarship given the limited resources of many libraries. One effect of the escalation of journal prices by for-profit journals is that newer journals are less likely to be picked up by libraries that are trying to preserve long runs of an established journal, even in the face of escalating prices. Another effect is that eventually some major journals (including for-profit ones) get cut as libraries try to control spiraling costs of journals. In an academic ecosystem where some journals consume vastly outsize percentages of library budgets, the profession as a whole loses out over time as the number of widely carried journal venues for publication decreases. Online journals could potentially offset this problem, but we clearly aren't there yet.

    For what it is worth, at my institution Phil Studies was twice in the past 5 years looked at as a potential journal to cut because of its cost (over 1k a year, if memory serves). This is obviously an important journal, and I am very glad we were able to retain it. However, we haven't been able to hold on to all the journals we would have liked in those rounds of cuts. Moreover, it is virtually impossible for us to get new journals, even when they are very good or central to the research of a given faculty member. So, keeping Phil Studies has come at the cost of other philosophy journals that would be good for my institution to carry.

    The issue is, I think, just this: given that many of us have an excess of opportunities to referee (certainly, I think, everyone who has commented thus far), and given that the financial practices of some journals crowds out access to other journals, which journals do we want to be supporting with our service labor?

    Reply
  12. Eric Schliesser

    An added complication is that in Continental Europe the ESF Humanities journal rankings are becoming very important to advancement and research grants (fast becoming the only way to get PhD students). Quite a few of the journals ranked 'A' are for-profit. Interestingly (and amusingly), many European grant-agencies (lead by the Germans) are starting to insist that funded research become freely available, which will lead to paradoxical consequences.

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  13. David Velleman

    In some disciplines, the editorial boards of commercial journals have resigned and formed non-profit journals, some of which are open-access as well. This step dissolves some of the problems mentioned above. It leaves the discipline with as many venues for publication, while reducing and in some cases eliminating the costs of access to research. The new venues can retain the reputation of the old ones, because of having retained their editorial boards. There are non-profit organizations that are seeking to publish online journals and would be happy to explore the possibility of giving shelter to fugitive editors. One such organization is the Scholarly Publishing Office at the University of Michigan, which currently publishes Philosophers' Imprint, as well as journals in other disciplines.

    The first question, then, is a question for editors rather than authors or referees: should one edit a commercial journal, given the possibility of editing a non-profit journal instead?

    For authors and referees, the question is not whether they are owed compensation (a non-starter), nor whether they have an obligation to serve the profession (a no-brainer), but whether they should continue to make it easy for editors to keep commercial journals running rather than defect to the non-profit side. And this question is vexed in the same ways as any question about whether to support imperfect institutions. Should one support such institutions for the limited good they do? or should one withdraw support, in the hope of hastening change — of bringing on the revolution?

    Unfortunately, the revolution in academic publishing is slower to materialize than some of us had hoped. (See the overly optimistic mission statement of Philosopers' Imprint, which is now 10 years old, at http://www.philosophersimprint.org/about.html). Still, the question whether to support an imperfect institution will never be easy, and conscientious people are bound to disagree.

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  14. Lee Walters

    Eddy,

    I compliled a list of journal prices a few years ago. The data is here http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctylwa/philosophy_journals.htm but somewhat out of date. I guess the headline that Spinger journals are pricey is still true though.

    The latest prices of spinger journals can be found here http://www.springer.com/librarians/price+lists?SGWID=0-40585-0-0-0.

    Regarding Prof Velleman's point – I think something like this happened with JPL, with Review of Symbolic Logic becomeing the in-house journal of the Association of Symbolic Journal Logic

    Reply
  15. Robert Williams

    Just a quick note on the journal prices that Lee notes (which show some staggering differences at first glance). I think it's important to think about the number of pages/papers produced by a journal in a year. Synthese and Philosophical Studies, for example, are simply very much bigger (more pages, more papers) than some of the others that are cheaper in absolute terms. I don't think this entirely explains the differences, by the way—but they're not quite as stratospherically out of step as it might at first appear.

