I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Peer-Review System
I have reviewed manuscripts for for-profit publishers but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to stop working for free.

Peer-reviewing is facing a test to its usefulness unlike any test it faced in modern times.
It’s not just that it is biased. Or that that reviewers are usually bitterly divided over the next set of experiments. Or even that it takes so long that the first author might well lose the next job search cycle.
The dilemma — which for-profit publishers do not fully grasp — is that many of the reviewers of scholar communication are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of the system and its worst inclinations.
I would know. I am one of them.
To be clear, ours is not the popular “resistance” of Michael Eisen. We want peer-review to succeed and think that many reviews have already made manuscripts better and clearer.
But we believe our first duty is to science and are irritated that scholar communication continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the wealth of for-profit publishers when we get nothing.
That is why many reviewers have vowed to do what we can to not work for free and tell our colleagues to resist their misguided impulses to accept more papers to review for free for for-profit companies.
The root of the problem is that scientists are suckers. Anyone who works with them knows that they will do anything to get recognition from a stranger and add another line to their 27-page CV.
Although they are selected due to their wisdom and logic, scientists show little affinity for basic economic principles: no free labor for rich for- profit publishers and no free transfer of public money. At best, scientists have complained about those things in Twitter. At worst, they don’t care.
It may be cold comfort in this chaotic era, but the citizen of this world should know that there are adults in the room. We fully recognize what is happening. And we are trying to do what’s right even if declining a manuscript means that we can’t add another line to our CV.
This isn’t the work of the so-called “Reviewer 3”. It’s the work of many reviewers.
There is a quiet resistance within the peer-review system of people choosing to put science first. But the real difference will be made by more scientists rising above their instinct, reaching across their computers and declining to review shit for free in favor of a single one: for-profit publishers.
