Hi Simon,

Your article is very useful. Thank you for sharing this.

I believe published work is a contribution to public knowledge and a public good, hence access should be available to all. My contributions in different roles (as editorial board member of journals, editor of journal special issue, reviewer for different journals, book chapters etc) is for free as I believe it is part of my service for the wider community. But I am concerned that the benefits are going to for-profit publishers who are charging high subscription costs /APC charges etc.

Personally, I do not like the idea of payment for reviewers as it will further commodify research/knowledge. The long term aim should be to make all published work free and open access so that everyone benefits (this will be great help for our colleagues in the developing world and poor communities).

In my humble opinion, the reviewers are doing a great service by working for free but the benefits are going to for-profit publishers who are charging high subscription costs /APC charges etc. It is important we all work together to get the publishers to reduce their high subscription costs for e-journals as well as APC costs.

One solution, might be to look for other options for enabling socially just publishing. For example, we are making available all accepted papers from the Academic Track of FOSS4G (from Nottingham in 2013 to current) Open Access with the help of colleagues from The University of Massachusetts Amherst .

https://www.osgeo.org/foundation-news/foss4g-conference-academic-proceedings-full-proceedings-individual-papers-available-online/

Best wishes,

Suchith

From: A forum for critical and radical geographers <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Batterbury, Simon <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: 30 May 2018 09:31
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: : Re: Scientific journal publishing houses : PAY-PER-REVIEW: make it mandatory for scientific journals to remunerate reviewers.

My views are in the Fennia article https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/66910.

It all starts at the top - if job prospects and promotions and the UK's REF/Australia's ERA etc. now depend on publishing in a narrow range of anglo-american journals, it is up to senior academics to assure junior colleagues that that they will value high quality, socially just publishing in other outlets. Otherwise, we will make no inroads into the exploitative world of commercial publishing [which dominates the highly ranked journals] whatsoever. Read the work, not just the journal title.

Secondly as Springer et al point out, do the reviewing. It is a 'form of mutual aid'. Personally I don't need to be paid, others might. But I will get very choosy about the type of journal to do it for, faced with the corporate takeovers and mergers. And senior people and heads of dept. need to treat reviewing and editing as legitimate and rewarded activity in a workload, whether time is funded externally or not. https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/66862

Thirdly, a Fennia editorial just published by Kallio and Metzger addresses the questions raised in this debate head on. https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/70470
They are proposing several ways of rewarding reviewers, including open forums between authors and the reviewers - the reviewers get a publication out of it! The current issue has an example.
Kallio, K., & Metzger, J. (2018). ’Alternative’ journal publishing and the economy of academic prestige. Fennia - International Journal of Geography, 196(1), 1-3. https://fennia.journal.fi/article/view/70469
I think Current Anthropology has something similar. We have not developed it for the JPE.

The need to publish open access is worth reiterating - the foundations of the OA movement were radical. It’s the sensible and just thing to do. The fact that big publishers make a lot of money from OA through high APCs [particularly in STEM disciplines] , does not take away from its importance. You cannot rely on Researchgate and academia for dissemination anymore, some of the alternatives are illegal, university article repositories are uneven. OA articles tend to get read and cited a little more.

This is all part of the 'last frontier' of critical geography. Thinking about where the work is published and how. This seems to have taken about 40 years.

Prof. Simon Batterbury | Chair of Political Ecology | B504, Lancaster Environment Centre | Lancaster University | Lancaster, LA1 4YQ | UK, Europe. [log in to unmask]
& Principal Fellow, School of Geography, University of Melbourne, Australia
http://www.simonbatterbury.net
Journal of Political Ecology , https://journals.uair.arizona.edu/index.php/JPE/index
OA and affordable journal list http://tinyurl.com/ze9b4zp