Today I signed up to Publons. For those of you who don't know, Publons is a new way of measuring the amount of peer review you do so that you can get credit for it with your employer.
I did not sign-up willingly. In fact, I only did so after my partner pointed out that my planned stand against it was really just an act of self-sabotage now that my university has endorsed them.
Publons adds a new way of measuring academic performance, making it a part of a process that I find altogether self-defeating. When we count things, and tie those things to our livelihoods, we simply disincentivise the work that isn't counted. When the non-incentivised tasks become neglected the edict that caused the problem isn't repealed. Instead, perversely, we march on along the same track and try and rebalance the system using the same strategy that has caused the problem in the first place: we count the neglected things. I probably don't need to spell this out but this activity doesn't solve the problem; it just defers it to another area where the cycle begins anew. And so it goes on ... and now we have Publons because people are not doing enough peer review because they are too busy meeting all their other KPIs, one of which is the need to publish like the clappers.
As an editor of a journal, I speak from experience when I say that finding people to review articles can be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. This is frustrating, to be sure, but I don't think that counting peer reviews is the answer.
The other thing that I don't like about Publons is its potential contribution to the exploitation of academic labour by academic publishers. Peer review is a great and noble thing etcetera etcetera, and research articles advance knowledge. But the fact is, the greatest beneficiaries of the pressure to publish are the publishing houses whose profits continue to soar off the labour of academics. To the extent that academics generally work longer hours than they are technically paid for, a lot of this labour is free. By having academics account for peer review in such stringent ways, we are binding ourselves to a system that profits from us more than we profit from it.
Rather than compounding the problem of harmful KPIs in the form of Publons, I'd much rather we reassess and address what is causing system imbalance in the first place. Reducing some of the incentives to publish, for instance, or even encouraging people to publish less is one way to reduce the supply of papers that require reviews and to discourage lower quality papers. This needn't mean that people stop communicating their ideas if they have them in abundance - just that they set a slightly higher bar regarding what of their own work they choose to publish in peer-reviewed journals, and what they choose to communicate via other channels.
I did not sign-up willingly. In fact, I only did so after my partner pointed out that my planned stand against it was really just an act of self-sabotage now that my university has endorsed them.
Publons adds a new way of measuring academic performance, making it a part of a process that I find altogether self-defeating. When we count things, and tie those things to our livelihoods, we simply disincentivise the work that isn't counted. When the non-incentivised tasks become neglected the edict that caused the problem isn't repealed. Instead, perversely, we march on along the same track and try and rebalance the system using the same strategy that has caused the problem in the first place: we count the neglected things. I probably don't need to spell this out but this activity doesn't solve the problem; it just defers it to another area where the cycle begins anew. And so it goes on ... and now we have Publons because people are not doing enough peer review because they are too busy meeting all their other KPIs, one of which is the need to publish like the clappers.
As an editor of a journal, I speak from experience when I say that finding people to review articles can be like trying to find a needle in a haystack. This is frustrating, to be sure, but I don't think that counting peer reviews is the answer.
The other thing that I don't like about Publons is its potential contribution to the exploitation of academic labour by academic publishers. Peer review is a great and noble thing etcetera etcetera, and research articles advance knowledge. But the fact is, the greatest beneficiaries of the pressure to publish are the publishing houses whose profits continue to soar off the labour of academics. To the extent that academics generally work longer hours than they are technically paid for, a lot of this labour is free. By having academics account for peer review in such stringent ways, we are binding ourselves to a system that profits from us more than we profit from it.
Rather than compounding the problem of harmful KPIs in the form of Publons, I'd much rather we reassess and address what is causing system imbalance in the first place. Reducing some of the incentives to publish, for instance, or even encouraging people to publish less is one way to reduce the supply of papers that require reviews and to discourage lower quality papers. This needn't mean that people stop communicating their ideas if they have them in abundance - just that they set a slightly higher bar regarding what of their own work they choose to publish in peer-reviewed journals, and what they choose to communicate via other channels.
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