Peer review declaration

I only peer review articles that are guaranteed to be published Open Access (fair or self-archived). Publication fees are not acceptable, except as a form of voluntary support to respectable not-for-profit professional societies.

At the moment I take a light-touch approach: If I see the manuscript that I am asked to review already deposited on arXiv, or submitted to a no-fees Open Access journal, I will consider reviewing it. Otherwise not. If the authors or the publisher break this trust by not updating their arXiv copies to reflect the final content, or by later having the arXiv copy removed, I will start taking a stricter approach, and demand the authors or the publisher to commit to no-fees Open Access in writing before accepting to review.

This decision stems from the publishing industry’s theft of the public purse throughout the decades, extorting copyright transfer or astronomical article processing charges whilst not contributing anything of value, and passing all work to unpaid authors and reviewers. These days even the sweatshop-grade copy editing is passed to authors in case of Taylor and Francis. At the same time the industry works against academics and the public good by attacking sci-hub. I work for free for the public benefit, and out of scientific curiosity, not for crooked corporations that only work against me, not for or with me. I do not support fee-based Open Access, because I expect it to line up the pockets and maintain science hostage to the same corporations, and to maintain a class society between researchers who can and cannot afford it. The same money is better spent for science itself, and to support the low operating costs of community-run free and fair journals.

I do not review for nor will I submit any future manuscripts to Elsevier or Taylor and Francis journals.

Tuomo Valkonen, 2018-04-09

Further reading

Journals I have found