FLICKR, ANONYMOUS ACCOUNTBiogeographer Mark Maslin of University College London (UCL) announced his resignation from his positions as volunteer editor and member of the editorial advisory panel at Scientific Reports, a Nature Publishing Group (NPG) open-access journal, in a tweet last week (March 26) after the journal announced it is instituting a policy that would allow authors to pay for expedited peer review by a private company.
“My objections are that it sets up a two-tiered system and instead of the best science being published in a timely fashion it will further shift the balance to well-funded labs and groups,” Maslin told ScienceInsider. “Academic publishing is going through a revolution and we should expect some bumps along the way. This was just one that I felt I could not accept.”
Private peer review is now a multimillion dollar industry, with many journals now offering a service through which authors can fast-track their manuscripts through the process—for a price. Last week (March 24), Scientific Reports announced that, for a cost of $750, it had begun offering such expedited service, through the peer-review service Rubriq, which pays its editors $100 each per review. (Rubriq ...