    Obviously, you can argue back and forth about how to think about these things, but it's worth bearing in mind the page-relative costs when forming an opinion about which journals are gougey and which aren't.

    Reply
  16. Clayton Littlejohn

    It seems that there are at least two issues here. Michael Rosen's observation seemed pretty right to me: if it's either obligatory or supererogatory to shoulder some of the burden of refereeing, the fact that some third party benefits from your work seems like an exceptionally weak reason to refrain from volunteering. Antony Eagle's observation seemed pretty right as well: it's not advisable to support commercial publishers when their practices are bad for the profession and hard on university budgets. Since those of us who don't have tenure need the commercial publishers to land tenure track jobs or build up sufficient research profiles to get tenure, is the best solution for the referees to keep refereeing, the tenured to follow John Gardner's lead and stop submitting, and for the editorial boards of Phil Studies, Synthese, Erkenntnis, etc… to bolt or revolt and give us a few more PIs or JPLs?

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  17. Mike Otsuka

    And see also this useful list of subscription prices per 100 pages of commercial versus non-profit journals that Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen compiled a couple years ago:

    http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2006/09/time_to_end_for.html

    (Scroll down to the fourth comment from the bottom, and see also Suzanne Bertrand's correction re PPR one comment below.)

    Reply
  18. Jeff Horty

    Lee,

    The RSL is not a non-profit journal, I don't think. It is published for the ASL by Cambridge University Press, which sells it to people and libraries, just as the JPL is published for an independent JPL Advisory Committee which has existed in one form or another since the early 1970's.

    I'd be very interested in seeing a per-page price comparison between the RSL and the JPL. Note: I have no idea what this would look like – I'm curious, and would take the information back to Springer. Editors are always fighting with publishers for lower prices for their journals, just as authors are fighting for lower prices for their books.

    True non-profits, edited by a group of saints, are journals like

    Philosophers' Imprint
    Semantics and Pragmatics
    The Australasian Journal of Logic

    And in the realm of book publishing, check out
    Dov Gabbay's

    College Publications
    http://www.collegepublications.co.uk/

    which is also trying to fight higher book prices. That's another thing to support.

    Reply
  19. Neil

    Note that libraries do not pay the list price for journals. Instead, most libraries buy a package of journals, which very significantly lowers the per-journal price. Many academic libraries are part of consortia which negotiate directly with publishers, which lowers the price still further. Unfortunately, consortia agreements with publishers are often governed by commercial-in-confidence agreements, so there is no price transparency.

    Reply
  20. Allen Coates

    For reasons other commenters have noted, I have a hard time understanding why anyone would be terribly upset over the thought that for-profit journals exploit you when you referee for them. If there is a problem here, it surely isn't exploitation.

    However, I have an easy time understanding why those who generally object to for-profit journals would be upset over contributing their labor to them. The fact that the labor is uncompensated would then seem like an extra slap in the face. But if you do object to for-profit journals — and I agree that there are reasons to object — then receiving compensation for refereeing is hardly a solution. That's just a way of saying "I'll contribute my labor to an objectionable practice, for a price." I don't know if it is best to continue refereeing uncompensated for such journals, or to refuse to referee for them. But demanding compensation hardly seems to be the best response.

    Reply
  21. David Velleman

    Neil: I regret to say that your optimism about journal prices to libraries is not warranted. My wife was the director of the science libraries at Michigan, and I can tell you that the cost of journals to academic libraries is staggering. What's worse, the advent of online access has made matters worse, not better, since libraries often end up paying twice for the same journal, once in print and again online.

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  22. Neil

    David, my librarian at Melbourne tells me that the per-journal cost of Springer and Elsevier journals for their library is much lower than the advertized price because Melbourne belongs to a five university consortium. That's my only claim. I have no reason to believe my librarian is lying.

