Is peer-review biased? Locating inequality in global academic publishing in the neoliberal system

By Anna Kristina Hultgren

A foundational question in the field of English for Research Publication Purposes is the extent to which researchers who have English as an Additional Language are disadvantaged by demands to publish their academic outputs in English (for recent reviews, see Soler, 2021; Flowerdew & Habibie, 2022; Demeter, 2020). Inequalities have been researched both from the perspective of manuscript authors and from the perspective of gatekeepers, that is primarily reviewers and editors. In combination, such studies have yielded important insights into how inequality is experienced (in the case of the author) and knowingly or unknowingly exercised (in the case of the gatekeeper).

In this blog, I turn attention to the neoliberal system of global academic publishing as a key source of inequality and disadvantage for marginalized scholars. Specifically, I argue that inequality is located less in the individual author, reviewer and editor and more in the profit-chasing premise of global academic publishing, coupled with the research evaluation regimes that feed it (Hultgren, 2019; 2020; to appear).

Are peer-reviewers biased?

There seems to be some disagreement as to whether the peer-review system is systemically biased, i.e. systematically affecting certain groups of scholars, particularly those already marginalized, more than others. While recognizing the importance of geographical location, experience and networks, Hyland (2020) views peer reviewing as embodying “an adherence to objectivity rather than personal self-interest” (2020, p. 52; see also Hyland, 2015; 2016). Despite their commitment to objectivity, however, peer reviewers are human and, as Hyland writes, they inevitably bring their own values and ideologies to the process:

We have to remember that reviewers are not computers running algorithms which check manuscripts against objective criteria. Values and beliefs always feed into recommendations. Far from being surprising, then, disagreements and subjectivity are inevitable: an inescapable aspect of scientific fact construction (2020, p. 55).

Despite some general agreement about what constitutes field-specific standards for research and “good” and “acceptable” language (Hynninen & Kuteeva, 2017), peer-reviewers are only human so their interpretations of those norms will inevitably vary and be applied differently across different manuscripts. This is why Hyland acknowledges authors often feeling hard done by or disillusioned with the peer review process: “Slow, biased, contradictory, hurtful or wilfully obtuse, reviewers come in for a lot of stick” (Hyland, 2020, p. 51).

In contrast to Hyland, Demeter (2020) is in no doubt that the peer reviewing system itself is biased. Despite the double-blind peer review system being premised on ensuring an unbiased evaluation, Demeter writes: “the most striking feature of peer review is that, while it is intended to assure the unbiased assessment of academic research, it is one of the most biased processes in academia” (2020, p. 44). To make his case, Demeter draws on data showing a positive correlation between the nationality of editors (or editorial board members) and the nationality of the affiliations of the published papers. In other words, gatekeepers from the Global North prefer to publish the works of authors from the Global North. Based on these findings, Demeter argues that the identity of authors and their affiliation may be blind to reviewers, it is not so to editors. He also points out that even if manuscripts have been anonymized, authors’ identity can be revealed through topic choice, research site, reference list, and so on (ibid).

Demeter further argues, drawing on a recent report by Publon, that US-based scholars dominate absolute contribution to peer review, and that a whopping 96% of journal editors are selected from the Global North, creating a Matthew effect that perpetuates existing global inequities. In other words, Global North scholars wield disproportionate amounts of power over what is published and not. Demeter’s analyses, in my view, are powerful and important. Demeter himself, however, stays clear of explicitly discussing whether bias is located in the individual (whether this is deliberate discrimination or unconscious bias), or in systemic issues. His Bourdieusian framework, however, implies that he sees it as both.

Profit-chasing as a source of inequality

It is also possible to locate geopolitical inequality in global knowledge production in the profit-chasing premise of the publishing industry. In the UK, publishers’ income from scholarly journals has grown year on year since 2013, with over £2 billion income in the most recent year for which data is available (2019) (Watson, 2021). This profit is likely to have been fuelled by national and institutional research evaluation exercises. Publishers themselves would likely argue that they too have expenses, and that profit is limited by the small audiences that many highly specialised journals attract. However, anyone in doubt of the profit-making capacities of publishers need look no further than to their profit margins. In recent years, Elsevier, the world’s largest publishing company, has had a profit margin of 37 percent, which is higher than that of companies such as Microsoft, Google and Coca Cola (Ware & Mabe, 2015; Buranyi, 2017; Muellerleile, 2020).

