Peer review is a cornerstone of academic publishing. It is how we ensure that published science is valid. Peer review, by which researchers judge the quality of papers submitted to journals, stops pseudoscience from being peddled as equivalent to rigorous research. At the same time, the peer-review system is under considerable strain as the number of journal articles published each year increases, jumping from 1.9 million in 2016 to 2.8 million in 2022, according to Scopus and Web of Science.
All these articles require experienced peer reviewers, with papers typically taking months to go through peer review. This cannot be blamed alone on the time taken to post manuscripts and reviews back and forth between editors and reviewers, but instead is a result of high workloads and, fundamentally, how busy everyone is. Given peer reviewers need to be expert in their field, the pool of potential reviewers is inherently limited. A bottleneck is emerging as the number of papers grows quicker than the number of researchers in academia.
Scientific publishers have long been central to managing the process of peer review. For anyone outside academia, the concept of peer review may seem illogical given that researchers spend their time on it without much acknowledgement. While initiatives are in place to change this such as outstanding-reviewer awards and the Web of Science recording reviewer data, there is no promise that such recognition will be considered when looking for permanent positions or applying for promotion.
The impact of open access
Why, then, do we agree to review? As an active researcher myself in quantum physics, I peer-reviewed more than 40 papers last year and I’ve always viewed it as a duty. It’s a necessary time-sink to make our academic system function, to ensure that published research is valid and to challenge questionable claims. However, like anything people do out of a sense of duty, inevitably there are those who will seek to exploit it for profit.
Many journals today are open access, in which fees, known as article-processing charges, are levied to make the published work freely available online. It makes sense that costs need to be imposed – staff working at publishing companies need paying; articles need editing and typesetting; servers need be maintained and web-hosting fees have to be paid. Recently, publishers have invested heavily in digital technology and developed new ways to disseminate research to a wider audience.
Open access, however, has encouraged some publishers to boost revenues by simply publishing as many papers as possible. At the same time, there has been an increase in retractions, especially of fabricated or manipulated manuscripts sold by “paper mills”. The rise of retractions isn’t directly linked to the emergence of open access, but it’s not a good sign, especially when the academic publishing industry reports profit margins of roughly 40% – higher than many other industries. Elsevier, for instance, publishes nearly 3000 journals and in 2023 its parent company, Relx, recorded a profit of £1.79bn. This is all money that was either paid in open-access fees or by libraries (or private users) for journal subscriptions but ends up going to shareholders rather than science.
It’s important to add that not all academic publishers are for-profit. Some, like the American Physical Society (APS), IOP Publishing, Optica, AIP Publishing and the American Association for the Advancement of Science – as well as university presses – are wings of academic societies and universities. Any profit they make is reinvested into research, education or the academic community. Indeed, IOP Publishing, AIP Publishing and the APS have formed a new “purpose-led publishing” coalition, in which the three publishers confirm that they will continue to reinvest the funds generated from publishing back into research and “never” have shareholders that result in putting “profit above purpose”.
But many of the largest publishers – the likes of Springer Nature, Elsevier, Taylor and Francis, MDPI and Wiley – are for-profit companies and are making massive sums for their shareholders. Should we just accept that this is how the system is? If not, what can we do about it and what impact can we as individuals have on a multi-billion-dollar industry? I have decided that I will no longer review for, nor submit my articles (when corresponding author) to, any for-profit publishers.
I’m lucky in my field that I have many good alternatives such as the arXiv overlay journal Quantum, IOP Publishing’s Quantum Science and Technology, APS’s Physical Review X Quantum and Optica Quantum. If your field doesn’t, then why not push for them to be created? We may not be able to dismantle the entire for-profit publishing industry, but we can stop contributing to it (especially those who have a permanent job in academia and are not as tied down by the need to publish in high impact factor journals). Such actions may seem small, but together can have an effect and push to make academia the environment we want to be contributing to. It may sound radical to take change into your own hands, but it’s worth a try. You never know, but it could help more money make its way back into science.
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