As scientists and scholars, we create the intellectual content that appears in APA Journals. We conduct the research, write the papers and review the work at no cost to your journals. We also edit your journals for minimal income. This makes the academic publication system incredibly profitable for publishers.

It deeply concerns us that APA uses these profits to pay staff to threaten us to remove these products of our free labor from our academic websites, where other academics can read and build on our work.

We engage in practices like voluntary reviewing for APA because we feel a commitment to producing a public good that others can use to promote scientific progress. By using these profits to restrict us from sharing our own work, you have privatized a public good and made our relationship transactional. Of course, it is entirely within your rights to do so.

If you wish to make this relationship transactional, we demand that you use the profits from our work to pay us for reviewing. If we learn that you have pressured any of the signees to remove their own APA publications from their academic website, then all signees will demand that you pay us $300 per review (unless otherwise agreed upon in writing).

In short, you have a simple choice: You continue to accept our free labor and allow us to share the products of our labor on our academic websites OR we move to a transactional relationship and you pay us for our reviewing and we use that money to pay for open access rights for our papers (or any other purpose we deem relevant).