There is no doubt that participation in global knowledge production is highly inequitable and that it correlates strongly with national wealth. Using bibliometric data from Elsevier’s Scopus database, O’Neil (2018) shows that only 10 countries in the world – some of the wealthiest ones – produce well over half of the world’s total academic output (63.3%) with the remaining 221 countries producing the rest. In other words, the publication of academic output is concentrated in a small minority of rich countries, although China has recently overtaken the US to become the pre-eminent producer of global research papers while India has overtaken Germany, the UK and Japan so there may be some changes on the horizon (Ware & Mabe, 2015).

Arguably, this system generates and reproduces a preference for certain topics, epistemologies, theories, methodologies, discourse styles, and so on, in which Global North scholars have accumulated capital (for excellent discussions of these issues, see Pennycook & Makoni 2019; Stroud & Kerfoot 2020; Canagarajah 2021). These often taken-for-granted preferences cause some manuscripts to be selected and others to be deselected. Thus, I would suggest that it is the neoliberalist premise of global academic publishing – and the research evaluation regimes that fuel it – that is the main culprit in creating and perpetuating systemic inequality in academic knowledge production. When unregulated profitmaking enters into social and human processes, it invariably creates and exacerbates existing economic and other inequalities. Like most capitalist systems, then, global academic publishing accumulates wealth and power where wealth and power already exist, leading to financial and epistemic capital becoming inextricably intertwined.

Benefits and limitations of peer reviewing

Peer reviewing no doubt serves many benefits. Peer reviewers serve as “custodians of knowledge” (Starfield & Paltridge, 2019), making important decisions about the development and integration of new research and ensuring standards (Hyland, 2015, 2020; Johnson, Watkinson, & Mabe, 2018). Peer review offers authors an indication of how other researchers understand their work, and it serves as a stamp of quality for more than a million papers published each year, thus facilitating researchers’ ability to keep abreast of important developments in their field (Hyland, 2015, 2020). More widely, academic knowledge production has benefits such as stimulating thinking, disseminating knowledge and recording and advancing scientific progress (Johnson, Watkinson, & Mabe, 2018).

Despite its merits and commitment to objectivity, however, what peer review fails to do is address and eradicate systemic geopolitical inequalities in academic publishing. These are caused by differential access to material and academic capital in a neoliberalist system. It might even be argued that putting up a pretence of objectivity through the double-blind peer reviewing system is worse than recognizing that systemic inequality exists. This is because the double-blind peer review sets up a smokescreen that the process is objective, which may be true in theory and, presumably in most cases, at an individual level, but it is far from objective or fair at a structural level. Recognizing that systemic inequality exists in the first place seems a prerequisite for tackling it.

Moreover, interpreted through a neoliberal lens, the peer reviewing process serves the interests of the publishing industry by maintaining a guise of integrity of the process and journal prestige. It is easier to justify institutional subscription fees that are renowned for their exorbitant rates when the product on offer is highly coveted and revered. The interest of the publishing industry, then, in upholding the peer reviewing process is clear, particularly given that, unlike in any other business, it incurs virtually no additional expense for them. It is a well-known but surprisingly well-tolerated fact that one key reason why publishers are able to generate such huge profits is that, unlike in most other business arrangements, academics are quite happy to work for free. Authors and reviewers do not get paid (other than, of course, indirectly through the salaries they receive from their institution), and journal editors may receive a modest remuneration.

Having benefited from this free labour, publishers subsequently charge research institutions sometimes extortionate sums for subscribing to their journals, institutions that have already paid indirectly for the outputs through the salaries of their academic employees. This free-riding off academics’ workloads whilst afterwards charging the institutions for accessing the work they themselves have produced has been described as “double appropriating” (Berverungen, Böhm, & Land, 2012). As Muellerleile puts it: “First, [the publishers] claim intellectual (copy)rights over knowledge they have played almost no role in producing, and second, they sell this knowledge back to universities at inflated prices” (2020, p. 133). Editors and authors, in turn, have their own less profit-driven but more career-oriented incentives to uphold the prestige of the journal and therefore become inevitably complicit in the system. In general, then, it seems clear that even its purportedly fairest double-blind design, peer review in its current form is unequipped to tackle ingrained systemic inequities.

Is there an alternative?

