7 ms·

For anyone who still doesn't know this: publishers do not pay paper authors, in any field. I am also not aware of a publisher paying peer reviewers. (Lowly soo

For anyone who still doesn't know this: publishers do not pay paper authors, in any field. I am also not aware of a publisher paying peer reviewers. (Lowly soon-to-be-postdoc here; a professor would be able to say more.)

Y7ZCQtNo39 8y ago
How do peer reviews happen, then, if nobody gets paid to do them? Does research money (that goes to the production of the paper) not also cover peer-reviews? I wouldn't see any incentive for any work to be peer-reviewed, ever, then.
- rsa4046 8y ago
  The incentives are 1) professional responsibility; 2) the opportunity to participate in the direction of new research, stay abreast of the field, and maintain a high level of integrity; 3) young researchers joining the field benefit from the process, both as reviewers and authors.
  - Y7ZCQtNo39 8y ago
    I can't remember the last time I've read a headline about the peer-reviewer that confirmed some groundbreaking finding. Maybe it gives you the opportunity to network with higher-profile contributors to your field, if you offer to peer review their work (though to be honest, I don't know how the peer review process works, and if you can even "offer" to perform it for a specific paper).
    - ylmm 8y ago
      At least in the social sciences, journal editors delegate papers to reviewers. Your first sentence also suggests that you don't know what peer review is. Peer review is not the same thing as replication, which is replicating the results of a paper after it's been published (e.g., confirming some groundbreaking finding). Peer review happens at the stage before publication of the original paper. Researcher(s) submit the paper to the journal. The journal editor sends the paper out to some reviewers, who review the paper (this is the "peer review" stage). Pending reviewer feedback and editor approval, the paper is published. Edit: also the "benefit" that rsa4046 refers to probably doesn't mean networking. AFAIK, reviewers are always anonymous to the authors (which can generate its own problems e.g., if the reviewer gets a paper authored by someone he/she doesn't get along with). The benefit being referred to, I believe, is that of learning to write better reviews, and having reviewed other's work, learning how to improve your own.
      - apathy 8y ago
        Well, yeah, but learning to review is less difficult than learning how to communicate clearly, crisply, and forcefully. So in a well administered review, most benefits accrue to the authors even if the reviews are poorly done, so long as they are ethical. (Editors can step in when reviewers are being unreasonable or ignoring explicit instructions; unfortunately professional editors at glam journals can also step in to push exciting or politically expedient work into press before there is time to adequately vet it, which sucks and gives everyone a bad name).
        ylmm 8y ago
        Well, yeah, there are other irrelevant things about reviewing that I also have the ability to bring up but my point is that to say that the "benefit" of reviewing is for the purpose of networking is misinformed.
        apathy 8y ago
        I sometimes agree to review out of a sense of obligation, where I know damned well that the authors recommended me, but you’re right, that’s not networking per se. There’s no reasonable expectation of benefit and it would be unethical as hell to request any. The authors most likely won’t (can’t) ever know that I agreed to review their paper; it’s more of a good citizen affair. Sometimes, afterwards, it will become apparent that a particular referee was someone familiar. I would like to think that the original poster was imagining something along those lines, but your take is probably closer to the truth. Oh well.
- ylmm 8y ago
  I've only worked with professors in economics and political science but I'm under the impression that this is true more generally of academia. Some people do it to help advance the state of the field. Career incentives and standing in the field also come into play. As the poster above mentioned, a professor would be able to say more. To respond succinctly to your comments: money isn't the only incentive in life, so it seems weird to not see "any incentive" as soon as money is taken out of the picture.
  - williamstein 8y ago
    I'm a professor (in mathematics), and there are some reasons why I personally might say "yes" to review a paper. (1) If the paper is so interesting that when I see it I think "I really, really want to read this paper!", then I am likely to peer review it because as a reviewer when I read it, I get to ask any question and the author will take my questions and concerns very seriously. (2) I owe the editor who is asking me to peer review the paper (or maybe even the author of the paper), e.g., if the editor put a lot of work into ensuring a paper I once wrote got properly reviewed. (3) Even if I say "no" to fully reviewing a paper, as an expert in the area I can often provide quick valuable feedback about the relative value of the claimed contribution, and who is most likely to be suited to review it; I'll do a quick informal review like that in some cases. From the outside, it is easy to forgot the extreme extent to which academics are motivated by (or view themselves as motivated by) principles of "good citizenship". This is selection -- the people who aren't this way, often do not get hired or promoted. Also, many academics (at least in pure math) view motivation for money as a "lower order term". It's a good thing for them, because for much of your long career in academia there is little you can do to impact your salary, besides applying for a job somewhere else. For me it's always been: each year you get some maximum possible merit raise of between 0% and 4%, depending on external economics that the department has no control over. Academic book royalties might also raise your yearly salary by 2%. Being highly money-motivated in some parts of academia would end up being very frustrating indeed. E.g., even when I've got a big NFS grant, that doesn't change my salary one bit; instead, it changes how many students and/or postdocs I could support.
    - apathy 8y ago
- impendia 8y ago
