Comment on Scholarly Authors are Increasingly Experiencing APC Fatigue by Benno von Bormann, MD

Harvey I get your point, but lazy reviewers are not automatically good reviewers; and some of them are lazy, simple as that. I’m doing reviews myself and I do it with greatest diligence. When I accept, it means it will be done within 4 weeks maximum. Nowadays with the Internet at hand, this is more than enough; either you’re an expert in the field or you’re not. People arguing they are snowed under with duties should reject the job, which would be fair towards the authors. But experts jump at the chance to be reviewer for high IF Journals, not always to enhance scientific quality but their own reputation.
The case I’ve explained above means that an actual randomized trial with a new therapeutic approach in perioperative pain management (which may benefit the patients) already lost > half a year; outcome unknown. Interestingly none of these ‘leading’ Journals (for me, there is no such thing) care about conflicts of interest, something that can be much more dangerous for patients. Authors declare it, and that’s it. Consequences – None! I fully agree with J. Ioannidis that at least 90% of the medical literature is flawed and contaminated with heavy bias.
It’s the experience of our own group: Scrutiny regarding reliability of data incl. submitting the raw-data, ethical concerns, funding from ‘interested groups’ was much more thorough in PeerJ compared to Journals with IF 51, 37, 18, 14, 6, 5, and 3 respectively. Again, we have zero ties to any publisher, but in the future we will care less about IF, and more about the availability of our data.