Being a good academic citizen

A lot of ink has been spilt about the pro’s and con’s of academic peer review. I am not going to add to the existing literature on this matter in this blogpost. Suffice it to say that I subscribe to the view that anonymous peer review is still the least deficient of the available mechanisms to determine the quality of a given article submission. As an editor of two international journals I am painfully aware of the fact that occasionally the quality of peer review is not as good as it should be. Usually enraged or not so enraged emails from authors give us editors an indication that one or another of the reviewers we invited to review a particular manuscript might not have been as diligent as would have been desirable.  In some of those cases we tend to embark on a second round of reviews. Either way, we depend on volunteers, also commonly known as good academic citizens, to review articles submitted to the journal. Our Editorial Board members have graciously agreed to review a minimum of four submitted articles for us in any given year, many review quite a few more submissions.

Without dependable reviewers Bioethics and Developing World Bioethics could not function and deliver high-quality outputs. One problem we encounter frequently is that it often is very difficult to find reviewers for submitted manuscripts. We know from conversation with fellow editors at other bioethics and medical ethics journals that we are not alone in this. The ‘very difficult’ refers to a number of different problems, the accumulated effects of which have a deleterious effect on our operations. For starters, too many academics are very happy to submit their manuscripts for review but they think little of returning the professional courtesy of their reviewers by responding positively to invitations to review manuscripts for the journal. As a result, some of those good academic citizens, who review diligently for us, get arguably overburdened with review requests, while those who prefer not to review content get a free ride. I wonder whether the Golden Rule might actually be more frequently written about by academic ethicists than it is actually followed by us. It is notable that junior academics tend to be more generous with their time while many (but by no means all) of the more established scholars are among the more frequent non-responders. The former also tend to provide longer, more in-depth and more constructive reviews. This, of course, is very much appreciated by authors keen to improve their papers prior to submitting their final draft for publication.

Other problems that typically delay – sometimes very significantly – decisions on submitted manuscripts have to do with invited reviewers not responding to our invitations, lagging significantly behind agreed-upon deadlines for the delivery of the reviews, not delivering promised reviews at all, but also producing reviews so devoid of critical substance that they are useless for all intent and purposes.

Part of the problem is undoubtedly that many academic institutions encourage free-riders by not giving serious credits for undertaking per reviews for academic journals, funding agencies and the like. If annual performance reviews, or tenure reviews do not include credits for such work it is understandable why academics turn down such work. This is very unfortunate indeed.  As academics we should flag this issue within our institutions with a view toward establishing formal institutional recognition of demonstrable, quantifiable services to the academic community. 

Odd CMAJ Editorial

There is a big of an outcry in Canada over an Editorial by the current Interim Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Medical Association Journal, Dr Rajendra Kale. Kale argues that pregnant women in Canada should not be provided with information about the sex of the fetus to avoid female feticide among Indo-Canadians. Kale proposes that women should only be told 30 weeks after conception to make it more difficult for them to have an abortion based on an arbitrary marker such as the sex of the fetus. Indeed, The Toronto Star newspaper reports that there is some empirical evidence suggesting a not insignificant gender balance in parts of the country: 'Though Canada does not collect statistics based on ethnicity at birth, population statistics show the country, now home to more than a million Indo-Canadians, has a skewed gender ratio. According to the 2006 census figures, nationally there are 932 girls to 1,000 boys under age 15 in the South Asian community, compared to 953 girls to 1,000 boys in the general population. The numbers in the South Asian community in the Toronto area are further skewed with 917 girls to 1,000 boys in the Toronto Central Metropolitan Area. Broken down further, it shows 904 girls to 1,000 boys in Mississauga, and 864 girls to 1,000 boys in Brampton.'

The gender imbalance itself is not really a great deal of concern in the country as a whole, the differential between the South Asian community and the general populations is a mere 20. Not exactly a dramatic figure. That doesn't mean that this differential is not higher in certain parts of eg Toronto, but in the big swing of things this isn't a dramatic situation. Baldev Mutta, a staff member in a Punjabi Community Health Centre notes in the Star that there is a preference among recent immigrants in favour of male off-spring. Women are reportedly threatened with divorce if they don't agree to to abort female fetuses.

It goes without saying that putting women under such pressures is unacceptable. It also seems, for most circumstances, bizarre to me that - recent migrant or not - anyone would have strong preferences for the sex of his or her off-spring. However, there can be at least some ethically unproblematic reasons, too. For instance, a family might have a preference for a 50:50 ratio among their off-spring and so decide to abort a male or female fetus in favour of a future child of the desired sex. Having knowledge of their off-springs sex sooner rather than later arguably is better overall, because the aborted fetus would be less advanced in its development. There could also be good health reasons for wanting to know, for instance in the case of sex linked genetic diseases.

My point is that it is unacceptable to view certain reasons for wanting an abortion acceptable and other reasons sufficiently dodgy that one chooses ('doctor knows best', it goes without saying!) which women will be told of the sex of their off-spring and which women must not be told. It is clear from the statistics quoted by Kale in his Editorial that the overwhelming majority of Indo-Canadians do not actually choose abortions based on the sex of their off-spring. Preventing them -and anyone else -for that matter from knowing the sex of their off-spring is plain offensive. No wonder that a woman from such a cultural background is quoted along these lines in the Toronto Star, “It’s upsetting, to be honest with you,” says Hussain, who worries Kale’s editorial will further push this kind of discrimination. “It’s a stereotype that brown people will abort a child who is not a boy.”

I might be mistaken, but I suspect that Kale's real agenda is anti-choice to begin with. He confuses fetuses and 'girls' as well as fetuses and 'women' in his Editorial as this quote shows quite nicely, 'Postponing the transmission of such information is a small price to pay to save thousands of girls in Canada. Compared with the situation in India and China, the problem of female feticide in Canada is small, circumscribed and manageable. If Canada cannot control this repugnant practice, what hope do India and China have of saving millions of women?'

Of course, the lives of neither women nor girls are at stake here. The issue is whether or not pregnant women have a right to know the sex of their off-spring. In Canada they do. It's a good thing. Cultural biases need to be confronted where they occur, there mustn't be technical pseudo-solutions to them that infringe on hard-won individual liberties that women can rightly take for granted today in Canada. If the argument really is about the morality of abortion, Kale should have argued that case and should not have chosen to engage in skirmishing activities to do with Indo-Canadians.