Editorial : maieutic or meddlesome? : reflections on the roles of the journal and the author

Abstract

There is a fair amount of road to travel between a submitted draft and a published article. For authors, publishing takes time, effort, and in some journals a significant monetary contribution as well. For editors and peer reviewers it also entails a fair amount of (usually unpaid) labour. By one estimate scholars and scientists globally spend more than 15,000 years peer reviewing annually, and to that we would have to add the significant amount of time spent revising articles, copy editing, formatting and generally making pieces ready for publication. So free it is not; even at a Diamond open access journal such as ours. Since publishing incurs costs, it is worth enquiring at regular intervals into what sort of added value academic publishing and peer review contributes, for the author, for the editor, for the legal community, perhaps even for the world.