COMMENTARY
The Publishing Ecosystem} Reciprocal Altruism}
and the Kindness of Strangers
Lawrence
he scientific peer review process is
a wonderful thing, when it works.
As editor-in-chief of the Annals, I am
reminded fairly often of some shortcomings
in this system, and over the past couple of
years, problems that exemplify these shortcomings seem to have become more frequent and therefore more serious. These are
not new, nor are they unique to entomology,
but I think there is a disturbing trend that
we ought to consider and attempt to rectify.
Here are some recent examples:
o I got a call from one of our hard-working
subject editors who complained that
he could not find anyone to review a
manuscript submitted to Annals that I
had assigned him. He had gone through
the list suggested by the author without
success (I wish everyone would provide
such a list-it does often make things
easier for us), and then tried as many
people as he could identify who were
competent in the area of the manuscript.
The problem seemed to be that some
potential reviewers explained that they
were too busy with their own work to
spend time evaluating the work of other
people, and some just didn't respond at
all to repeated requests. Sometimes editors have had to query more than a dozen
scientists before they can get at least one
to agree to be a reviewer. In the worstcase scenario, we may have to settle for
less competent opinions than we would
like. This is a bit like the jury system, in
which the smart people know the excuses
they can use to opt out, sometimes leaving less thoughtful people in charge of a
defendant's fate.
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E. Hurd
I got an e-mail from an author demanding
to know what the delay was over his
manuscript (an increasingly common
event). This was a case of problems
finding reviewers, as outlined above,
but the irony of this particular situation
is that the author is someone who has
a history of declining to review other
people's manuscripts.
Annals is receiving many more manuscripts from foreign authors these days,
something we don't want to discourage.
However, many of these manuscripts are
written using incorrect English syntax,
and both subject editors and reviewers
tend not to want to bother with them. I
try to filter out and return most of these
to the authors, asking them to find a native English speaker (whether a colleague
or a paid service) to help them with the
writing. However, sometimes the English
is not so bad that a reviewer couldn't
judge whether the data are good and
novel enough to warrant the time and effort on the part of the authors to rewrite
the manuscript and resubmit it.
I have been trying to replace some subject
editors whose term of service has expired,
and I am having trouble finding willing
souls among the most competent. Subject
editors of ESAjournals are appointed for
definite terms, so at any given time, someone may be rotating off the editorial staff
and, as editor-in-chief, I need to replace
him or her. It is becoming very difficult
to find someone of sufficiently demonstrated expertise (Le., good publications
in the desired subject) who also has the
time and willingness to serve.
I got an angry e-mail from a group of
authors who objected to the harsh language used by an anonymous reviewer to
criticize their manuscript. Unfortunately,
this is also fairly common. Sometimes reviewers are tempted to rudeness because
they lose patience with a poorly prepared
manuscript (Bennett 2009), but often it
is a function of the fact that many of us
took graduate seminar courses in which
students were encouraged to equate
critical evaluation
with demolition
(Walbot 2009).
In addition to membership in our Entomological Society of America, I am a life
member of "the other ESA" (Ecological Society of America), so I tend to think of things
in terms of their interrelatedness within an
ecosystem. Authors are primary producers
who acquire and provide information in the
form of a manuscript analogously to the way
plants fix and store energy from sunlight,
and the rest of us are consumers. Editors
and reviewers serve to ensure that the
manuscript is high-quality food for thought.
The publishing ecosystem is, as most scientist-authors know, a fairly complex mechanism that is heavily time-dependent. People
want their novel results to be available as
soon as possible for a variety of reasons,
including priority among competing labs
and promotion or tenure decisions by home
departments. After all, our online submission and evaluation software is called Rapid
Review. The problem is that very often this
is a functional oxymoron.
However much we wish it, the system
does not operate by itself. It takes effort
from authors to get their manuscripts into
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American Entomologist
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Spring 2010
intelligible shape, from subject editors to
select competent reviewers as fast as they
can, and from reviewers to give their time
and talent. So, what's the incentive to spend
time and energy on behalf of someone who
may even be a competitor in your field? Not
money; that's for sure. Subject editors and
reviewers work for free, and authors, after
a sometimes bruising review process, are
assessed page charges (adding injury to insult?). Not academic recognition, either: reviewing is not often rewarded by university
department chairs, who are more concerned
with research productivity than they are
with service to a society. Generally, scholarship and teaching are activities that are used
for tenure and promotion decisions, while
service is viewed as a maintenance activity
that is expected but not often rewarded.
We could invoke the principle of noblesse
oblige, but that has limited utility at best. I
prefer to think in terms of the evolutionary
idea of reciprocal altruism (Trivers 1985),
in which an apparently altruistic act such
as picking ticks off other members of your
group, caring for their offspring, or reading
each other's manuscripts is shared among
individuals in a group. The act represents
a cost to your own fitness (risk incurred or
time and energy expended that you could
have used working on your own stuff), so
there is some selective pressure to avoid it
(i.e., cheat). But this can be overbalanced
by the benefit derived by now and then
being on the receiving end of the deal. In
other words, the act of reviewing is not really altruism at all, since you will benefit in
the future from what you do today: we get
what we spend. In order for this to work, we
need a coherent group in which members
are aware of each other and what they do.
Entomologists surely form such a group, and
the core of this group in the U.S.is the ESA.
The reason to review or serve on an editorial
board is that the publishing machinery that
we all use will slow to a stop if we don't have
a critical mass of participants at all levels.
Speaking of evolutionary theory, Charles
Darwin, whose 200th birthday would have
been this year (2010), and who was a Life
Member of the Royal Entomological Society
of London, was not impressed with the generosity of entomologists as a group (Smith
2009). I suggest that generosity, while not
absolutely necessary to the functioning
of our publishing ecosystem as explained
above, is nonetheless beneficial in terms
of how we express ourselves to authors
we often don't know personally. Think of
how you'd like your students to be treated
when they venture forth into the publishing
morass for the first time, and treat other
authors as such (yes, a version of the Golden
Rule). Consider lending your talents to the
ESAas subject editor. Review when you possibly can, and do it with the objectto instruct
and encourage, rather than to browbeat
from the safety of anonymity. Further, train
your students to be civil as well as critical,
and then we can use kindness as well as
speed to promote the timely and mutually
beneficial dissemination of entomological
knowledge.
•••••
References Cited
Bennett, A. 2009. (Not) everyone's a critic.
Bull.Ent. Soc.Canada41:105-106.
Smith, K. G. V. 2009. Charles Darwin and the
Royal Entomological Society ofLondon. Antenna 33:92-93.
Trivers, R. L. 1985. Socialevolution. Benjamin
Cummings, Menlo Park, CA.
Walbot, V. 2009. Are we training pit bulls to
review our manuscripts? J. BioI.8:24.
Lawrence E. Hurd is Herwick Professor of
Biology,Department of Biology,Washington &
Lee University; Lexington, VA24450. He is also
a Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society of
London.
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