How your failure to reply hurts the profession

As a submissions editor for a journal I am in charge of sending out requests to review submitted manuscripts to suitable reviewers. Fortunately, this is often a relatively painless process. But every so often the potential reviewer is completely unresponsive. Each time I am baffled. The requests to review contain the manuscript's title, an abstract and two links: one for accepting the invitation and one for declining. If potential reviewers are busy and can't take on the assignment, then all they need to do is click "decline invitation." Of course, it would be ideal if they also listed some alternative reviewers but in principle they only need to click on a link. It should take them no more than one minute to complete this task. Apparently, some folks are unwilling to spare one minute of their time to help the profession. Perhaps they are unaware of how much it hurts the profession when they fail to respond.

When an editor sends out a request to review a paper, the person on the receiving end is commonly given somehere between a half and one week to respond to the request, for example, by declining it. If the editor hasn't heard back from the reviewer after the allocated amount of time, a reminder is sent out. When the potential reviewer does not respond to the reminder, he or she is uninvited and subsequently informed about this. If the submission process occurs via an electronic submission system, the latter two steps typically occur automatically.

At this point two wasteful weeks have passed. But that is not all the time that has passed. Prior to the two weeks the editor may have spent a day or two finding the potential reviewer and will now have to repeat this process. It is also worth bearing in mind that most journal editors don't work full time as editors. Most editors work full time as university professors with the same teaching load, service load and research projects as other professors. They have taken on the editorial task, not as a way of completing their full time job or as a way of making money, but as a charitable service to the profession. This means that they do not work 40 hours a week as journal editors. Some editors may complete the editorial work on specific days. Let's say that our submissions editor works on journal stuff on Mondays and Fridays. Since some potential reviewers are invited on a Monday in this scenario, those who are unresponsive might be uninvited on a Monday night (depending on the journal). But then the editor cannot begin to look for an alternative reviewer until the following Friday, and if she has a lot of submissions and a lot of unresponsive potential reviewers, it may take her a couple of weeks to find an alternative reviewer and send out the new request to review. Because the initial potential reviewer was unresponsive, all of this may add up to four or more additional weeks. In unfortunate cases this prolonged reviewing time could make the difference between the author of the manuscript being jobless and her getting or keeping a job.

I am, of course, aware that there can be circumstances in which it is not possible to reply to a request to review within two weeks or so. Problems at work or at home may prevent people from checking their emails altogether. Extended traveling may have similar consequences. A potential reviewer could also, in principle, accidentally delete the email request, perhaps even twice. But these are far from the only circumstances in which potential reviewers are unresponsive. People that I know are capable of responding to tons of other emails sometimes do not bother to accept or decline the invitation to review. I am baffled by this negligence or perhaps recklessness. Why do professional academics behave so irresponsibly again and again? I would like to know, and I would like to urge potential reviewers who are in the habit of not responding to requests to review to consider the harm they may be inflicting on authors and the profession.