Since @poritzj has been active here, I am taking the liberty of reposting his really good (and hard) questions about doing reviews for academic Journals. He shared these in the Creative Commons Slack as well as in/on Twitter (maybe elsewhere).
Question about morality/practicality of open access…
I regularly get asked to review scholarly papers for academic journals in the areas of my disciplinary expertise.
I used to do it because I thought that this was the way the field advances, by collective effort. To be honest, I also liked to be able to say on my CV that I review for . And it is also a way to keep on top of what topics are getting the most attention this very moment by the researchers in my field.
.
But the journals are rarely (never?) entirely open access … maybe they have one of those deals where authors pay huge APCs to go open, I honestly have never looked into it. (Mostly, recently, it’s been Taylor and Francis- and Springer Verlag-owned journals, and journals from the IEEE (a professional society).)I’ve been thinking in recent years that I should work very hard never to publish my own work in fora which are not OA … hence my question:
Does my reviewing work for these closed journals support the inequitable system of scholarly publishing that I abhor, or is should I just support the decision of the researchers who chose where to submit their work?
I should note that of course I am not paid for my time doing the reviewing work … but there is an argument that I am compensated by that line of my CV and by my very early previews of current work. And, anyway, I don’t like the neoliberal view that everything has to be directly compensated – maybe sometimes we just work collectively for a better world – so I don’t know that I think the issue of my (lack of) payment is relevant.
Any thoughts, friends?
Please join in a conversation here about journal reviews in or not in open access journals.