  I'm a math professor, I can answer this. We tend to think of journals as being run by their editorial boards -- i.e., by scientists in our field. The publishers are in the background, not taking a very active role, simply skimming off truckloads of money in the process. In particular, peer-review requests tend to come from scientists whom we know at least by reputation, and often personally. When I spend serious time peer-reviewing a paper, it will be on a quality paper on a subject that I enjoy reading about anyway. (If I get asked to peer-review a paper that looks uninteresting to me, or something outside my interests and expertise, I'll either decline the request or write a quick report recommending that the paper not be accepted.) It's interesting work, it's important for the health of the field, it helps me support other researchers in my field (if I like their paper and give it a positive review), and it helps my own reputation (the journal editors are often bigshots). From this point of view, it's a win-win-win-win. Finally, paying for peer review doesn't make much sense because the time required is highly variable. I might take between 20 minutes and 30+ hours to review a paper, and I wouldn't necessarily expect the editor to be able to predict how much (even within an order of magnitude) in advance. However, I see no reason why high-profit publishers should be able to insert themselves as middlemen and engage in rent-seeking behavior. I hope we figure out a way to give them the boot, and then continue approximately as we have been doing.
  - ylmm 8y ago
    The editors of a prestigious linguistics journal actually gave Elsevier the middle finger a while back. Here's a good summary: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=22162 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=22162. Economics and linguistics also publish their own journals which costs some money but significantly less than Elsevier's subscriptions (I believe linguistics' is 300 USD per year). There's probably enough momentum behind middlemen-run journals that prevents this from happening more en masse.
  - justinclift 8y ago
    > If I get asked to peer-review a paper that looks uninteresting to me, or something outside my interests and expertise, ... or write a quick report recommending that the paper not be accepted. That seems kind of harsh?
- TheSmiddy 8y ago
  They are paid, just not by the journal, they're paid a salary by their university and one of their responsibilities is peer reviewing papers.
  - Fomite 8y ago
    This. "Service to the university and field" is literally part of my contract.
rsa4046 8y ago
In academia (at least the hard sciences), no faculty are ever paid for publishing in mainstream, peer-reviewed journals. No reviewers are ever paid either, although recently Elsevier has started to publish the names of its "star reviewers", presumably as a token for the large investment in time and expertise required to evaluate papers for publication and improve the field. Even book deals (or editorships) yield no real income, beyond some nominal amount (between $0 and $50). What's more, the lay public is hilariously misinformed about this, believing that faculty, researchers, etc., are paid royalties for journal papers. Where they got this idea, I don't know ...
- impendia 8y ago
  > No reviewers are ever paid either That's almost true. Elsevier once surprised me with a $100 Amazon gift card, which they said was in recognition for a particularly good job of peer review that year. I'd laugh at the prospect of Elsevier rewarding me with "recognition" -- certainly something I would not put on my CV -- although I did take their money. Another time, the American Mathematical Society (which is non-profit, and perfectly ethical) asked me to do a book review, and then gave me $150 in bookstore credit afterwards -- again by surprise. My understanding is that book authors can make a reasonable amount in royalties (a few thousand, anyway). For journal papers, as you say I've never heard of any author getting a royalty.
  - randomsearch 8y ago
    In some subjects, reviewers are indeed paid. Probably the parent has experience in CS or similar where reviewers are never paid.
  - laichzeit0 8y ago
    What's your hourly rate? How many hours did you spend reviewing? Divide that $100 by the hours and see if it was worth it.
    - bubblethink 8y ago
      Reviewing isn't a full-time job (or any sort of job really). So the hourly rate doesn't make sense. If anything, you'd have to put reviewing in the consulting category since the hour that you spend reviewing something isn't a literal hour of labor. It's the years of experience that you enabled you to do a review in an hour.
peter303 8y ago
'I scratch back, you scratch mine' Generous reciprocity of free service keeps the system going.
- Fomite 8y ago
  Also this - I review for journals because in turn my submissions to those journals are reviewed.
pcurve 8y ago
I have half a dozen post doc friends in science. All of them are honest and exceedingly hard workers, but they became disillusioned after 10 years in academia. Despite their PHD and advanced degrees that they worked so hard to earn, they now work in completely different fields, most very low paying. I really hope you have better outcome.
ummonk 8y ago
But for open access journals, authors often do pay publishers.
icelancer 8y ago
I've shelled out a few thousand dollars to publish my last two papers, and my editors / reviewers got none of it.
dompydumpy 8y ago
Yes, authors even pay for submissions themselves often
ms013 8y ago
Nope. Nobody in the review or author role gets paid. And personally, that doesn’t bother me. I put in time to review papers with the understanding that someone else will put in time to review mine. My employer (I’m in industry) understands that this is a reasonable use of my time given that they see value in me being engaged in the academic world. Prior to industry when I was an academic, it was also part of my paid job. It’s usually called service. The trope that it’s all unpaid labor is a bit deceiving and not entirely accurate.
- BlackFly 8y ago
  You've misunderstood the person you are replying to. The insinuation was not that the labor is unpaid, the insinuation is that the labor is paid for by someone other than the publisher. The ultimate point being that the group that pays for the labor does not get the benefit of the labor: each member of the public must individually pay for access to the article. This situation is absurd: they have already paid for the article's production. This is why the most powerful open access initiatives are being driven by grant agencies. They are in a position to unequivocally state that the research they are paying for must be open to the public since they grant the money on behalf of that very same public.
- yqx 8y ago
  I don't understand why academics seem so complacent in this. Sure I'm perfectly happy to do "service" for a community of researchers who run an open access journal or are organizing a conference. That's a beautiful system. When it's for a for-profit publisher that will charge those not working at a well funded academic institution extortionate fees to access my work , or the work I'm reviewing, it's a whole different story.
dhimes 8y ago
OT: Lowly soon-to-be-postdoc here Congratulations :)

