So, I’ve had a bit of a think…
Well, I first had a bit of a nap! In those deep unconscious workings, my brain sat on the issue of what a better system to peer-review might look like. Right now, it’s full of elitism. Where you publish has become the stamp of credibility and validity that others depend on to help decide whether to cite your work. This has journals scrambling among themselves to play what they think is the game in ways that will rig it in their favour. One of them is to have a high rejection rate. The more selective they are (aka the higher up their nose), the more they can claim to be prestigious. But, there’s a lot of shite in ‘prestigious’ journals and even more elsewhere. The system is full of holes. Water is spurting everywhere, causing the system to drown in its own choking ego.
We need a new system that’s a bit like the blind auditions of The Voice. It needs to eradicate the things that suck energy and increase inequality, and needs to flood it with processes that align with core business. The structures need to facilitate the intended outcomes of science. The entire ERA (Excellence in Research for Australia) framework for evaluating the quality of research (the equivalent in the UK being work that is REF-able) has become laughable to me. So much national time, money, and energy has gone into the issue of where, at the expense of what.
Here’s what the current system needs to ditch:
The power-tripping of editors
The bullying of reviewers
The free abuse of reviewers’ labour
The feeding of the property portfolio of open access journal board members
Lengthy delays and multiple rounds of revision
Asking scholars to format their own article
Copy-editors changing a scholar’s wording without checking
Stealing scholars’ intellectual autonomy and confidence by making them feel they always need someone’s approval to speak
Here’s what a new system needs to reinstate or introduce:
Critical independent thought
Freedom of speech
Freedom of information
Payment for authors for their work and knowledge
Here’s what I’m thinking out loud (so rudimentary):
A universal platform is created where every scholar has a profile and is freely searchable across the globe
Scholars can either upload pre-prints asking for feedback first (usually ECRs), or go straight to self-publishing their work with a DOI, statement on contribution (agreed between all authors), and searchable keywords by the paper’s language
Fellow scholars who read their work can either choose not to cite it because they think it’s crap, or choose to cite it, provide testimonials of support, and pay them a small nominal amount of money.
Any constructive feedback a fellow scholar wishes to offer should be worded according to the golden rule ‘don’t say anything you wouldn’t say to my face’.
People who use the platform but are not (seasoned) scholars themselves can use the constructive feedback being offered by others to help decide if they would like to use that person’s work to help inform their own. This way, it’s what’s being said about the work that matters, not where it was said.
I know, the money one is a problem. People unconsciously think that what falls out of a white man’s mouth is god’s gift but the same words from a brown woman are overlookable. So in this system, he’ll get prestige and become rich. Still thinking this one through… But in the mean time, playing with ideas that don’t take a scholar away from her core work to spend endless hours writing a promotions or grant application full of stupid information like where she published, as if that’s more important than what she has to say, and pretends that she has not navigated gate-keeping, silencing, harassment, and battering to even get that publication, is surely a good thing.
Maybe…
For every dollar a white man scholar receives for his work when cited, white women and non-Indigenous men of colour receive four, and non-Indigenous women of colour receive eight. All Indigenous scholars receive sixteen times more (white passing and light-skinned included - always black enough to be black). Those who have sailed through life without any real challenge to their hard-wired belief that such an assertion violently, outrageously, and offensively violates the reasonable expectation for merit-based justice and fairness have no idea how unfair things are. I’m happy to tune them out. The problem is, injustice is so steeply entrenched that I know this still won’t close the gap.
Still thinking…
The new ways of promoting freedom of speech and information will finally give a platform to those from non-English speaking backgrounds to speak and share what they know with those like them who want to hear what they have to say. No more white Emeritus Professor gate-keepers living in London who can only speak one language deciding if someone in Tanzania has something valuable to say in a language that might be her third or fourth.