    Reply
  23. Mike Otsuka

    "The RSL is not a non-profit journal, I don't think. It is published for the ASL by Cambridge University Press, which sells it to people and libraries"

    The distinction that's being drawn is between those journals published by non-profit organizations such as university presses and those published by for-profit enterprises such as Springer, where the latter enrich shareholders or other owners, whereas the former don't.

    The fact that an organization sells things doesn't make it a for-profit enterprise. Oxfam, for example, sells second-hand good in its shops. But it's a non-profit organization.

    "True non-profits, edited by a group of saints, are journals like Philosophers' Imprint, Semantics and Pragmatics, The Australasian Journal of Logic"

    I doubt, however, that any editors of any professional philosophical journals, whether published by commercial presses or non-profit organizations, get paid more than a nominal fee, if that. So perhaps they should be canonized as well.

    Reply
  24. Keith DeRose

    I have no significant reasons for or against referring for such journals that haven't already been listed here. My resolution, based on such reasons, is that I give priority to refereeing for other, not-for-profit journals. Since I can only accept a quite small percentage of the requests to referee that I receive, this has amounted to not refereeing at all for the for-profit journals. But others may be in a different situation such that this policy would still allow them to do some refereeing for the for-profits.

    A few years back, I responded to a request to referee for a very expensive philosophy journal by offering to (I think: I'm not sure I'm remembering all the details right) referee 3 papers a year for them in exchange for a free subscription to their journal for my university's library. (If you make a similar offer, I think it may be important that you specify that this may be your school's only subscription to the journal: don't let it be a case of a free *second* subscription to be given on the condition that your school already pays for a first subscription.) They didn't take me up on it.

    Reply
  25. Kati Farkas

    I recently counted the price/100 page for Spinger journals because we were reviewing journal subscriptions for our university library. The prices are those listed on the Springer webpage (institutional rates), I hope I got the page numbers (and the calculations) right.

    Erkenntnis 1009 eur / 870 pages: 116 eur / 100 pp
    Synthese: 2379 eur / 3000 pages: 80 eur / 100 pp
    Phil Studies: 2270 eur / 2250 pages: 100 eur / 100 pp

    compare these with a couple of random examples from other publishers:
    Blackwell:
    Phil and Phenomenological Research 288 eur / 1600 pages: 18 eur / 100 pp
    Taylor and Francis:
    Australasian Journal of Phil: 172 eur / 700 pages: 24 eur / 100 pages

    some other Blackwell journals are quite expensive though, even if not as expensive as Springer:
    Philosophy Compass 634 eur / 1296 pages: 49 eur / 100 pp

    Still, it seems to me that the point is not so much for-profit publishing as such, but the apparently very high prices of Springer journals. In my experience, they charge a lot not only for subscriptions, but also for copyrights. And I am not aware of any reason for these very high prices other than Springer's desire to increase their profit.

    We feel the negative effects of this quite directly. I teach at a small university and we are not part of a big consortium that would get all Springer journals in a package. We have wanted to subscribe to Erkenntnis for a number of years, but given our limited budget, we cannot afford it. A few years ago it was suggested that we should consider giving up Phil Studies, since it takes up about fifth of our journal budget – and perhaps we could get a number of other journals instead. One thing that stopped us from doing this is that apparently our library is the only one in the whole of Hungary that still subscribes to Phil Studies.

    A few years ago there was a discussion of Springer's practice here, I think Tim Crane's comments are still worth reading:

    http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2006/09/time_to_end_for.html

    Reply
  26. Jeff Horty

    Mike:

    I take your point on the meaning of non-profit. What I would like to know is the actual page-cost difference — how much worse does the profit motive make it? That would be a useful number, and it's surprisingly hard to get since these things are often sold to libraries in bundles.

    When I spoke of the editors of free, high-quality, online journals as saints, I was thinking of the effort involved in setting them up. It must have been staggering.

