Read & Publish (R&P) agreements (referred to by many names, but most commonly “transformative agreements”) are package subscription deals offered to academic libraries by publishers, sometimes by way of library consortium negotiation. What distinguishes an R&P agreement from the classic “big deal” is the allure of open access (OA) publishing support: as part of the agreement, an institution’s affiliated authors can receive coverage for article processing charges (APCs) required to publish OA in a portfolio of the publisher’s academic journals. This can look a few ways: a limited pool of APC-dedicated funds that replenishes annually; or a limited pool of credits or tokens; or rarely, an uncapped automatic waiver for all accepted articles; and these funds or credits might be limited to hybrid OA journals (journals that allow authors to either publish their articles behind a subscription paywall without direct cost, or publish OA for a fee) or gold OA journals (journals that require all articles be published OA for a fee).
The premise of R&P agreements was first proposed by faculty at the Max Planck Digital Library in 2015. It quickly captured the imagination of many influential OA advocates as a potential path toward mass conversion of the academic publishing system away from the traditional subscription model to a fully OA future, and R&P agreements have since proliferated across Europe and the U.S. After reflecting on how events have unfolded over the past decade, many of those same proponents (e.g. cOAlitionS, Jisc) are no longer confident in the promise of R&P agreements.
The question of R&P agreements asks whether the ends justify the means. On one hand, R&P agreements and the APC model upon which they are based have significantly increased the overall market share of OA publications over the past 10 years, now up to around 50% of all journal articles published annually (although that trajectory has plateaued over the past several years). R&P agreements also provide a neat solution for federally funded authors who are worried about potential caps on the amount of grant dollars they can spend on APCs.
Of course, not all publishers behave in the same way, and not all R&P agreements are created equally. Dér recently raised the point that, to be truly “transitional/transformative,” the Max Planck team always envisioned that R&P agreements would evolve through regular negotiations, and eventually, libraries would “…unbundle fixed lump-sum OA payments or capped OA article allowances and adopt a post-payment model. This way, investments can be linked, objectively, to the actual number of articles published…” Although university presses and society publishers seem more willing to explore alternative R&P conceptions, this goal has ostensibly been lost in the shuffle during negotiations with big publishers.
Ultimately, in their current common form, big R&P agreements ask research institutions to further sacrifice control of the scholarly communication system to for-profit publishers by incentivizing submissions to their journals. This relationship undercuts efforts to promote author and/or institutional engagement with other OA publishing and distribution models (e.g. diamond OA, pre-prints, self-archiving). When factoring in the bloated subscription packages attached to these distorted OA perks, it seems increasingly difficult for the ends to justify the means.
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For those interested, here is some more leisure reading in addition to the links scattered above:
As a process that validates information credibility, peer review is undeniably and incredibly valuable—when it works. But sometimes it doesn’t work as well as we’d like.
Photo by Joaquin Alcaraz on Unsplash. Alt image: A lighted gatehouse stands in the middle of a dark road, with a barrier raised on the left side and another barrier lowered on the right side.
[Update 9/4: At request from Clarivate, I have corrected a reference to the organization’s treatment of eLife, which is partially indexed in Web of Science’s “Emerging Sources Citation Index.”]
As Peer Review Week nears (September 15-19), I’ve been reflecting on this process that has become so ingrained in the contemporary production and communication of scholarship. What follows are some of my meandering thoughts on the current state of peer review, about which I certainly do not claim to be the foremost expert. Many smart people have been wrestling with peer review for quite a while; I’m just another librarian-blogger weighing in.
Issues
Peer review is a critical component of today’s scholarly publishing process. The validation of information via peer review is perhaps the main value scholarly publishers purport to provide (in addition to infrastructure, like persistent identifiers and metadata). In an age of rampant mis- and disinformation, when most research is published in countries whose democracies and press freedoms are under threat, a process that validates information credibility is undeniably and incredibly valuable—when it works.
But sometimes it doesn’t work as well as we’d like. As of August 26, 2025, Retraction Watch’s database contains records for over 66,000 articles that have been retracted or marked as concerning since they began tracking in 2017. Over 43,000 of those articles were published in the last 10 years, between 2014-2025.
