Author: Ricardo Moro
Position: Researcher
Institution: BioCurex
E-mail: rmoro@compuserve.com
Submitted Date: April 24, 2007
Published Date: April 26, 2007
This comment was originally posted as a “Reader Response” on the publication date indicated above. All Reader Responses are now available as comments.

Punishing the reviewer is not the solution and I doubt that paying her or him $20-$50 will change anything. Most journals make money out of scientific papers; a lot of money as I came to learn from some research I did on the subject. Thus, it is only fair that we change things a little in favor of the author.

At present, the journals and their editors are omnipotent: They decide what is published or not, how long the article will be, when will it be published, who will review it, and in many cases, the author has to pay a fee per page - more money to the journal! The author loses the copyright on his own material and to ad insult to injury, he or she cannot submit to more than one journal at a time.

All this happens because scientists wish to communicate their ideas to other scientists...

A step in the right direction would be to submit to multiple journals at once and let them compete for the best papers. Once they know that another journal could get a good article by reviewing it faster, things will accelerate; it cannot be otherwise, money is at steak for the publishers...

The argument that reviewers are too busy and therefore multiple submission would clog the system is fallacious: Reviewers must be intimate with the author's field and therefore they have an interest in knowing what is been done whether a paper is published or not, and if it is published, they will eventually read the article because it is in their field.

One last thought: Centuries ago, scientists started sending letters to each other. Then they grouped in Societies in order to share their results and get feed back. These Societies - which were not for profit - started publishing journals. For this, they hired the services of a print shop and they were free to change printers if their cost became too high. Then the world turned upside down; the scientist lost ownership of his or her own data and the print shop (now called publisher) gained control of the scientific literature... It is about time that we turn it right side up.