POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS TO THE PROBLEM

Is the cure worse than the disease? Perhaps there are other solutions to the problem of excessive submissions that might better maintain the integrity of the peer-review process.

Some journals pay for reviews. Even a small amount of money often can entice people to sell their time. If the problem is that peers will not produce reviews for free, then we should determine how much it would cost to change their behavior. Some journals have experience with paying reviewers; indeed, I suspect that virtually all book publishers pay reviewers for their efforts.Footnote ⁹ Perhaps they would be willing to advise on the pros and cons of such policies. It seems likely that paying people for reviews would significantly enlarge the reviewer pool.Footnote ¹⁰

Where would the money come from to pay reviewers? An obvious first answer is submission fees.Footnote ¹¹ It seems almost certain that given the choice between not getting a substantive review for “free” and getting one for a fee, most authors would choose the latter.

Some journals charge these fees (Journal of Politics once charged a nominal fee). I assume some reviewers (like me) would continue to review for our main academic journals without charging a fee. If necessary, a mechanism might be established to subsidize those who claim they cannot afford the submission fee (see subsequent discussion on graduate students). Authors and reviewers might be able to allocate the monies they earn from paid reviews to offset submission fees through a type of credit system. Regarding administrative overhead, I expect that managing the money is less time-consuming than reaching out to five or six reviewers to have three or so to agree to provide their services for free. With payment for reviews, the rate of agreement to review certainly would increase. Some funding agencies allow investigators to budget for publication fees, and some journals are profit-making organizations.Footnote ¹² Perhaps the profit-making journals (like some drug manufacturers) could pay the fees for those who claim they cannot afford them.

There are other ways in which revenue could be raised for our academic publishers, ranging from requiring that people who publish in the journal be a member of the association (even if only for a year) to outright publication fees (in addition to submission fees). Economists have documented the fact that there are substantial personal financial gains to be gotten from publishing papers in academic journals; it seems a small imposition to ask those whose papers we publish to provide at least some payment or remuneration to the journal.

What about graduate students? I have heard but cannot confirm that some graduate seminars require that all students submit their seminar paper for publication—just as it seems that virtually all students now apply for National Science Foundation (NSF) dissertation grants. The same might be said of so-called third-year papers. These practices, I suspect, place an unacceptable burden on our journals—although most of these are likely desk rejected in the first place—and should be prohibited. An easy solution would be to require a student’s faculty adviser to sign off on a paper before it is submitted.Footnote ¹³ I certainly believe that some (perhaps many) graduate students produce publishable work, but many do not, and allowing unworthy graduate students’ papers to muck up the review process is much too high a price for our science to pay.

I have published a “short paper” in one of our major journals (they used to be called “Research Notes”—I also published some of those). However, I have two observations about those notes. First, in my estimation, they are decidedly of lower quality and/or narrower interest, almost by definition.Footnote ¹⁴ Second, although they may not consume exactly the same peer-review resources as a typical paper, they do consume resources (most editors, in my experience, do not ask for a “review lite” of these papers). It is unclear to me why, when faced with a suffocating demand for reviews, a new category of easily produced papers requiring review would be implemented. Perhaps there are good reasons, but from the vantage point of preserving the endangered peer-review process, I certainly would tradeoff the short-paper submissions for fewer desk rejects of real papers.

But, to parrot a famous question: What is to be done? It may be clear by now that I think desk rejects are an existential threat to the quality and integrity of our peer-review system and our science. I have suggested ways in which the number of papers requiring review might be reduced, as well as ways in which peer reviewers might be enticed to be more willing to conduct reviews. However, there is another way by which the costs of desk rejects can be altered.

I have adopted a simple policy on desk rejects: I will not review for a journal that will not review my papers. I put a time limit on the “red card.” I tell editors who desk reject my papers that I suspend being a reviewer for at least a year for their journal. I also report that I will try to convince my coauthors (where relevant) to adopt my policy. Moreover, it is obvious that I am writing this article, in part, to convince my colleagues to adopt my policy.

One editor replied, in effect, that I do not do much reviewing for his journal so little is lost. Fine. But I, like most of us, do a significant amount (too much) of reviewing. For some journals, I probably review three or four or even more manuscripts per year, even on an “emergency” basis. Therefore, after a desk reject at one of these journals, it loses my services for perhaps three reviews. It could have expended three reviews on my paper, which my three reviews on other papers would have balanced out. Therefore, given its refusal to review my paper, the journal lost a net of three reviews. Not such a big deal, perhaps, in part because I do not know what policy my coauthors adopt. However, there is a fundamental principle of fairness here: We should not review for a journal that will not review our papers. As a corollary, if we do not like editorial policies, we should do what we can to convince editors to change them.Footnote ¹⁵

An editor of a major journal recently told me that he receives few complaints (beyond mine) from authors on desk rejects and other issues. One lesson that all professional socialization courses teach graduate students is: Don’t get into a war with editors, no matter how badly you have been treated (e.g., a year or more on a revise and resubmit accompanied by a summary rejection—true story). In general, this is good advice for authors. However, editors should not assume that because they receive few complaints that authors are happy. Many are not. Because I think this issue warrants wider discussion within our discipline, I have decided—perhaps unwisely—to ignore my own advice about keeping one’s mouth shut.

There no doubt are some half-baked ideas in this missive; others might have better solutions to the desk-reject problem. The fundamental point I want to make is simply that Desk-Reject Affliction has engulfed our discipline, with little public discussion, and with substantial consequences. The practice typically is justified by the problem of too many submissions. Perhaps that problem can be solved in other less-damaging ways if we—those who submit our papers to our journals—put our mind to it.

Most important, this non-peer-review process has slowly and silently crept into our discipline and now has become the “new normal.” It has done so to the displeasure of many authors (who also are reviewers) and without widespread debate and discussion. There undoubtedly are some manuscripts that do not deserve peer review, but if they are half or more of all papers submitted, then something may be amiss. My hope is that this article will inform editors of the widespread (N ≥ 1) unhappiness of their authors and will initiate a much broader and open discussion of ways in which the peer-review process can be saved.

Journals at which this article has been desk rejected: none, so far.Footnote ¹⁶