Peer review: are you actually volunteering your time?
“Wait, reviewers shouldn’t be getting paid for their work — reviewing should be a volunteer service in academia!”
To me, volunteering your time means forgoing payment for your time. But how is this affected when someone else is cashing in on your time instead? My experience of volunteering my time over the years has tended to be for some event or other, often a fundraising activity, for charity, or maybe educational outreach. Importantly for this post, though, is that I am fairly sure I have never volunteered my time but then had a 3rd party charge a commercial, profit-generating price for it.
In the industry that is scholarly communication, notions of journal or content brands, as much as they are claimed and protected by publishers, are only ever created and maintained in partnership with the editors and reviewers who handle the editorial functions at the journal — who enable the creation of a product which, in the subscription model, can be sold. But the point of this post is that this is a different kind of volunteering — when someone else is commercially charging for your services, and improving their brand via your services.
While we aim to help challenge this, at Collabra: Psychology it is much more nuanced than simply getting paid. What Collabra: Psychology actually does is allow reviewers (and editors for that matter) to make decisions over a portion of the revenue that the journal earns from its Article Processing Charges, after we (UC Press) have covered our costs. (This classic chart to the left is a reminder of the process, and check out the original below!)
One of the decision options for reviewers and editors is that they can elect to pay themselves. (Note: a big difference from “getting paid.”) And the other two decisions involve paying these earnings forward, either to our waiver fund, or to their institution’s open access fund, if it has one. And that’s the volunteering part — reviewers and editors have actively decided, with either of these two latter options, to volunteer their time.
What if 1% of all revenue from Elsevier’s, Wiley’s, Springer’s journals was shared with institutions at which reviewers were based?
I am not, of course, saying that all scholarly publishing pre-Collabra is a questionable practice of selling volunteered time. Plenty of publishers charge a fair price and ensure that some direct benefits, as well as indirect benefits, are passed through to the people that actually handle the papers. (I’m thinking society publishers, as one example, who run a profitable journal but support the field which contains the reviewers. And University Presses, with their traditional focus on scholarship over hot topics.) But we all know that some publishers are getting very, very rich, while nothing tangible is making its way back to the primary volunteers making this happen. I’ve always wondered whether the passionate criticisms of the big, usually commercial, publishers, and various boycotts over the last 15 years would have been the same if others, in addition to the publishers, had been benefiting from all the considerable business success? E.g. what if 1% of all revenue from just Elsevier’s, Wiley’s, Springer’s journals was shared with institutions at which reviewers were based? (Just FYI, if you check those links to the annual reports in the last sentence, 1% would be at least 50 million dollars.)
Do you think the work of volunteer reviewers is worth 1% of this revenue? Would it be impossible to allow them to have a say in this?
Either way, our long term hope at UC Press, for Collabra: Psychology, is that all the volunteer work of reviewers and editors continues, and that paid-forward earnings will help enable more open access publishing for everyone.
But, of course, if you want to elect to pay yourself, that is fine too. The most important thing is that it is never our decision, only yours, and that kind of ownership is what volunteering should be all about.
— Dan Morgan, Publisher, Collabra: Psychology
