INDUSTRY & RESEARCH campusreview. com. au
It ' s a thankless job
Journal editors warn the lack of incentives to do referee work is hurting quality and puts the very existence of some publications in danger.
Interview with Antonia Maiolo
Increased recognition of refereeing and editing as parts of academic roles is crucial, a Melbourne University professor says.
Paul Jensen, professor of economics at the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research, is also the editor of the Australian Economic Review – a quarterly peer-reviewed applied economics journal with a strong focus on policy.
He was one of 43 academic journal editors who last year launched a campaign calling for greater recognition of their contribution.
In a letter sent to universities and research funding bodies, the group stated that“ universities need to establish meaningful incentives to develop and maintain these kinds of professional service requirements”.
The letter outlined the difficulty editors were facing in finding people willing to undertake the tasks of journal editing and peer review of submitted articles, identifying“ increased academic workload” and the“ casualisation of academic staff " as two reasons. However, the overarching factor, the authors argued, is“ the exclusion of editing and assessing from the Excellence in Research in Australia assessment system”.
Jensen, who has had work published in international and domestic journals and also does much refereeing work, is concerned that the current system doesn’ t do enough to recognise the important roles editors and referees play in the production of world-class research.
He spoke to Campus Review in January to explain the possible effects of this emerging problem.
CR: Could you start off by telling me how bad the decline in the number of academics volunteering their time to review journals is? PJ: It’ s not something we have tried to quantify at this stage. What we were merely pointing out in that letter was our own individual experiences. We are all editors of journals and we’ ve all been working in this space for a long time, and we’ ve been finding it increasingly difficult to encourage people to act as referees. So, more and more people are just saying“ No, I’ m too busy”. We think it’ s quite a serious problem. Rather than having any systematic evidence on that, it’ s more anecdotal in nature.
What kind of impact would a continued decline of peer reviewers have on the output and the quality of publications? We think it’ s potentially quite serious. We’ re all for the idea that Australia should be trying to create and disseminate worldclass research – I mean that’ s the mission for all research-active academics. We’ re in support of that as a general guiding principle. What we think has happened here is that we just haven’ t quite got the incentives to make sure we keep editors and referees contributing to that process.
And, potentially, the downside of not doing that or continuing the [ current ] system is that good publications will die. There is a serious concern that if we don’ t get enough submissions or referees to do the work that needs to be done to produce good research – and in fact the editors don’ t want to edit journals anymore – those journals might die.
I suppose that is in and of itself a very important concern. But also those journals that do exist [ may ] just have lower quality. We know that even though it’ s not a perfect process, the peer review system is the best one we have. If people aren’ t putting in a significant effort to undertake the refereeing work, the quality of the publications will fall.
We see it as an integral part of the whole process, and are
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