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by Al-Khwarizmi 3294 days ago
The thing (at least for me) is that it feels hypocritical to refuse to review after having benefitted from many other people's reviews when submitting to those same journals.
1 comments

I have heard this argument and I don't think it's valid. We are stuck in a broken system where researchers are pressured to publish in closed-access venues. It's hard to act against this at the publication level, because you may need to publish in such venues (for career reasons), and (more importantly, at least for me) you often co-author papers with other people who may not share your dislike of closed access.

By contrast, acting at the review level is your own choice, it carries little penalty, and it is just as effective (closed-access journals would not be sustainable if no one reviewed for them). I don't think it's hypocritical to admit that you publish in closed-access journals because of career pressure or coauthor pressure, but you would prefer if such journals didn't exist so you act against them at the review level.

This looks like it violates the golden rule, but in fact it does not: if everything followed this policy, closed-access journals would disappear. :)