So I had a little spat with an Elsevier editor who argued that reviewing for Elsevier journals should be performed for free, because Elsevier is part of the scientific community.
Maybe they are part of the scientific community, but primarily they are a commercial enterprise which turns academic labor into profits for their shareholders, like most commercial publishers in this space. Said editor would quickly be out of (their) editing job if they worked against that.
Reviewing for Elsevier and similar publishers is a commercial transaction: You should charge (money) for your review (to go to your employer paying your salary) and leave it to Elsevier to markup your work and turn a profit from it. Your employer can then use your fee to cover some of the exorbitant costs of subscribing to Elsevier journals. I don’t why I would want to work for free for Elsevier or any other commercial publisher.
I do provide reviews, for free, for non-profit community publishers like the ACM, IEEE, and GI (German computer science society), of course. But they are bound to not follow a for-profit motive so I feel justified spending my salaried time on providing free academic services to them.
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