Transferring Referee Reports from One Journal to Another
Several publishers have policies that say that a manuscript rejected by one of its journals may be referred to another of its journals.
At Wiley, referee reports are transferred along with the manuscript.
Here’s its policy:
Such manuscripts and their peer review reports will be transferred to the receiving journal to expedite any further evaluation and the editor’s decision. The reviewer grants Wiley the right to re-use the peer review reports in order to provide publishing services, such as the transfer of manuscripts. This will be done in accordance with both journal and COPE guidelines. The reviewer also consents to the possible transfer of their name, email, and review to a relevant alternate journal.
As the philosophy professor who brought this to my attention put it:
The policy thus transforms the referee-editor relationship into a relationship between referee and publishing corporation. The seemingly obvious motive must be to increase the chances that Wiley can convert submissions to any of its journals into revenue for Wiley, by transferring submissions to journals with editors willing to publish them. There is no opt out, so anybody refereeing for Wiley is granting Wiley the right to transfer reviews to its other journals.
Since discovering the policy (it’s not clear how long it has been in place), he has refused to referee for Wiley journals.
I’m curious what others, including journal editors—and especially the editors of Wiley journals—make of this policy.
“The seemingly obvious motive must be to increase the chances that Wiley can convert submissions to any of its journals into revenue for Wiley”
The fact that this policy benefits Wiley does not exclude the possible benefits of the policy for academia. It looks like it could speed things up for authors, editors, show a kind of respect and value for referees and their efforts, etc. I mean, it’s certainly up for debate if the policy has these benefits or not. But it easily could. And just showing that it also benefits Wiley is neither here nor there. After all, if you were refereeing for Wiley, you were referring for them with the understanding that their business (1) benefits them and (2) benefits academia.
How does a policy of transferring reports without an opt out for referees who don’t want to participate “show a kind of respect and value for referees and their efforts”? I don’t get the intuition at all.
Why not both?
Well … ideally the author should revise her paper in light of the referees’ reports if it is rejected. So the new and improved paper should not be judged by the earlier reports … the author deserves a fair chance at a new judgment, not one tainted by the paper’s earlier rendition. Incidentally, I always refuse to referee papers I have refereed before, and I refuse the “check” the option of sending my reports on to another journal.
Sure. That might be the case. (Though, often, authors just send out the paper without paying attention to the reports, just to try the lottery). But that’s a different reason from the type provided in the original post. I’m just saying what should be obvious: <It benefits the publisher> does not entail that <it hurts the academic practice>
“So the new and improved paper should not be judged by the earlier reports.”
It seems to me authors could just submit the new paper to another journal without using the transfer option.
Not a very new policy—15-years old at least, and across various for- and non-profit publishers—but I’d only seen it with science journals. It clearly benefits publishers to keep publishable papers to themselves, even if those papers aren’t quite good enough for a spot in their ’top’ journal(s). It clearly benefits researchers, insofar as it cuts down on time spent engaged in peer review. It should only happen with the author’s consent, and the editors of the other journals in this ‘cascade’ may still reject a paper, may still ask for a R&R, etc. based on the referee reports.
One way of looking at it is that it changes the relationship from one between referee and editor to one between referee and publisher—and this is a legitimate reading of things—but it is also the case that it binds tighter the referee to the paper (for better or worse!).
I suspect the reader is right about Wiley’s (and other publishers’) motives. And especially given recent nefarious activity by such publishers, we should continue to support alt-journals like Ergo and Imprint.
In the meantime, while most journals in the profession remain the property of such publishers, I can see a beneficial effect of this in the following, I think common, situation (I presume consent on the part of the referee and the author on this process):
A. submits an article to prestigious journal J1. B. referees the paper, and thinks it’s not J1-quality (given its scope, ambitions, originality, etc.), but has potential for publication in *some other venue*, so long as certain issues can be addressed. When B. sends her report explaining her recommendation, B. suspects that the article will eventually be published in some venue. Say the editor of the journal agrees with all this. Instead of having A. resubmit the article to several journals until it eventually gets published, it would be good if some other journal, J2, could offer an R&R to A. based on B.’s report. A. may have higher aspirations for her paper, which may lead her reject the R&R. But she might also just want it published, and might judge J2 good for it. She might also think B.’s comments are helpful and the revisions doable. So, she might take the R&R rather than go through the process with one, two, …, seven journals. Such a setup could help find a paper a suitable home in a much faster and economic manner (in terms of author-, referee-, and editor- hours involved).
I think I feel a bit stupid about this, but I guess, despite being someone who is normally extremely suspicious/hateful of corporations, I’m not sure this seems necessarily bad to me? (Though I think it would be good to have an opt out option for people for whom it does feel bad!)
I assume that in no part of this process is the publisher kind of inserting itself and saying “editor of this lesser ranked journal that these reports got transferred to, you must accept it!”. Indeed, we don’t even have any information (or reason to think) that editors at other journals have to even read or use those referee reports. That would be a giant breach of editorial authority; it seems up to them whether they want to commission new ones, use the old ones, or even simply desk reject the paper. Given that, it’s hard to understand what, exactly, is deeply objectionable here (for me). But I am very open to better understanding (I hate for profit publishing as much as the next guy!). Just, as things stand I don’t fully get the harm in this, given that the author can opt out, the editor can opt out of using the reports, etc.
As Dale E. Miller notes below, whether this opens the door to malfeasance does not depend on whether editors of legitimate journals are pressured by the publisher, but on which other journals the publisher runs, and potentially which editors it chooses for any new journal it might start. There is nothing to stop a for-profit publisher, after all, from starting a journal that will publish anything all of its other journals reject, and presenting that journal as meeting the top standards of scholarly peer review. And maybe, if it operates under the right set of commitments about its obligations to shareholders, for-profit publishers would only be rational to do that. It only takes one academic to support such a scheme for it to get off the ground, with this refereeing policy in place.
But there’s also nothing pressuring the author to agree to a transfer to that journal, that’s any different from whatever pressures they feel to submit to such a journal (publishing in that journal is not going to help them professionally, so I’m unclear what those pressures would be).
I found out about this policy recently after receiving a rejection notice from a Wiley journal. It offered me the opportunity to transfer my paper and associated reviews to another journal. I don’t have any issues with this and may have considered it under different circumstances, but the only problem in this case was that the single review I received was embarrassingly bad! “Bad” as in lazy and misinformed: the reviewer misinterpreted and then misrepresented the argument from the paper, dismissing it on the basis of a series of objections that do not actually apply.
This in itself is no big deal–most of us have likely been on the receiving end of this kind of review–though I wouldn’t want it to cloud the judgement of another editor or prevent my paper from receiving fair consideration at a different journal.
This may not be such an issue in philosophy (yet), but from what I’ve heard my impression is that in other fields this practice is often a way for a publisher to move papers from higher-quality journals with no or low APCs to low-quality (if not quite predatory) journals with high APCs. So it’s at least an attempt to extract money from the author.
I signed a petition that I would not referee for JPP and I plan to abide by this commitment. For similar reasons, I would not referee for PPA. So, I wouldn’t be able accept to referee a Wiley paper if there’s any chance that the paper might end up being considered for one of these journals. Note that all the advantages below could be had if there was an opt-out clause. The problem is that there is no such option.