My activity (complaint) as a reviewer

Main message: Since reviewing is a duty for all of us, I usually accept the job (unless there are conflicts such as friends' papers). Unfortunately, I cannot accept more than 24 journal paper review requests per year, so if you contact me for a review, most likely you will have to wait! If you have 5 minutes of freedom, you might wish to read my reasons below.

My reasons

Since I am publishing (as an average) around 3 journal papers each year (see the next link)

http://users.dimi.uniud.it/~franco.blanchini/Journal_papers.html

and each of them requires 3 reviews, in the average, I am requiring around 9 reviews per year (let us say 10) so that I can include the papers I got rejected (fortunately recently are not that many). Then

Reviews required by my journal submissions per year = 10

Since I have, as an average, three co-authors the “fair reviewing load” should be 10/3. Since this is not an integer, let us say

Fair reviewing workload (for journals) for Blanchini = 4

Let us say that, being born in 1959, I am not old (at least I think so), but not very young as well. So let us increase that because it is always preferable to have a certain experience to do the job. Then let us say

Reasonable reviewing workload (for journals) per year = 10 journal submissions.

Unfortunately I accept more than twice as much. Precisely

My current reviewing workload = n > 20 review requests for journals each year,

without taking into account re-submissions, conference reviews (which require less time) and the activity as an associate editor for Automatica and senior editor for IEEE Control System Letters. The number 20 is a (very conservative) lower bound for the last 8 years. On the other hand, my case is not isolated. Then my question is

Who is not properly working as a reviewer?

• People who think they are too important for this low-level job?

• People who think that the others have to read their work, not the other way?

• People who are too busy and think that the rest of the world is not?

• People who discovered ``less reviews more publications” (with their own name)?

Dear Journal Editors, if you read this page, please do not think that this is not a matter of your concern.

Best wishes, Franco