I was asked to review a manuscript for PLos One recently and declined because they asked for a review in 10 days. This might be standard for biology papers or something, but seems absurd for a paper where the reviewer is asked to sign off on technical correctness for something which may entail a fair bit of math. This sort of one-size-fits-all approach to academic practice drives me nuts. It’s the same kind of thing that leads to workshops on grant writing led by someone who has had a lot of success writing grants to one program at NIH/NSF/wherever and then dispenses advice specific to that area with almost zero recognition that different programs/agencies have different priorities. Wow, context matters! Who knew?

Now, a reasonable claim is that 10 days at 8 hours a day is 80 hours and that is a totally reasonable amount of time to check all the math in a paper, assuming I had nothing else to do with my time. A friend told me their advisor had a policy to decline a review if they couldn’t do it in the next week. This strikes me as an admirable approach to things that probably worked well in the 80s.

However, given that 50% of papers are accepted to PLoS on a pay-to-publish model, what is the prior belief that spending even 30 minutes of my time reading the paper is worthwhile? Far better to spend 10 minutes complaining about it on a nearly defunct blog, no?