Publishing: The peer-review scam

If anyone wants a good idea for a startup in the academic journals space, I'd recommend looking into vetting peer reviewers as part of the article submission/review process. There have been a few high profile cases of people faking their peer reviews recently. At Sage we dealt with a big case of that earlier in the year and retracted 60 papers. A new case this week seems like it involves 5 published papers and a bunch that got caught before being published. Note that both those cases (and some more) use ScholarOne as the submission management platform.

In particular, the new hotness in the academic journal world is open access journals, and OA journals need to be particularly careful about bad stuff slipping through peer review. A few OA journals from Hindawi just lost their impact factor (source: http://scholarlyoa.com/2014/10/14/the-scientific-world-journ...), not due to outright peer review fraud, but due to other "abnormal citation patterns". For OA journals getting or losing an impact factor has a HUGE impact on the # of submissions (which are directly tied to revenue), so there's a big need to ensure you don't get caught with your pants down when it comes to the peer review process. So if you had a product that gave a publisher higher confidence in the integrity of the peer review process I imagine you'd be able to get a number of bites from big and small publishers alike.

I'll quote the Bruce Schneier quote from the article. “There are almost never technical solutions to social problems.”

I use the term "valueless" in a very careful and specific meaning. It does not mean the work is without merit or doesn't have large impact or benefits to society, rather it simply means the quality of the work has no value to the peer reviewers or to the journal itself.

* The peer reviewers are donating their time and generally getting nothing in return from reading the work other than seeing what other developments are going in in the field.

* The journal gets nothing from work itself. They are solely in the business of collecting author fees and fees from library.

In this context, I think it is accurate to describe most work as "valueless" to those involved in the system. This naturally leads to sloppy peer review and publishing practices.

What I would like to see is a system that makes all players have skin in the game for the quality of the work.

How to do this? One way would be a new kind of journal where everything published has to be patentable. The journal would pay for the patenting costs and the split any potential licensing fees with the authors/funding institutions in some way. Peer reviewers would be paid and/or get a small cut of the patent.

This would make everyone in the process have "skin in the game" in the value and quality of the work being published. I don't know if the economics of such a model would work, but I think it would be a fascinating experiment.

There is academic merit in being a reviewer. Being a reviewer for the New England Journal of Medicine would surely favor any tenure committee or grant application. Perhaps one could argue that's hard to perceive, but I think it's safe to say any PhD sees the value.

The journals, on the other hand, have abided by very loose business practices with exorbatant margins enabled to a great degree by the perception of the academic honor system, for a long time. Their business models and methods are thankfully coming under much deserved scrutiny.

Should researchers be honorable people? Yes. Will you always find dishonorable behavior in a set of 100 people, over a lifetime? Yes.