The Dumpster Fire That Is Academic Publishing

Discipline and Publish

For about three years, I was a reviewer on the highest rated academic journal in its field. I am not a professional academic. I do not have a PhD. But my field at the time was a domain of management and I had a sympathy for academic study. I did spend a decade teaching part-time on a Masters program for beer money and laughs. I was recommended as a reviewer by a prominent figure in this domain notorious for both his intellectual pretentions and volatile personal relationships with whom I currently have a relationship that is both distant and cordial (these things are correlated).

I cannot remember exactly how many papers I reviewed - say about 10. Of these, there was only one I outright rejected. The author had simply summarized a few magazine articles and had brought nothing new to the party. As this was the first article I reviewed, I did wonder if it was some kind of initiation ritual from the editor. If it was then I passed. The subsequent articles I reviewed all had some redeeming features and so I made my suggestions to improve them - mostly around greater clarity on methods and stronger recommendations for practical application and further research.

In theory, the process was double blind. In about 60% of cases, it was possible to identify the author as academics love to cite themselves. In one case, the article was suspiciously well-written. I emailed a friend of mine, Mr X, who was by far the best writer in our God-forsaken discipline and asked: “Have you recently submitted an article to the Journal of Blah Blah?”

“Maybe”
”Excellent. I am reviewing it.”

“We’re not supposed to talk! The process is supposed to be blind!”
”Look, I’m cracking into this beer and I’ll be pretty blind soon.”

The compromise that we came to is that I would acknowledge to the editor that I suspected I knew who the author of this paper was, I would acknowledge our relationship, and make my suggestions anyway. I am the kind of a-hole who likes nothing more than correcting a close friend.

In general, the whole process was frustrating. I would have to accept or reject papers on their title alone and sometimes I would be assigned a paper on a topic that I was shaky about. However once accepted, I had to review. On top of which, this was all unpaid labour for a very wealthy commercial academic publishing company. After a few years, I tired of this game and resigned. It had been an eye-opening experience.

I value academic research. The frequent reference to the papers and books of academic researchers in my posts here should confirm that. And yet all is not well in academic publishing.

• Most academics have KPIs to publish in journals each year. So a market of low-quality “predatory” journals has arisen to fulfil this need.

• A focus on novel and headline-grabbing results has led to editors discounting replication studies - which has led to a “replication crisis” in many scientific fields.

• In fields where lots of money is at stake - e.g. clinical trials for pharmaceutical research - much negative research is simply not published.

• Scientific fraud is rampant and some estimates such that up to 100,000 papers should be retracted annually. Some dodgy researchers have even taken to suing whistle-blowers (apparently honesty researchers are impervious to irony).

• Above all, the academic publishing industry encourages academics to communicate to ever smaller cohorts of peers. Can you really be said to have advanced human knowledge if your readership is smaller than the average WhatsApp group? A number of academics have said to me point-blank that efforts to open up their work to audiences outside academia would have a negative effect on their careers. This is a tragedy.

All this is a long-winded way of saying that when the “Grievance Studies” thing came out, my response was: You don’t know the half of it.

“As much as I value Reviewer 2’s opinion…”