The busier I get as a father and as an academic, the more I critically evaluate the necessity, efficiency and value of the different jobs and tasks I do. Reflection on one particular aspect of my working life has made me start to wonder whether as academics we are being taken advantage of and allowing ourselves to be treated as mugs! This work is not usually part of our expected workload from our employers and is not in any important way monitored or gives us any real direct personal benefit. The companies we do this extra work for make huge profits (hundreds of millions of pounds per year) and profit margins (>35%) benefiting from huge amounts of regular free consultancy from some of the brightest and well qualified experts in their field in the world.

Yes, I’m talking about peer review! A contentious topic for many in the current world of scientific publishing.

Many talk about this regarding the ethics of the large profits many publishers make, including a recent article in The Guardian. It’s a lucrative business, hence the large number of low quality publishers spamming our inboxes daily and trying to feed off the scraps of academic science. However, I want to tackle this from a personal perspective of the value of our time and expertise and not underselling it.

In what other professional industry would highly qualified professionals provide free consultation and work to a company making huge profits off what they are doing for them? They would be demanding a fee for their time. So why aren’t we? Hence my conclusion that we are allowing ourselves to be taken advantage of and treated like chumps.

While Universities expect their academic staff will be undertaking peer review tasks as this is part of the current system, I would expect that in most cases it does not appear in anyone’s workload calculations in any real way and, to be fair, university accountants might argue that the institution sees no direct benefit from staff spending time they are paying for performing such tasks. Peer reviewing plays no significant part in hiring and promotion decisions and I see no way that this will change: your own grants and papers will always be far more significant than those of others where you have assisted with the quality control.

I am aware that you can now record your peer review activity online with Publons. Indeed, I have started to record my own peer review activity here, mainly to keep track for my own interest. Interestingly, of those registered that make their reviewing activity public, the most prolific reviewer is doing more than one paper per day and over 200 are doing more than one per week. If their line managers see this they might be thinking these people need more institutional work to do!

One thing that is also obvious from Publons but also conversations with colleagues, is the workload of peer review is not fairly spread through the community. I don’t know the exact stats but it has been well documented that the majority of peer review is covered by a minority of the community. Many have commented to me that they do not have time to peer review and so they don’t do it. I’m not particularly impressed by this attitude. I think, in the current system, we should aim to be environmentally friendly by taking on about the same number of peer review tasks that we create (say, three times the number of papers where we are the senior, corresponding author). I’m probably exceeding this at present but not in any obscene way.

So if the burden is not evenly spread, we see no direct benefit and the publishers are profiting from our work, what is the answer? Well, I think it’s through reviewer fees. Funders seem happy to pay extortionate open access fees (where while I understand the benefits of open access, a cost-benefit analysis would probably show this isn’t money well spent) and UK research councils fund research based on full economic costs. Well, the full costs of the research include my time in peer reviewing the resultant papers before publication.

So what might be an appropriate fee? A back of envelope calculation suggests most academics are paid in the range of £25-£100 per hour (albeit based on an unrealistic assumption of normal working hours and holidays!) with the median likely to be in the lower end of that range. Reviewing a paper can take anything from about 2 hours for a short and straightforward paper to 4 hours or more for longer (including large supplemental information) or more complicated papers, if done with care and diligence. Therefore, somewhere in the range of £50-£200 per paper is not unreasonable.

Is this ever likely to happen? Well, I have no influence. It would take very senior figures in the scientific community (not one, a large number) to have any chance of creating change. The publishers have us over a barrel. If we stop peer reviewing then no one can publish their science.

In a stand-off, who would blink first? Probably the academics.

So am I going to change my attitude to peer review? Maybe a little. I will still try to be “environmentally friendly” in my approach but I will feel less guilty about saying no during the busier times of year and when I have multiple requests, beyond my interest in a specific paper, I will likely prioritise not-for-profit publishers over the others. Maybe I’m a sucker by doing this!

This is somewhat of a casual rant with a glass of wine in front of TV, but I’m sure I’ve stoked some strong opinions in many of you. I’d love to hear the views of others on this topic as I think it is important that we have open debate within the community.