16 ms·

The landscape of incentives within scientific publishing is complicated. You have to map out what drives each of the parties: journals, authors, reviewers, read

The landscape of incentives within scientific publishing is complicated. You have to map out what drives each of the parties: journals, authors, reviewers, readers. Journals want high-quality submissions from well-known authors in order to maintain the brand. They also want ongoing subscription fees. Authors want to be published in good journals, but they also want raw publication count to be high. So the primary incentive may not be intellectual honesty. Reviewers often are in competition with the authors of the papers they're reviewing, hence the term peer-review. They have an incentive to prevent publication of competing work. Readers want all knowledge to be free, so they have an incentive to not pay for journals. They also want to know which works are important and which are crock, so name-recognition comes into play. I've probably left something out, but you get the idea. Coming up with new ideas is fun, but until you align the incentives, nothing meaningful will happen. And you've got hundreds of years of inertia and thousands of careers in the balance.

digbyloftus 11y ago
"Reviewers often are in competition with the authors of the papers they're reviewing, hence the term peer-review. They have an incentive to prevent publication of competing work." This seems backwards to me. There isn't a fixed amount of interest in a field that is captured by peers. If others in your industry are getting attention then it draws attention to your industry as a whole. I'd think reviewers would be biased towards having competing work published not against.
- clarkmoody 11y ago
  In some fields, there is extreme pressure to be "first to publish" specific results, and sometimes multiple labs are working on the exact same problem. In this case, if the "peer" is with a competing lab, they are faced with the unethical decision of rejecting the paper in favor of their lab. Or even worse, of stealing the results and trying to publish first.

digbyloftus 11y ago

"Reviewers often are in competition with the authors of the papers they're reviewing, hence the term peer-review. They have an incentive to prevent publication of competing work." This seems backwards to me. There isn't a fixed amount of interest in a field that is captured by peers. If others in your industry are getting attention then it draws attention to your industry as a whole. I'd think reviewers would be biased towards having competing work published not against.

clarkmoody 11y ago
In some fields, there is extreme pressure to be "first to publish" specific results, and sometimes multiple labs are working on the exact same problem. In this case, if the "peer" is with a competing lab, they are faced with the unethical decision of rejecting the paper in favor of their lab. Or even worse, of stealing the results and trying to publish first.