open access | Rene Bekkers

"Here’s CRAP: a new policy regarding review requests I’ve decided to try out. CRAP means Conditional Review Acceptance Policy, the new default response to review requests. I will perform review only if the journal agrees to publish the article in a Free Open Access mode – making the article publicly available, without charging any fees for it from universities, authors, or readers. Here’s the story behind CRAP. If you’re an academic, you will recognize the pattern: you get an ‘invitation’ or a ‘request’ to review a paper submitted to the journal because ‘you have been identified as an expert on the topic’. If you’re serious about the job, you easily spend half a day reading the article, thinking about the innovations in the research questions, the consistency of the hypotheses, wondering why previous research was ignored, vetting the reliability and the validity of the data and methods used, checking the tables, leaving aside the errors in references which the author copied from a previously published article. As a reviewer accepting the task to review a paper you sometimes get a 25% discount on the hugely overpriced books by the publisher or access to journal articles which your university library already paid for ... What can we do about this? Should the volunteer work we do be monetized? Should we go on strike to ask for an adequate wage? According to the profitability of the journal perhaps? So that the higher the profit the publisher makes on a journal, the higher the compensation for reviewers? This would do nothing to reduce the public bad. Instead, I think we should move into Free Open Access publishing. The public nature of knowledge, the production of which is made possible by public funding, should be accessible for the public. It is fair that some compensation is given to the journal’s publisher for the costs they will have to incur to copy-edit the article and to host the electronic manuscript submission system. These costs are relatively low. I am leaving the number crunching for some other time or some other geek, but my hunch is that if we would monetize our volunteer work as reviewers this would be enough to pay for the publication of one article.  Academic publishers are not stupid. They see the push towards open access coming, and are now actively offering open access publication in their journals. But everything comes at a price. So they are charging authors (i.e., authors’ funders) fees for open access publication, ranging from several hundred to thousands of dollars. Obviously, this business model is quite profitable – otherwise commercial publishers would not adopt it. Thugs and thieves are abusing the fee-based open access model by creating worthless journals that will publish any article, cashing the fees and to make a profit. The more respectable publishers are now negotiating with universities and public funders of science about a better model, circumventing the authors. Undoubtedly the starting point for such a model is that the academic publication industry remains profitable. In all of this, the volunteer work of reviewers is still the backbone of high quality journal publications. And it is still not compensated.  So my plea to fellow academics is simple. We should give CRAP as our new default response. Agree to review if the publisher agrees to publish the article in Free Open Access. It may be the only way to force Free Open Access into existence. I will keep you updated on the score."