Tag: feedback

I engage in peer review as a service to the scientific community. I do so despite the fact that many commercial publishers benefit greatly (financially) from my doing so. While some call peer reviewing activities “free labour”, I see it as a part of my job — which makes the commercial publishers exploiting the taxpayer rather than me personally (perhaps a face-saving narrative).

But there’s a limit, please. Here’s a recent mail I received:

You recently completed a review for [journal name].

We are keen to receive your feedback regarding your experiences.  Your responses will be used to help improve the services currently offered to you, and will not be passed onto any third parties or used for marketing purposes.  It will take approximately 10-12 minutes to complete this survey.

You can spin it all you want, but I am doing you a service, not the other way around. You see, I have nothing to hide here, so I am sharing this with any interested third parties. I find it fulfilling to think (pretend?) that my comments and observations on a written article help to make it more useful to the scientific community, and with that to society. This didn’t quite take me 10-12 minutes, and probably doesn’t answer the questions in this survey (I couldn’t be bothered to click).

Despite the spin, the third party here is you, the commercial publisher trying to control the publishing process from start to finish.

The aim of the research is to understand how satisfied you are with the relationship and service provided by [the journal] and its online review platform.

That relationship? It’s actually quite simple: you ask for a review, which I provide for the sake of the scientific community, despite who you are.