So how, then, might an alternative and more equitable system of academic publishing look? Various options have been proposed to replace the current peer review system. Some proposals include an open peer review system, where both authors and reviewers know the identity of each other, as well as more interactive and continuous discussions of a manuscript, sometimes involving a wider range of stakeholders (see Hyland, 2020, for a discussion of the respective merits and disadvantages of such options). Flowerdew and Habibie (2022), in turn, discuss the digitization of knowledge and how platforms such as LinkedIn, Researchgate, Figshare and academia.edu allow scholars to disseminate knowledge and gain feedback in new ways. Some eminent sociolinguists successfully bypass commercial publication channels by engaging in knowledge activism through blogs, twitter, videos and other forms of digital publishing, thereby promoting a wider knowledge dissemination and education of society. Suresh Canagarajah’s website here is such an example. To less established scholars and early career researchers, however, who are dependent on the system to secure tenure and promotion, this is rarely an option. As the world transitions to Open Access publishing, we await to see whether this and other forms of reviewing and digitization will lead to less profit-driven and more sustainable and equitable publishing practices (European Universities Association, 2020).

Anna Kristina Hultgren is Professor of Sociolinguistics and Applied Linguistics and UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at The Open University

This blog has been adapted from:

Hultgren, Anna Kristina. To appear. Certifying knowledge under neoliberalism: Global inequality and academic wellbeing. In P. Habibie and A. K. Hultgren (eds). The Inner World of Gatekeeping in Scholarly Publication. Palgrave and Macmillan.

References

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Buranyi, S. (2017). Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science? The Guardian 27.6.2017. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science. Accessed 22 Feb 2022.

Canagarajah S. (2021). Diversifying academic communication in anti-racist scholarship: The value of a translingual orientation. Ethnicities. December 2021. doi:10.1177/14687968211061586

Demeter, M. (2020). Academic Knowledge Production and the Global South: Questioning Inequality and Under-Representation. Palgrave Macmillan.

European Universities Association. (2020). Read & Publish contracts in the context of a dynamic scholarly publishing system. https://eua.eu/resources/publications/932:read-publishagreements.html Accessed 22 Feb 2022.

Flowerdew, J. and P. Habibie. (2022). Introducing English for research publication purposes. Routledge.

Hultgren, K. (2019). English as the language for academic publication: On equity, disadvantage and “non-nativeness” as a red herring. Publications, 7 (2): 1-13.

Hultgren, K. (2020). Global English: From “Tyrannosaurus Rex” to “Red Herring”. Nordic Journal of English Studies, 19 (3): 10-34.

Hyland, K. (2020). Peer review: Objective screening or wishful thinking? Journal of English for Research Publication Purposes, 1(1): 51-65.

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Muellerleile, C. (2020). Open access panacea: Scarcity, abundance, and enclosure in the new economy of academic knowledge production. In D. Tyfield, R. Lave, S. Randalls and C. Thorpe (eds), The Routledge Handbook of the Political Economy of Science (pp. 132– 155). Routledge.

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1 Comment on Is peer-review biased? Locating inequality in global academic publishing in the neoliberal system

  1. asc16
    February 23, 2022 at 2:59 pm (2 years ago)

    Kristina,
    You address a much-needed question about the double-blind review process. Despite the claims of being an objective and neutral system, you show how it can be biased. My favorite example is how sometimes American reviewers didn’t realize I was writing from a British colony and pointed to my British spelling as badly edited nonnative submissions! Nowadays I am running into discourse level problem in the submission of autoethnographies. Editors want me to remove my name in order to anonymize it for review. However, in articles that are so deeply embodied and personal, the removal of your name is not going to make the article fully impersonal. In one case, where I didn’t have my name, an editor declined to send out my ms for review, because she said the reviewers might still guess my identity! It appears that a single-blind review (where the author’s identity is visible) or an open review (where both parties are identified) might be the way out for such submissions. We know from experience and from studies that both reviewers and authors can guess their identities despite the double-blinded process. There are so many clues as to people’s identities, even general details such as university, country, or ideological stance even if we might not know the actual name. So this pretense of anonymity doesn’t help. In reverse, some believe that if we knew the identities of authors and reviewers, the process might be more honest. This way, the reviewers can’t hide behind their anonymity to express their biases. I still remember my submission to a composition journal where my identity could be guessed from the nature of my research. The reviewer (whom I could also guess) literally wrote “This author doesn’t have the theoretical sophistication and intellectual depth to address this research question” and recommended rejection. I had to simply “keep calm and carry on” because the reviewer is anonymous!
    –Suresh

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