    Setting up the infrastructure, doing the database work, developing style sheets, purchasing and configuring journal management software from still other vendors, making sure material remains online forever — these are all services publishers provide so editors don't have to. Yes, many of them currently charge way, way too much for these services. I don't see how these prices can be sustained for very long.

    Getting good comparative numbers would help drive them down, and the mere existence of high-quality but free competition should do so as well.

    Reply
  27. Anita Bernstein

    It's surprising that this question hasn't been resolved, but I guess the for-profit model for journals is relatively new.

    Academic law, from which I've roamed to this site, offers both more money-making opportunities for faculty and fewer referring tasks; so the related question that I pose originates in my own occupation. But it would come up in philosophy too: If you used research assistants, graduate students, or faculty secretaries in your income-generating activity–a course textbook, for example, that yields royalties–do you owe them some share of the haul?

    I haven't known what to do but decided some years ago that whenever I'm paid for turning in something on which a research assistant or secretary helped, I will give a tithe-like fraction (the proportion varies) of my earnings to that person.

    Reply
  28. bill

    One issue that arises for scholars publishing in English in at least some non-Anglophone countries is whether a journal is listed in the Thomson-Reuters Citation Index. Publications in such journals count for more, in terms of prestige, and sometimes also money, than publications in other refereed journals.

    It's my understanding that Philosophers Imprint and JESP aren't citation indexed. (I checked this a month or so ago, so if there have been very recent changes I don't know about them). If we want to encourage people to publish in not-for-profit Open Access journals, this might be something that editors and editorila boards should think about.

    Reply
  29. Steven Hales

    I don't really see the moral significance of refereeing for for-profit vs. non-profit publishers. The for-profit/non-profit distinction is really just a legal nicety, not an ethical distinction or even a financial one. The Catholic Church is technically not-for-profit, but they are awash in money, and plenty of for-profit businesses are barely making ends meet. The real objection seems to be about Springer journals. And, of those, Phil Studies and Synthese. They cost so damn much (compared with other philosophy journals, not compared with science journals) how come authors and referees aren't getting a cut?

    Yeah, I guess. I can't get too worked up about it. I agree with Michael Rosen; our professional obligations to our peers and to the advance of truth seems more important than moaning that Springer should send me $50 for refereeing a submission. Would the profession be better served by open access journals? Tim Crane and David Velleman are probably right that it would. But we have to stay afloat while rebuilding our raft.

    Reply
  30. Justin Fisher

    I'm curious whether people take refereeing to be obligatory or superegatory?

    If refereeing were obligatory, then I'd agree with the above responses saying it's still obligatory even when it has the side effect of enriching a greedy third party.

    But, if refereeing is supererogatory, then effects on third parties can be highly relevant. I support those people who want to focus their supererogatory contributions on those journals that they think are doing the most good, and I agree that, ceteris paribus, cheaper not-for-profit journals do more good than more expensive for-profit journals.

    My own inclination is to think that not all referee-requests are obligatory, especially not ones from for-profit journals. Insofar as the world would clearly be better if for-profit journals were replaced by not-for-profit competitors, I think it might even be obligatory (in the absence of overriding considerations) *not* to assist for-profit journals when there are not-for-profit alternatives available.

    Reply
  31. Eyja M. Brynjarsdóttir

    I'd like to second Bill's point from above. At my little Northern European university, a paper published in a journal that's either in the Thomson index or A-listed on the ERIH list (http://www.esf.org/research-areas/humanities/research-infrastructures-including-erih/erih-initial-lists.html) gives 20 so-called "research points" whereas a paper in a journal that isn't even on the ERIH list (which holds for Philosophers' Imprint and JESP, among others) gives 5 points. These research points are what counts toward career advancement within the university, and people get an annual bonus directly calculated on the basis of research points earned that year. A paper in, say, Phil. Studies would put about 2500 USD in my pocket while a paper in a non-listed journal would yield 4 times less cash. Not that money should be the main motivation for research (I've some serious doubts about this reward system) but it's still hard to ignore when working for a puny wage.