Y7ZCQtNo39 8y ago

How do peer reviews happen, then, if nobody gets paid to do them? Does research money (that goes to the production of the paper) not also cover peer-reviews? I wouldn't see any incentive for any work to be peer-reviewed, ever, then.

rsa4046 8y ago
The incentives are 1) professional responsibility; 2) the opportunity to participate in the direction of new research, stay abreast of the field, and maintain a high level of integrity; 3) young researchers joining the field benefit from the process, both as reviewers and authors.
- Y7ZCQtNo39 8y ago
  I can't remember the last time I've read a headline about the peer-reviewer that confirmed some groundbreaking finding. Maybe it gives you the opportunity to network with higher-profile contributors to your field, if you offer to peer review their work (though to be honest, I don't know how the peer review process works, and if you can even "offer" to perform it for a specific paper).
  - ylmm 8y ago
    At least in the social sciences, journal editors delegate papers to reviewers. Your first sentence also suggests that you don't know what peer review is. Peer review is not the same thing as replication, which is replicating the results of a paper after it's been published (e.g., confirming some groundbreaking finding). Peer review happens at the stage before publication of the original paper. Researcher(s) submit the paper to the journal. The journal editor sends the paper out to some reviewers, who review the paper (this is the "peer review" stage). Pending reviewer feedback and editor approval, the paper is published. Edit: also the "benefit" that rsa4046 refers to probably doesn't mean networking. AFAIK, reviewers are always anonymous to the authors (which can generate its own problems e.g., if the reviewer gets a paper authored by someone he/she doesn't get along with). The benefit being referred to, I believe, is that of learning to write better reviews, and having reviewed other's work, learning how to improve your own.
    - apathy 8y ago
      Well, yeah, but learning to review is less difficult than learning how to communicate clearly, crisply, and forcefully. So in a well administered review, most benefits accrue to the authors even if the reviews are poorly done, so long as they are ethical. (Editors can step in when reviewers are being unreasonable or ignoring explicit instructions; unfortunately professional editors at glam journals can also step in to push exciting or politically expedient work into press before there is time to adequately vet it, which sucks and gives everyone a bad name).
      - ylmm 8y ago
        Well, yeah, there are other irrelevant things about reviewing that I also have the ability to bring up but my point is that to say that the "benefit" of reviewing is for the purpose of networking is misinformed.
        apathy 8y ago
        I sometimes agree to review out of a sense of obligation, where I know damned well that the authors recommended me, but you’re right, that’s not networking per se. There’s no reasonable expectation of benefit and it would be unethical as hell to request any. The authors most likely won’t (can’t) ever know that I agreed to review their paper; it’s more of a good citizen affair. Sometimes, afterwards, it will become apparent that a particular referee was someone familiar. I would like to think that the original poster was imagining something along those lines, but your take is probably closer to the truth. Oh well.
ylmm 8y ago
I've only worked with professors in economics and political science but I'm under the impression that this is true more generally of academia. Some people do it to help advance the state of the field. Career incentives and standing in the field also come into play. As the poster above mentioned, a professor would be able to say more. To respond succinctly to your comments: money isn't the only incentive in life, so it seems weird to not see "any incentive" as soon as money is taken out of the picture.
- williamstein 8y ago