We can’t lay blame at the feet of individual peer reviewers for a problem so systemic and complex and persistent. A (literally) large part of the issue is the incomprehensible amount of scholarship flowing through the system: in 2022, just 10 of the largest publishers produced around 2.82 million journal articles. Retraction Watch reports 9,973 retracted or markedly concerning articles by those same publishers in 2022[1], meaning the rate was around 0.35%, or about 1 in every 282 articles. Even if that might otherwise seem like a permissibly low error rate, the sheer quantity of submissions in the system still meant nearly 10,000 deeply flawed or fraudulent articles made it through peer review in 2022, many of which appeared in journals owned by well-known and established publishers. That is a startling number and a direct consequence of the immense strain on the scholarly journal publishing system.
Even while acknowledging those conditions, the blind method of peer review also deserves some scrutiny. Double-blind peer review is the particular flavor I can speak to from experience, during which neither the authors nor the reviewers are privy to each other’s identities (you’ve likely heard of/encountered the oft-maligned Reviewer 2). Review interactions are de-identified and kept private from readers. The main rationale behind this approach to peer review is that anonymity (such that it can be achieved) protects both authors and reviewers from bias, whether positive or negative, and from potential retribution. These are, without doubt, important considerations that should not be dismissed lightly. Many disciplines have relatively small communities of scholars, and particular specialties within disciplines are shared by even smaller groups who might often be called upon as experts to review each other’s work. However, the need to invite niche experts as peer reviewers may result in unavoidable opportunity for bias, as a new report suggests peer reviewers are more likely to recommend studies for publications that cite their own work.
Involving disciplinary experts is necessary because peer review is meant to do more than check citation accuracy and assess methodology and catch evidence of generative AI authorship. It is also meant to help authors address valid questions about their work and communicate new insights more clearly via constructive feedback. This begs the question: is the blind peer review process constructive? Again, I can only speak to my experience participating in a few double-blind peer review processes for journal articles as both author and reviewer. I do think those reviews improved the clarity and quality of the ultimate products, but although I appreciated that improvement as both author and reviewer, the interactions between authors and reviewers didn’t feel particularly constructive. I recall them feeling somewhat rude, combative, and dismissive, despite the manuscripts’ eventual acceptance. This is all anecdotal, of course, and I could have been unlucky (and probably sound whiny). I’m curious to hear about other folks’ experiences. Still, I’ve come away from those interactions further convinced that anonymity does not usually bring out the best in folks, especially when they’re likely overworked. Overworked reviewers might even be tempted to make undisclosed use of Generative AI themselves for a little relief, to which authors are now responding by hiding prompts in their manuscripts to encourage positive reviews. In sum, one of blind peer review’s critical flaws is the lack of reviewer accountability, in both the spirit and integrity of the review.[2]
Another part of the peer reviewers’ role is to recommend the article for acceptance or rejection, so some level of judgement is a necessary part of the system. However, in a system where acceptance/rejection rates are a badge of honor for journals, one starts to wonder whether the current mode of peer review is still founded in the spirit of progressing knowledge, or if it’s been turned into a zero-sum game for publishers’ private gain.
In the same vein, the behind-the-curtains nature of blind peer review enables the devaluation of reviewers’ labor even though it is the core service publishers (or rather, editorial boards) provide to the scholarly communication system. The flip side of public accountability is public recognition, which is also lost in the blind peer review process. Scholars are expected to volunteer their peer review services as part of their contribution to the progress of knowledge in their field, while for-profit publishers just so happen to enjoy the material profits of that uncompensated labor. There are some exceptions to this rule as more journals work with services like ORCID to formally acknowledge peer reviewers. There are also strong opposing arguments, specifically for paying peer reviewers. Regardless, it’s not a big leap to connect the devaluation of peer reviewers’ labor to longer review timelines, difficulty in finding willing peer reviewers, and the increasing number of retracted journal articles whose peer reviewers missed major flaws and/or falsified information.
Libraries
How does all this impact academic libraries? To start, our collection development responsibilities position us as arbiters of information legitimacy. If something is in our collection, we’ve symbolically stamped it with our seal of approval to some degree. Of course, we can’t review and fact check of every piece of content in our collections, and even if we had the time, we wouldn’t have the expertise to do so across disciplines. We rely on “reputable” sources to facilitate this validation of credible scholarship, often via blind peer review. But if the system we’ve relied on to legitimize scholarship isn’t working as well as it could (in many ways), then as information professionals, we necessarily should be interested in potential solutions and alternative approaches. Further, considering our goals to promote information literacy, I’d argue that blind peer review obscures from readers the constructed and contextual nature of authority, the process of information creation, and the layers of conversation that underpin a specific piece of scholarship. Blind peer review is simply not an ideal fit in an information age when transparency and trustworthiness feel so imperiled.
