A New Year's letter to academic publishers

My relationships with journals are rather like a bad marriage: a mixture of dependency and hatred. Part of the problem is that journal editors and academics often have a rather different view of the process. Scientific journals could not survive without academics. We do the research, often spending several years of our lives to produce a piece of work that is then distilled into one short paper, which the fond author invariably regards as a fascinating contribution to the field. But when we try to place our work in a journal, we find that it's a buyer's market: most journals are overwhelmed with more submitted papers than they can cope with, and rejection rates are high. So there is a total mismatch: we set out naively dreaming of journals leaping at the opportunity to secure our best work, only to be met with coldness and rejection.  As in the best Barbara Cartland novels, for a lucky few, persistence is ultimately rewarded, and the stony-hearted editor is won over. But many potential authors fall by the wayside long before that point.

But times are changing. We are moving from a traditional "dead tree technology" model, where journals have to be expensively printed and distributed, to electronic-only media. These not only cost less to produce, but also avoid the length limits that traditionally have forced journals to be so highly selective. Alongside the technological changes, there has been rapid growth of the Open Access movement. The main motivations behind this movement were idealistic (making science available to all) and economic (escaping the stranglehold of expensive library subscriptions to closed-access journals). It's early days, but I am starting to sense that there's another consequence of the shift, which is that, as the field opens up, publishers are starting to change how they approach authors: less as supplicants, and more as customers.

In the past, the top journals had no incentive to be accommodating to authors. There were too many of us chasing scarce page space. But there are now some new boys on the open access block, and some of them have recognised that if they want to attract people to publish with them, they should listen to what authors want. And if they want academics to continue to referee papers for no reward, then they had better treat them well too.

This really is not too hard to do. I have two main gripes with journals, a big one and a little one. The big one concerns my time. The older I get, the less patient I am with organizations that behave as if I have all the time in the world to do the small bureaucratic chores that they wish to impose on me. For instance, many journals specify pointless formatting requirements for an initial submission. I really, really resent jumping through arbitrary hoops when the world is full of interesting things I could be doing. And cutting my toenails is considerably more interesting than reformatting references.

I recently encountered a journal whose website required you to enter details (name/address/email) of all authors in order to submit a pre-submission enquiry. Surely the whole point of a pre-submission enquiry is to save time, so you can get a quick decision on whether it's likely to be worth your while battling with the submission portal! There's also the horror of journals that require signatures from all authors at the point when you submit a manuscript: seems a harmless enough requirement, except that authors are often widely dispersed - on maternity leave or sailing the Atlantic - by the time the paper is submitted. The idea is to avoid fraud, of course, but like so many ethics regulations, the main effect of this requirement is to encourage honest, law-abiding people to take up forgery.

Oh, and then there are the 'invitations to review' (makes it sound so enticing, like being invited to a party), which require you to login in order to register your response – which for me invariably means selecting the option that I have forgotten my password, then looking at email to find how to update the password, meanwhile getting distracted by other email messages so I forget what I was doing, and eventually returning to the site to find it wants me now to change the password and enter mandatory contact details before it will accept my response. Well, no.  I'm usually a good citizen but I'm afraid I've just stopped responding to those.

You'd think the advent of electronic submission would make life easier, but in fact it can just open up a whole new world of tiny, fiddly things that you are required to do before your paper is submitted. Each individual thing is usually fairly trivial, but they do add up. So, for instance, if you'd like your authors to suggest referees, please allow them to paste in a list. DO NOT require them to cut and paste title, forename, initial, surname, email and institution into your horrible little boxes for each of six potential referees.  It all takes TIME. And we have more important things in life to be getting on with. Including doing the science that allows us to get the point of writing a paper.

Even worse, some of the requirements of journals are just historical artefacts with no more rationale than male nipples.  Here's a splendid post by Kate Jeffery which in fact was the impetus for this blogpost. I thought of Kate when, having carefully constructed a single manuscript document including figures, as instructed by the Instructions for Authors, I got to the submission portal to be strictly told that ON NO ACCOUNT must the figures be included in the main manuscript. Instead, they had to be separated, not only from the manuscript, but also from their captions (which had to be put as a list at the end of the manuscript). This makes sense ONCE THE PAPER IS ACCEPTED, when it needs to be typeset.  But not at the point of initial submission, when the paper's fate is undecided: it may well be rejected, and if not, it will certainly require revision. And meanwhile, you have referees tearing their hair out trying to link up the text, the Figures and their captions.

The smaller gripe is just about treating people with respect. I do have a preference for journal editors whose correspondence indicates that they are a human being and not an automaton. I've moaned about this before, in an old post describing a taxonomy of journal editors, but my feeling is that in the three years since I wrote that, things have got worse rather than better. Publishers and editors may think they make their referees happy by writing and telling them how useful their review of a paper has been – but the opposite effect is created if it is clear that this is a form letter that goes to all referees, however hopeless.It is really better to be ignored than to be sent an insincere, meaningless email - it just implies that the sender thinks you are stupid enough to be taken in by it.