  I'm a professor (in mathematics), and there are some reasons why I personally might say "yes" to review a paper. (1) If the paper is so interesting that when I see it I think "I really, really want to read this paper!", then I am likely to peer review it because as a reviewer when I read it, I get to ask any question and the author will take my questions and concerns very seriously. (2) I owe the editor who is asking me to peer review the paper (or maybe even the author of the paper), e.g., if the editor put a lot of work into ensuring a paper I once wrote got properly reviewed. (3) Even if I say "no" to fully reviewing a paper, as an expert in the area I can often provide quick valuable feedback about the relative value of the claimed contribution, and who is most likely to be suited to review it; I'll do a quick informal review like that in some cases. From the outside, it is easy to forgot the extreme extent to which academics are motivated by (or view themselves as motivated by) principles of "good citizenship". This is selection -- the people who aren't this way, often do not get hired or promoted. Also, many academics (at least in pure math) view motivation for money as a "lower order term". It's a good thing for them, because for much of your long career in academia there is little you can do to impact your salary, besides applying for a job somewhere else. For me it's always been: each year you get some maximum possible merit raise of between 0% and 4%, depending on external economics that the department has no control over. Academic book royalties might also raise your yearly salary by 2%. Being highly money-motivated in some parts of academia would end up being very frustrating indeed. E.g., even when I've got a big NFS grant, that doesn't change my salary one bit; instead, it changes how many students and/or postdocs I could support.
  - apathy 8y ago
impendia 8y ago
I'm a math professor, I can answer this. We tend to think of journals as being run by their editorial boards -- i.e., by scientists in our field. The publishers are in the background, not taking a very active role, simply skimming off truckloads of money in the process. In particular, peer-review requests tend to come from scientists whom we know at least by reputation, and often personally. When I spend serious time peer-reviewing a paper, it will be on a quality paper on a subject that I enjoy reading about anyway. (If I get asked to peer-review a paper that looks uninteresting to me, or something outside my interests and expertise, I'll either decline the request or write a quick report recommending that the paper not be accepted.) It's interesting work, it's important for the health of the field, it helps me support other researchers in my field (if I like their paper and give it a positive review), and it helps my own reputation (the journal editors are often bigshots). From this point of view, it's a win-win-win-win. Finally, paying for peer review doesn't make much sense because the time required is highly variable. I might take between 20 minutes and 30+ hours to review a paper, and I wouldn't necessarily expect the editor to be able to predict how much (even within an order of magnitude) in advance. However, I see no reason why high-profit publishers should be able to insert themselves as middlemen and engage in rent-seeking behavior. I hope we figure out a way to give them the boot, and then continue approximately as we have been doing.
- ylmm 8y ago
  The editors of a prestigious linguistics journal actually gave Elsevier the middle finger a while back. Here's a good summary: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=22162 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=22162. Economics and linguistics also publish their own journals which costs some money but significantly less than Elsevier's subscriptions (I believe linguistics' is 300 USD per year). There's probably enough momentum behind middlemen-run journals that prevents this from happening more en masse.
- justinclift 8y ago
  > If I get asked to peer-review a paper that looks uninteresting to me, or something outside my interests and expertise, ... or write a quick report recommending that the paper not be accepted. That seems kind of harsh?
TheSmiddy 8y ago
They are paid, just not by the journal, they're paid a salary by their university and one of their responsibilities is peer reviewing papers.
- Fomite 8y ago
  This. "Service to the university and field" is literally part of my contract.

