Paying for peer review

I’ve been writing about various challenges and crises in scientific publishing since the origins of this blog back in the distant days of the Nature Science Network. Several million papers have been submitted, reviewed (with varying degrees of rigour), and published (at varying costs) in the years since, but I think it’s fair to say that the whole system is still not quite perfect. As workloads of practising scientists continue to spiral, one persistent challenge is finding qualified people to review the torrent of submissions at any one journal. And one potential (and probably partial) solution to this, which appeared in my feed most recently in this post from Trevor Branch, is for the publishing giants to divert some of their profits into actually paying reviewers for their time.

Now as I’ve written before, I am in general an advocate for paying people for the work they do, and given a Truss-related 40% hike in my mortgage repayments I’m not going to sniff at the opportunity to supplement my income, especially if it is just doing things I do anyway. But I have a few questions about how a system of payment for reviewing would work, in practice. (All of this assumes good actors all round, committed to thorough and conscientious reviews, which seems reasonable as I can’t imagine anybody playing the scientific publishing system for personal gain…)

First things first: how much? If you start to pay people for their time, you need to pay enough for it not to be insulting. Funding agencies are increasingly paying reviewers or panel members, and in my experience rates for this come in between about £200 and £500 a day. So that might be a reasonable benchmark - considerably less than one might get for private consultancy as a PhD-qualified scientist, but not insultingly low. The next job is to scale that to how long it takes to review a manuscript, where I will throw out a figure of 2-3 hours (this is broadly in line with what people have self-reported, although there is a lot of variation and quite a long right hand tail). So let’s call it somewhere around ⅓ to ½ a day - suggesting that something in the region of £100-£200 might be a reasonable fee for a single review. (Of course, people may favour some kind of an increasing scale from non-profits through society journals to the big glamour mags.)

My second thought was how would this be administered, practically? Although publishing is concentrated into a few massive publishers, there are still quite a number of players in the game - would you be contracted to everyone you reviewed for? And how would it be taxed? This might be obvious for those in jurisdictions where tax returns are an integral part of everyone’s working life, but for those of us in PAYE systems where tax on our primary income is deducted at source, little bits of extra income coming in from multiple ‘employers’ could cause a massive headache, out of proportion to the few hundred pounds extra per year it brings in.

Ultimately, would I be more likely to agree to a review if I were getting paid for it? At this relatively comfortable stage in my career - mortgage notwithstanding, I’m doing OK, and I do have ‘scholarship’ hours baked into my workload - probably not. But there have been times when it would have made a significant difference, for instance between post-doc contracts when things were very tight. So I’d be interested in seeing more concrete plans for how this could work, and to reassure me that publishers would not respond by simply increasing fees, effectively directing even more public money into private hands.

Taking responsibility for shit

It’s interesting, the questions people ask on finding out you’re a marine biologist. Recently I’ve noticed a theme: what people (in the UK anyway) want to know is what do I think about all the sewage going into the sea? Now I’m as prone as anyone to taking the ‘actually it’s a bit more complicated than you may have heard’ stance on many issues, but here I am pretty happy to stick with a simple ‘yep, it’s pretty bad isn’t it?’ 

Of course, it is a bit more complicated than this - for instance, my local river, the Don, is far cleaner now than it was 50 years ago when it was “…grossly polluted and fishless throughout almost its entire catchment”. And for a few weeks back in the late 1990s I worked on a campaign to try to stop South West Water from polluting the coast around Portsmouth with raw sewage. So none of this is new, but, due no doubt to recent coverage of the low performance and high profits of the privatised water companies, this is certainly an issue that has ‘cut through’.

However. The other morning in a taxi to the station to catch an early train, when my driver raised this, what he was specifically disgusted about was ‘nappies and condoms and sanitary towels on the beaches’. Now I’m not about to leap to the defence of the water companies, but - those kinds of things should be nowhere near the sewage system. They should be going in the bin, not down the loo. And if they are flushed away, that’s on us. Time to take some responsibility.

[Naturally I didn’t actually say any of this to the cabbie. He was quite a forceful personality, it was 6.30am, and I’m English - I settled for an ambiguous tut.]

I have a similar feeling when I see headlines like this one in The Guardian yesterday: “Survey finds that 60 firms are responsible for half of world’s plastic pollution”. I mean yes, these firms are producing the plastic. But we’re consuming it. To be fair - the article itself does touch on this tension between individual and corporate responsibility. But even if these multinationals follow through on their pledges to switch to recycled plastic or bioplastics or some other material - all of these have environmental impacts, sometimes really significant ones. Ultimately: as long as we keep buying shit, they’ll keep selling it.

Treating the symptoms or the cause of a crisis

Imagine. You are walking along the coast and encounter a stranded dolphin. Every instinct is to try to alleviate this stress, to get the animal back out to sea.

But imagine this scene is replicated all along the beach, in fact over thousands of kilometres of coastline: countless dolphins in distress. And imagine you know exactly why this is happening: let’s say it’s directly attributable to the activities of some colossal multinational offshore industry interfering with their sonar.

So maybe getting the dolphins back to sea is not a great idea. Maybe they need to be temporarily taken into captivity.

A major effort to build a dolphinarium ensues. Maybe it’s part-funded by the multinational company. Maybe it’s widely publicised in the global media. A new home providing temporary respite for three, four, even five dolphins.

Perhaps everyone agrees that the only way the dolphins have a long-term future is for the multinational to transition to less damaging activities - the technology already exists, all that’s needed is some political will.

Those behind the dolphinarium argue powerfully that it is a necessary short-term emergency response, keeping some dolphins healthy while the larger issues are addressed. Others argue equally powerfully that it is at best a drop in the ocean, at worst ineffective greenwashing, that can never match the scale of the disaster.

This thought experiment was prompted by an atypically enlightening twitterx discussion I encountered yesterday about our response to the ongoing coral bleaching crisis, and in particular whether small-scale efforts such as reef restoration have any positive role to play. Is anything other than rapid decarbonisation of the global economy mere dolphinarium building? (You can jump into the discussion here and work forwards and back).

Honestly, I don’t know. But it’s hard to stand by and watch local catastrophes unfold, even if their causes are global. I mean, most of us would still try to save the dolphin, wouldn’t we?

Header image © Danny Copeland https://www.dannyunderwater.com/: bleached coral in New Caledonia in 2016