    I don't know why a journal such as Philosophers' Imprint hasn't made it onto the ERIH-list and I've wondered whether it has something to do with its format.

    Reply
  32. bill

    Eyja:

    It looks from page 2 of this document as though the panels for ERIH have excluded on-line publications as a matter of principle (though they don't mention any plausible principle that could actually justify this.)

    http://www.esf.org/index.php?eID=tx_nawsecuredl&u=0&file=fileadmin/be_user/research_areas/HUM/Documents/ERIH/Methodology_Statements/Philosophy1.pdf&t=1260632454&hash=e1b33a6bb7cdd5801aaee2ae53fbd7ae

    Thomson Reuters is another matter: one might suspect that if they are making money out of journal publishing they might have a commercial interest in not including journals such as Philosophers Imprint. (Or rather, they have an interest in doing what they can to avoid encouraging people to bring into existence prestigious high-quality not-for -profit journals)

    Brian – I'm aware that by bringing up the issue of Thomson Reuters and Phil Imprint I've caused a certain amount of topic drift, for which I apologise. But my first comment did seem relevant to the issue of which journals we should be trying to encourage.

    On that topic: I'd hope that those who are wringing their hands about the ethics of refereeeing for Springer and some other publishing houses are also prepared to express their moral convictions in ways that impose less cost on others and more on themselves than they would if they did nothing beyond turn down refereeing requests for such journals.

    Reply
  33. Dale Miller

    If refereeing is an obligation, it is an imperfect obligation. You might fail to fulfill this obligation if you're a professional philosopher who simply refuses to referee. But that doesn't meant that you're obligated to say yes to every request from every journal, and if you happen to choose not to referee for for-profit journals at all or not to referee for them unless they compensate you, then I don't see how this opens you up to criticism — at least as long as you still do a reasonable amount of refereeing. I'm not particularly exercised about for-profit journals myself. But the result of everyone's adopting the policy of demanding compensation for their refereeing services from for-profit journals would not be that these journals would cost more. It is that they would vanish, since no one would pay what publishers would have to charge for them, and not-for-profit journals would invade the niches they occupy.

    Reply
  34. Hippocampa.wordpress.com

    I guess a rule of thumb is that for every paper you get published, you review two or three papers since it is likely that your paper was reviewed by that number of peers (and some more if you had to make revisions and it was reviewed again).
    If you object to reviewing for commercial journals, then I guess the consequence should also be that you will not submit papers to commercial journals.
    The whole system amazes me though. I do some editorial assisting for a Springer journal, and what they do is make sure the submitted document gets fed into the editorial manager system (that happens in the Philippines) and that it gets stripped off self references in order to allow blind reviews (by lack of a better word, I am not an ablist). The arduous task of finding reviewers is done by people like yours truly. It's arduous because you really want to find a good match between the paper and the reviewer, whilst avoiding picking people who could identify the author and avoiding to overburden prompt and faithful reviewers and at the same time trying to avoid all kinds of biases in your reviewer pool.
    It takes me on average one and a half hour per reviewer, that is: to find a match and to invite this reviewer. Considering that about 30% of the reviewers declines, fails to respond at all or agrees and then doesn't deliver a review, that is a lot of work before anything is even being reviewed yet. Then considering that quite a few submissions need revisions and those revisions need to be reviewed again… That is a lot of work that is done that is work not paid for either, and maybe the peers who consider themselves exploited might want to take that into consideration.
    I guess it is a good idea to specify that when you decline for the reason of the publisher being commercial, you mention this to the editor. Springer's editorial system does offer you the opportunity to do so and then the poor sod trying to match reviewers can remove you from the pool (that is: mark you as permanently unavailable in the system) and not waste anyone's time by inviting you again.
    I'd rather be working for an open source journal, for the obvious reasons, but heck.
    Due to the economic crisis I will be unemployed per January 1, so if anyone needs an editorial assitant for an ethics journal, you're welcome to contact me 🙂

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