Refereeing

Fairly recently I submitted a referee report to one of the big academic publishers. At the end of the process, it asked me whether I wanted it to tell ORCiD that I had submitted a referee report. Instinctively I said no. Later, I started wondering why. It seemed with hindsight that I had good reasons.

As is commonplace now, we know that we do the real work for academic publishing: we do the research, we write the papers and submit them, we edit the journals, we referee the papers. The publishers simply publish them (often screwing them up in the process), collect the APCs, and pay very large dividends to their shareholders.

As I have also said more than once, I don’t need to do this now, and usually don’t do it for single-author papers: I put them on the arXiv and maybe publish them in a diamond journal. But often I have junior coauthors for whom publication in a paid-for journal matters, so I go through the charade.

For there is one thing that publishers give us for our money (although, of course, diamond journals do also): the ability to tick the box saying “refereed article”. This matters to the bean-counters who judge our research and decide on things like promotion. Without the referees, the publishers couldn’t offer that. So they need the referees.

So how do I justify my instinctive reaction to that question? Two reasons, that I can see:

• The refereeing process is supposed to be anonymous. I know from teaching cryptography that any small leakage of information can help to break the cipher.
• The more important reason, I think, is that the publishers know they need us and have to try to keep us on board. Despite their huge profits, they can’t pay us a fair price for our time, so they have to find some artificial way to give us a pat on the back, and this seems to be the current way of doing that.

I am getting old, and I can’t work at the rate that I once could. I get far more referee requests than I can possibly deal with. A fair proportion of these are outside my area of expertise, and another fair proportion are not well written. Both of these categories take much longer to deal with. So I admit it, I am not as efficient a referee as I once was, and all too often miss deadlines.

But I keep doing it for several reasons. First, and most important, collegiality: my papers have to be refereed for my co-authors’ sake, even if not for mine, and this is just return for that (though I referee far more papers than I write). But as well, occasionally I can help the authors: maybe I know something they don’t, or maybe I can spot the trick that will solve one of their problems, and I am under the illusion that it helps them if I point this out. Sometimes, too, this leads to new collaborations and new friendships. And finally, many of the editors are my friends, and I know well the trouble they go through finding referees, so I try to help as I can.

Incidentally, I see that the term “reviewer” has almost completely supplanted “referee”. It is probably more appropriate. A referee, in a sporting event, makes decisions which can only be overruled with great difficulty, whereas an academic referee simply advises the editors. I have argued with referees in the past, and I am glad to say that usually editors have made sensible decisions in these cases. The referee’s word is not law, even though it must be treated with respect.