rsa4046 8y ago

In academia (at least the hard sciences), no faculty are ever paid for publishing in mainstream, peer-reviewed journals. No reviewers are ever paid either, although recently Elsevier has started to publish the names of its "star reviewers", presumably as a token for the large investment in time and expertise required to evaluate papers for publication and improve the field. Even book deals (or editorships) yield no real income, beyond some nominal amount (between $0 and $50). What's more, the lay public is hilariously misinformed about this, believing that faculty, researchers, etc., are paid royalties for journal papers. Where they got this idea, I don't know ...

impendia 8y ago
> No reviewers are ever paid either That's almost true. Elsevier once surprised me with a $100 Amazon gift card, which they said was in recognition for a particularly good job of peer review that year. I'd laugh at the prospect of Elsevier rewarding me with "recognition" -- certainly something I would not put on my CV -- although I did take their money. Another time, the American Mathematical Society (which is non-profit, and perfectly ethical) asked me to do a book review, and then gave me $150 in bookstore credit afterwards -- again by surprise. My understanding is that book authors can make a reasonable amount in royalties (a few thousand, anyway). For journal papers, as you say I've never heard of any author getting a royalty.
- randomsearch 8y ago
  In some subjects, reviewers are indeed paid. Probably the parent has experience in CS or similar where reviewers are never paid.
- laichzeit0 8y ago
  What's your hourly rate? How many hours did you spend reviewing? Divide that $100 by the hours and see if it was worth it.
  - bubblethink 8y ago
    Reviewing isn't a full-time job (or any sort of job really). So the hourly rate doesn't make sense. If anything, you'd have to put reviewing in the consulting category since the hour that you spend reviewing something isn't a literal hour of labor. It's the years of experience that you enabled you to do a review in an hour.

peter303 8y ago

'I scratch back, you scratch mine' Generous reciprocity of free service keeps the system going.

Fomite 8y ago
Also this - I review for journals because in turn my submissions to those journals are reviewed.

pcurve 8y ago

I have half a dozen post doc friends in science. All of them are honest and exceedingly hard workers, but they became disillusioned after 10 years in academia. Despite their PHD and advanced degrees that they worked so hard to earn, they now work in completely different fields, most very low paying. I really hope you have better outcome.

ummonk 8y ago

But for open access journals, authors often do pay publishers.

icelancer 8y ago

I've shelled out a few thousand dollars to publish my last two papers, and my editors / reviewers got none of it.

dompydumpy 8y ago

Yes, authors even pay for submissions themselves often

ms013 8y ago

Nope. Nobody in the review or author role gets paid. And personally, that doesn’t bother me. I put in time to review papers with the understanding that someone else will put in time to review mine. My employer (I’m in industry) understands that this is a reasonable use of my time given that they see value in me being engaged in the academic world. Prior to industry when I was an academic, it was also part of my paid job. It’s usually called service. The trope that it’s all unpaid labor is a bit deceiving and not entirely accurate.

BlackFly 8y ago
You've misunderstood the person you are replying to. The insinuation was not that the labor is unpaid, the insinuation is that the labor is paid for by someone other than the publisher. The ultimate point being that the group that pays for the labor does not get the benefit of the labor: each member of the public must individually pay for access to the article. This situation is absurd: they have already paid for the article's production. This is why the most powerful open access initiatives are being driven by grant agencies. They are in a position to unequivocally state that the research they are paying for must be open to the public since they grant the money on behalf of that very same public.
yqx 8y ago
I don't understand why academics seem so complacent in this. Sure I'm perfectly happy to do "service" for a community of researchers who run an open access journal or are organizing a conference. That's a beautiful system. When it's for a for-profit publisher that will charge those not working at a well funded academic institution extortionate fees to access my work , or the work I'm reviewing, it's a whole different story.

dhimes 8y ago

OT: Lowly soon-to-be-postdoc here Congratulations :)