So, are there viable alternatives to blind peer review?
Again, smart folks have been wrestling with peer review for quite a while. Below are a few interesting approaches that have been/are currently being tested. Many of these approaches would fall under the general category of “open peer review,” but they use the term “open” to mean different things about the review process, so I’m going to distinguish them more explicitly, if possible, although they do share an openness as compared to blind peer review.
Small Changes
The most modest adjustment to blind peer review is simply to make both authors and reviewers aware of each other’s identities. Let’s call this “pre-publication open identities” peer review. Although this approach may encourage more humanity between its participants, it leaves other issues (e.g. reviewer recognition, context) unaddressed.
For those who want to retain the current review workflow but don’t think pre-publication open identities review moves the needle much, “transparent” peer review would be the next step to consider. The basic premise is that some amount of the review interaction is included as part of the final published product. This alternative seems palatable to some of the larger publishers (like Wiley and IEEE, for example), as it doesn’t threaten much about their workflow or revenue streams.
A Big Change
To this last point: In a 2024 interview with the Scholarly Kitchen, Nici Pfeiffer, Chief Product Officer at the Center for Open Science (known most for the Open Science Framework), offered this response to a question about the biggest opportunities facing the scholarly communication community:
“The biggest opportunities that lay before us are the separation of peer review from the publication of scholarship, and more assessment tools to evaluate the quality, rigor, reproducibility, robustness, etc. of research outcomes. To realize these opportunities, we will need to embrace new business models for publication, how we reward and incentivize getting it right over getting it published, and putting research evaluation in the hands of the communities that practice it.”
If we were to rethink the publication workflow to achieve a more democratized and community-governed peer review process, what would that look like, exactly?
Both compelling and provocative, one approach that’s gaining traction is “preprint review,” also dubbed “publish-review-curate” by MetaResearch Open Review, one of its adopters (along with eLife, Open Research Europe, and others). In these preprint review/publish-review-curate models, authors post their preprint (i.e. initial draft) in an open repository and provide a link to the relevant review organization (e.g. MetaROR), who facilitates peer review, publishes those reviews and an editorial assessment, provides a platform for public comment from readers, and categorizes the review materials in a disciplinary collection on their site. In MetaROR’s case, the review service does not publish the author’s work, and the author retains copyright and is able to do what they wish with the work at that point, including taking it to a traditional publisher if they so choose. F1000 and eLife serve as both the preprint repository and the review service to consolidate all elements in one location (here’s an example of what this looks like). Some of these review services are free for authors and some are not; some allow reviewers to remain anonymous and some do not. To me, the ideal version would not allow anonymous reviews and would be free to use, although that may be hard to achieve.
To me, the transparency of preprint review seems to encourage accountability, effort, and fairness from reviewers; allows for their labor to be incentivized; enriches scholarship with context that supports information literacy; and promises to expedite the entire review process. As Christopher Steven Marcum notes in his excellent essay on the firehose problem in scholarly communication, preprint review may help “…shift peer review from a monoculture maintained solely by publishers into an entire ecosystem largely maintained by researchers, their institutions, and their funders.” And although it might not solve the overload problem itself, it does begin to incentivize other contributions to the field aside from the publish-or-perish pressures that burden so many academics, and gives their institutions the chance to recognize credited peer review in tenure portfolios.
What’s your review?
If you’ve read this long, thank you, and I’m curious about your thoughts on peer review. Does it need fixing? If so, what pathway do you find most promising? As information professionals, we belong in these conversations. Thanks for your thoughts.
[1] To match the publishers studied by Hanson et al. (2024), I used the following search string in the Publisher field of Retraction Watch’s database, filtered for papers published between 01/01/2022–12/31/2022: [BioMed Central (BMC) OR Elsevier OR Frontiers OR Hindawi OR MDPI OR Nature Publishing Group OR PLoS OR Springer OR Springer – Nature Publishing Group OR Taylor and Francis OR Wiley OR Wiley-Blackwell].
[2] Single-blind peer review is another method, in which the authors are blinded to the reviewers’ identities, but the reviewers are aware of the authors’ identities. To me, this approach manages to both a) not hold reviewers accountable for their work and b) guarantee the chance for bias in the review process. Without any obvious benefits, and I don’t understand why a single-blind approach would be preferable.
How many times have you or your faculty received this message?
