The Dark Side of Scientific Publishing
The enormous pressure on scientists to publish on the one side and the constantly increasing workload on the other side (including peer review) bear the potential to deteriorate or even collapse the peer reviewing system. The increasingly harsh and compet
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The Dark Side of Scientific Publishing
The enormous pressure on scientists to publish on the one side and the constantly increasing workload on the other side (including peer review) bear the potential to deteriorate or even collapse the peer reviewing system. The increasingly harsh and competitive research environment has opened space for abuse of the scientific publishing process.
8.1 The Tragedy of the Reviewer Commons/ Cascading Peer Review The exponentially increasing number of manuscript submissions to all journals, the increasing pressure on authors to publish in high ranking journals, and the overvalued importance of the impact factor of some top journals result in high rejection rates for most internationally recognized scientific journals. Rejection rates above 60% are standard and top journals have rejection rates around 90%. Understandably, authors tend to submit their manuscripts to the highest ranking journal. Unfortunately, some authors view anonymous peer review as a stochastic process and, if the manuscript was rejected by one journal, try it with the next, hoping a new reviewer may give a different evaluation. Once a manuscript is rejected, it will cascade down with submissions to journals with a lower impact factor. This results in multiple submissions of the same manuscript to several journals until it is ultimately accepted by a journal of appropriate rank. Along with submissions, the manuscript is reviewed multiple times, resulting in an estimated average of 5–10 reviews per manuscript (Hochberg et al. 2009). Cascading of manuscripts adds to a serious overload of researchers with review requests, unnecessary effort on repeatedly rejected manuscripts, and potentially declining
© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH 2017 J.M. Starck, Scientific Peer Review, essentials, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-19915-9_8
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8 The Dark Side of Scientific Publishing
quality of reviews. Indeed, it would be the author’s responsibility to submit the manuscript to a journal of appropriate impact, but recommendations to overcome this “tragedy of the reviewer commons” (Hochberg et al. 2009) by mutualism, altruism, and good scientific practice are probably futile in an industrialized scientific world.—To overcome at least some of these problems, publishers have invented the “portable review,” i.e., manuscripts with proven scientific merits but not being accepted in their top journals are transferred together with the received reviews to other journals (of the same publisher) that might be interested in the paper. Some of the large publishing companies, journals, and individual researchers have also agreed on the San Francisco Declaration of Research Assessment (DORA) with the aim to “greatly reduce emphasis on the journal Impact Factor as a promotional tool” and to provide a more content oriented assessment of scientific work. In the long term this may reduce cascading peer review.
8.2 Fake Journal Peer Review Many journals offer, through their online submission systems, the option for the authors to
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