REMAIN CALM, ALL IS WELL.

According to the infelicitously named Chad M. Topaz of Williams College at the house organ for all wokeness, all the time in higher education, "The journals are fine. Everything is fine."

No, not exactly.

I have been publishing in academic journals for 25 years. I have published in dozens of them across multiple disciplines. I have refereed more than 100 articles for 41 unique journals. I have served as an editorial board member on five. I believe in peer review. I think the enterprise of having experts vet scholarly work before it enters the public record is one of the better ideas we have for managing knowledge, and I do not want to see it abandoned.

What I want is for the people who run journals to take their own systems as seriously as the people who depend on them. Because recently, I have had a run of experiences so bewildering that I started keeping notes. What follows are five of those experiences, in order from annoying to catastrophic.

In brief:

1.  Arbitrary editorial decisions, sometimes not even sending a paper out for review.
2.  Relatedly, soliciting papers, then advising authors such papers aren't what they want.
3.  Inconsistent policies with regard to simultaneous submissions of the same paper???
4.  Manuscript review in geologic time.
5.  Arbitrary review, whether timely or not.

Perhaps these system failures can be fixed.

Scholarly publishing is a multibillion-dollar industry sustained by donated labor. The research on how to improve it exists. The question is not whether better models are available. It is whether the people who run journals will hold their own processes to the same standards of coherence, rigor and transparency that they demand of authors.

In a reward system structured by the Minimal Publishable Unit, though, will it?