Dear Dr. Colleague,
We at Intellectual and Smart Publishers would love to talk to you about publishing “INSERT PAPER TITLE HERE” in our issue of Smart Things in Science. We offer expedited review!
So and So,
Intellectual and Smart Publishers
When the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education approached “Authority is constructed” little did we know the importance that our work would play in ongoing discussions on the national level about “fake news.” But the contextual and constructed nature of information was given a deeper hold within our field with news of the shut down of notorious Beall’s List. The list, which black-listed publishers deemed by Beall as predatory, was a tool which I used (with a necessary grain of salt) to counsel faculty and student interested in publishing their work. Beall’s enemies, and there were many, celebrated while his supporters, again many, wondered about how libraries and librarians will spread the news about the predators in our wake without his list.
How do we define predatory publishers? Predatory publishers (or vanity publishers as they were once known) are publishers with very little, if any, editing or peer review process. Maura Smale wrote a piece several years ago responding to an uptick of press about predatory open access publishers. Any presenter at any national conference will know these predators as their form letters seek to publish your presentations often without knowledge of what you even spoke about. They tout “expedited publishing process” and high impact values, while giving very little in return for your investment of dollars for publishing. Slate writer Joseph Stromberg has an excellent piece on publishing his thesis with a notorious publisher.
Writing in 1958, Howard A Sullivan explained that “the very use of the term vanity publishing implies contempt for the book produced and a judgement on the author and publisher—on the former because he has chosen an unorthodox way of attempting to achieve a recognition his talent does not merit, and on the latter because he has pandered to another’s weakness for his own profit.” (Sullivan, Howard A. “Vanity press publishing.” Library Trends 7, no. 1 (1958): 105-115. )
Weakness is an incredibly loaded term, but we are naturally suspicious of the merit of books published under such circumstances and of the scholar themselves for their unwillingness to be judged by a jury of their peers. Would books published this way merit publishing through traditional processes? Perhaps but also perhaps not.
Overwhelmingly, these predatory publishers target our most vulnerable university community members, who are driven to “publish or perish” to continue the cliché. (Lud?k Brož, Tereza Stöckelová, Filip Vostal do a nice overview of “bloodsuckers” in publishing) Students and new faculty are often pressured to publish at any cost and these emails fill that need to publish anywhere and everywhere. Yet, we know that Howard Sullivan’s view is the norm rather than an exception; the scholar caught publishing without peer-review is scorned in the university community.
A quick search online for “vanity press” or “predatory publisher” and “tenure” see many a frustrated new academic weighing the decisions between not publishing and publishing with a less desirable press. Karen Kelsky, the “professor is in” advice columnist, has approached this topicseveral times. Summing up that “Putting a book out with an obscure press is not much different than having no book out at all, in terms of gaining a tenure track job or tenure.” (http://theprofessorisin.com/2012/09/21/does-the-status-of-the-press-matter/) While not specifically talking about vanity presses, but merely unknown presses, it is clear that the quality of the press is a significant focus of tenure committees and the angst of new professors.
So, what can Libraries do?
If anything, this is an information literacy issue. Determining which presses are worthy of your work is something that should be taught in new faculty seminars by librarians whose expertise in the fields of publishing should help guide those led astray. Just as how we feel condescending when we teach searching to our students, it will feel just the same, if not worse, when teaching faculty where to publish. Teaching how we determine the value of information (another hallmark of the 2016 framework) will help our faculty in choosing where to publish, and in the end make them more successful in their career. Even if we assume that our colleagues in faculty positions are experts in their fields and highly educated, the intersection of need to publish and the predatory nature of these publishers “tricks” even the most brilliant into giving their work to them. But the researcher is not the only one tricked by these publishers.
The other thing we should consider is who buys these materials. I’m sorry to say that the primary purchasers of these books are libraries, given their price and often microscopic academic viewpoints. We might be the only institutions or persons capable of purchasing such expensive books. We must make an effort from a collection development standpoint to not purchase these books for our collections. In the past month or so I’ve worked with our collection development experts to create policies to prevent Utah State University from purchasing books from suspected predators.