So my message to publishers in 2014 is really very simple. The market is getting competitive and if you want to attract authors to send their best work to you, and referees to keep reviewing for you, you need to become more sensitive to our needs.  Two journals that appear to be trying hard are eLife and PeerJ, who avoid most of the bad practices I have outlined. I am hoping their example will cause others to up their game. We are mostly very simple souls who are not hard to please, but we hate having our time wasted, and we do like being treated like human beings.

Time for academics to withdraw free labour

© www.CartoonStock.com

Jack is a sheep farmer. He gets some government subsidies, and also works long hours to keep his sheep happy and healthy. When his beasts are ready for slaughter, he offers them to an abattoir. The abattoir is very choosy and may reject Jack’s sheep, which is a disaster for him, as there is no other route to the market. If he is lucky the abattoir will accept the animals, slaughter them and sell them, at a large profit, to the supermarket. Jack does not see any of this money. The populace struggle to afford the price of meat, but the government has no control over this. When Jack feels like a nice piece of lamb, he buys it from the supermarket. Meanwhile, Jack provides his services for free as an inspector of other farmers’ animals.

Crazy story, right? But that’s the model that academic publishing follows. Academics work their butts off to get research funding, often from government. They then do the research and write up and submit it for publication. They run the gauntlet of picky reviewers and editors to get the work accepted for publication. Once it is published, it appears in a journal which is sold on to academic institutions for large profits. Post publication, the academic often has to pay a cost equivalent to several hardback books to get a formatted electronic copy of the article. Meanwhile, the journals justify this by arguing they have extensive costs. But in fact, it is the academic community that does the bulk of the work for free, acting as editors and peer reviewers. Increasingly, they are expected also to do copy editing and graphic design, tasks that were previously undertaken by professional journal staff.

It has taken many years for the torpid academic community to wake up to this ludicrous situation, but things are slowly starting to change. In some fields, academics are starting to take things into their own hands and cut commercial publishers out of the loop, but this still the exception rather than the rule. A more widely adopted innovation has been Open Access publishing. On the one hand, electronic publishing has made it possible for journal papers to be posted online and made freely accessible. On the other, major funders, notably NIH in the USA and the Wellcome Trust in the UK, have insisted that researchers whom they fund must make their published work Open Access. Obviously, something has to give: the publishers are not going to do their work for nothing. But the system does work, with a combination of new journals that are Open Access from the start, and older ones agreeing to make selected articles Open Access, in both cases for a fee. In general, the funders agree to pay the charge.

This week, however, a story broke suggesting that the traditional publishers are trying to fight back and force NIH to backtrack on its Open Access policy. Things hotted up with this post from Michael Eisen who noted that one major publisher, Elsevier, has been lobbying a NY Congresswoman, Carolyn Maloney, to persuade her to support a bill that would limit Open Access publishing. Harvard University gave a detailed response to the bill, which can be found here.

I want my response to this story to go beyond just tut-tutting and shaking my head.  Academics do have some power here. We provide the articles for Elsevier journals, and we do a lot of unpaid work reviewing and editing for them. None of us wants to restrict our opportunities for publishing, but these days there are a lot of outlets available. When deciding where to submit a paper, I suspect that most academics, like me, take little notice of who the publisher of a journal is. I focus more on whether the journal has a good editor, my prior experience of publication lags, and whether Open Access is available. But as from now, I shall include publisher in the criteria I adopt, and avoid Elsevier as far as I can. Also, if asked to review for a journal, I’ll check if it is in the Elsevier stable, using this handy website, and if so, I’ll explain why I’m not prepared to review. I suggest that if you are as annoyed as I am by this story, you do likewise, and refuse to engage with Elsevier journals.

Addendum, 10th January 2012

Some people on Twitter have asked if people should be paid for the work they do as author/editor/reviewer. Definitely not. It would just make matters worse, because publishers would factor in these costs and charge even more for journals.

No, I just want a change in the model whereby publishers make enormous and undeserved profits from academics. There are various ways this could be done.

1. The publishers could charge less: currently if you try and download a single journal article, you are charged around £20, even though the production costs are minimal.

2. Retain the current model but remove commercial publishers from the loop, with publication of research limited to learned societies, universities, funders.

3. Retain the current model but make all journals Open Access, with the funder or university paying a one-off publication fee.

4. More radically, move to a system such as arxiv, which I discussed here.

On the whole, academics are an interesting bunch. We’re not all that interested in money, but we are skilled and can produce things of commercial value. It’s a golden opportunity for someone who does want to make money to step in a make a profit. Publishers like Elsevier would have been fine if they hadn’t been so greedy and had charged modest sums for their product. Instead, they pushed costs as high as the market could bear, making huge profits, while at the same time giving authors less and less. (Copy-editors have become an endangered species). Instead of facilitating scientific communication, they have put obstacles in the way. But part of the blame lies with the academic community, who have been far too passive. We should have tackled this years ago before it got out of hand.