A recent editorial in Nature was a declaration by a biologist from UCL on her refusal to accept refereeing requests during the summer (or was it the summer break), which was motivated by a need to reconnect with her son. Which is a good enough reason (!), but reflects sadly on the increasing pressure on one’s schedule to juggle teaching, research, administration, grant hunting, society service, along with a balanced enough family life. (Although I have been rather privileged in this regard!) Given that refereeing or journal editing is neither visible nor rewarded, it comes as the first task to be postponed or abandoned, even though most of us realise it is essential to keep science working as a whole and to make our own papers published. I have actually noticed an increasing difficulty in the past decade to get (good) referees to accept new reviews, often asking for deadlines that are hurting the authors, like six months. Making them practically unavailable. As I mentioned earlier on this blog, it could be that publishing referees’ reports as discussions would help, since they would become recognised as (unreviewed!) publications, but it is unclear this is the solution. If judging from the similar difficulty in getting discussions for discussed papers. (As an aside, there are two exciting papers coming up for discussion in Series B, ‘Unbiased Markov chain Monte Carlo methods with couplings’ by Pierre E. Jacob, John O’Leary and Yves F. Atchadé and in Bayesian Analysis, Latent nested nonparametric priors by Frederico Camerlenghi, David Dunson, Antonio Lijoi, Igor Prünster, and Abel Rodríguez). Which is surprising when considering the willingness of a part of the community to engage into forii discussions, sometimes of a considerable length as illustrated on Andrew’s blog.
Another entry in Nature mentioned the case of two University of København tenured professors in geology who were fired for either using a private email address (?!) or being away on field work during an exam and at a conference without permission from the administration. Which does not even remotely sound like a faulty behaviour to me or else I would have been fired eons ago..!