There is a huge problem in proclamations like this because the disgust over predatory publishers and vanity presses bleeds into ongoing discussions over the merits of indie publishers and self-publishing. Self-publishing and indie publishing are not straight line indications of lower quality or predatory materials, but it is often difficult to see the differences. In an account of self-publishing in OCLC records, Juris Dilevko and Keren Dali write, “as large mainstream publishers become focused on profit-and-loss statistics (Schiffrin, 2000) and as the demands of bookstores stoke the corporate emphasis on bestsellers (Epstein, 2001), librarians should remember that self-publishers often release titles that would not typically find a home with a profit-oriented publisher. Self-publishers may be one of the last frontiers of true independent publishing.” (Dilevko, Juris, and Keren Dali. “The self-publishing phenomenon and libraries.” Library & information science research 28, no. 2 (2006): 208-234.) This complicates an already muddled picture of what a library should collect; where questions of authority and how to deem a book worthy of our dwindling dollars, are becoming more and more difficult.
If faculty ask students to use peer-reviewed sources, should we not ask the same for the books we purchase? The end result would be a world devoid of the divergent voices that appear in indie and self publishing, yet save us from the troubles caused by predatory and vanity presses. A policy, perhaps, where fiction from self-publishing is acceptable but non-fiction is unacceptable? A change in how we value information and published works is in order, yet who will lead that charge?
There are no concrete solutions to these issues, but I know if I need to publish on it I’ve already got several offers.
Over the past academic year I’ve worked on a research project with a colleague to study the ways that students do their scholarly work, similar to the project at the University of Rochester a few years ago. We finished with data collection for this year and are spending the summer analyzing our results. We’ve gotten an additional grant and plan to collect data at a few more sites next year; ultimately we’ll produce a comprehensive analysis of all of our data. But in the short term, we’d like to share our preliminary results and analysis from this year’s research.
Here’s my dilemma: the fastest and most efficient way to disseminate our results is to share them on the website we’ve set up for the project. When I was an archaeologist we wrote up an interim report after each field season and a final report when the project was complete, and I’m thinking along these lines. However, I’m also a junior faculty member on the road to tenure, and the currency of the realm is, of course, the peer-reviewed journal article.
A peer-reviewed article will take considerably more time to be published, up to a year or even longer, especially if our submission isn’t accepted on the first try (as seems true for most article manuscripts). I’m a strong advocate of open access publishing, and it just seems wrong to keep our data to ourselves for all that time. But I do value the peer review process, and while I hope that posting a report on our website would generate comments, there’s no guarantee.
Ideally I’d like to write both a preliminary report, to be posted online by the end of the summer, and a scholarly article, submitted around the same time and (hopefully) published sometime next year. I’m not sure that we have time for both, though. While the summer months are slower in the library, we’re still open, and there are classes and reference desk shifts to staff and programs to plan for next year. So we are probably going to have to focus our energies on just one publication.
As I’ve been thinking on this recently there’s been lots of other news in the world of academic publishing. The University of California proposed a possible faculty boycott of the Nature Publishing Group. And an unusual scholarly publishing project came out of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University: Hacking the Academy, a book that gathered all of its submissions in just one week. I can’t help but think that we’re in an odd scholarly communication moment right now, stuck between old and new worlds of knowledge dissemination, and I’m not always sure how to chart my course.
It’s still a few weeks until Open Access Week, but starting now you can help reimagine what scholarly publishing might look like in the future. Media Studies scholar Kathleen Fitzpatrick has made her new book manuscript available online for open peer review. While Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy will go through the traditional blind review process (it’s slated to be published in print next year by NYU Press), Fitzpatrick also plans to incorporate reader comments from the online manuscript into her revisions, asserting that “peer review will be a more productive, more helpful, more transparent, and more effective process if conducted in the open.”
The beginning of open peer review for Planned Obsolescence also marks the launch of MediaCommons Press, the latest project from MediaCommons (which Barbara first alerted us to a couple of years ago). MediaCommons uses the CommentPress theme for the popular, open source WordPress blogging platform. Manuscript text is displayed side-by-side with reader comments, facilitating paragraph-level discussion of the book.
Of course this isn’t the first experiment with open peer review of scholarly works. Fitzpatrick published an article about CommentPress in the Journal of Scholarly Publishing in 2007, and also made it available online for comments. Noah Wardrip-Fruin opened up the manuscript for his book Expressive Processing to “blog-based peer review” on the group blog Grand Text Auto; it also went through the traditional peer review process before being published by MIT Press this year.
What’s most interesting to me about the Planned Obsolescence project is that the book itself discusses the process of peer review and scholarly publishing. Browsing the chapter titles and subtitles there looks to be lots of interest to academic librarians: discussions of authority, intellectual property, preservation, and the sustainability of university presses. I haven’t had a chance to read more than the first few pages yet, but I’m looking forward to continuing (and commenting, too).
