Should Academic Journals Charge to Review an Article?

The answer to the question above is: No.  No.  Hell no.

And yet, and yet.  Here I was checking out a potential journal for a manuscript I'm working on -- a damn good journal, it turns out -- and it says you must either be a member of the host organization or pay a $25 "processing fee" for your work to be reviewed.  WTF?  This ranks up there, sleaze-wise, with literary journals who charge authors a "reading fee" to review their fiction for possible publication.  The rule in fiction writing is simple: money flows to the author, not the other way around.  Otherwise it's just a vanity press and not worth reading, and sure as hell not worth publishing in.

Again, this is a damn fine academic journal and, ironically, I used to belong to the group that sponsors it (I gave up membership a few years ago as I cut back expenses, dropping a couple of groups). It's an understandable rule from a financial standpoint, I get that, but in my mind it raises serious questions about the quality of the research when only members -- or those willing to pay for the privilege of consideration -- get published there.  Too damn insular for my taste.  In defense of the journal, it's apparently had this rule for some time.

Maybe it's like this in a number of academic fields outside my own and I just didn't realize it.

So off I go looking for another home...

Ghostwriting the Meds

I need a corporate ghostwriter for my academic work.

That seems to be what's happening in medical journals, according to today's New York Times story, and there's a growing backlash among lawmakers and journal editors.  Why?  According to the Times lede:

The scientific integrity of medical research has been clouded in recent years by articles that were drafted by drug company-sponsored ghostwriters and then passed off as the work of independent academic authors.

That says it all.

We used to trust peer-reviewed journals, especially the big medical journals, to get it right.  But of late, the big pharmaceutical/medical companies are cooking the data.  Never trusted them, but I did trust university medical researchers.  Apparently that trust was misplaced too.

How this affects what people know is obvious.  Much of what we learn about medical breakthroughs, testing, new products, new drugs, comes through a news media filter from the academic journals.  There's something magical about the New England Journal of Medicine -- so magical, it seems, that corporations and sleazy academics team up to have corporate hacks ghostwrite academic research.

Which, apparently, I need.  Get more publications that way, or at least grant money.