4 ms·

Reviewing an amazon article costs 5 minutes. Reviewing a paper costs a day. Journals extort hundreds of man hours per conference from reviewers. The largest co

Reviewing an amazon article costs 5 minutes. Reviewing a paper costs a day. Journals extort hundreds of man hours per conference from reviewers. The largest cost of all, research and writing the paper, isn't reimbursed in the slightest and largely covered by tax payers, who then still won't be able to access the results because of paywalls. The entire business plan of journals is to take research and peer review for free, and then sell it. Back when distribution was costly that may have made sense, but nowadays with the internet the cost of distribution is a fraction of what it used to be.

hos234 7y ago
Cost of distribution maybe free but attracting qualified and useful reviews is definitely not. People who think open access is the solution to that are dealing with a focusing illusion - https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11984 https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11984
- sideshowb 7y ago
  Attracting good reviews is the editor's job which is often unpaid too
- necovek 7y ago
  You seem to repeatedly ignore people claiming that they are doing peer-reviews for free. I guess free facts are not qualified and useful facts ;)
- obmelvin 7y ago
  The reviews are by and large free. I've known multiple phd candidates to be given papers by their advisor and they do the initial review for their advisor. Often these are additional reviews asked for by the advisor. That is to say, the advisor is usually not trying to avoid doing work, but they want their students to gain experience reviewing papers. Neither the advisor is paid for their individual reviews or supervised reviews, or is the student compensated in any way. Amazon reviews are not remotely a good comparison. There is huge incentive in terms of experience gain, getting a bit of a sneak peek at research, and reputation gain(lets be real, its not that uncommon for people to be fairly confident they know who an anonymous reviewer etc is). I'm not trying to make any point other than to add further disagreement to the idea that these reviews are not currently obtained essentially for free.
BiteCode_dev 7y ago
And anybody can make an amazon review. Very few people have the skills required to peer review a scientific paper.

hos234 7y ago

Cost of distribution maybe free but attracting qualified and useful reviews is definitely not. People who think open access is the solution to that are dealing with a focusing illusion - https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11984 https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11984

sideshowb 7y ago
Attracting good reviews is the editor's job which is often unpaid too
necovek 7y ago
You seem to repeatedly ignore people claiming that they are doing peer-reviews for free. I guess free facts are not qualified and useful facts ;)
obmelvin 7y ago
The reviews are by and large free. I've known multiple phd candidates to be given papers by their advisor and they do the initial review for their advisor. Often these are additional reviews asked for by the advisor. That is to say, the advisor is usually not trying to avoid doing work, but they want their students to gain experience reviewing papers. Neither the advisor is paid for their individual reviews or supervised reviews, or is the student compensated in any way. Amazon reviews are not remotely a good comparison. There is huge incentive in terms of experience gain, getting a bit of a sneak peek at research, and reputation gain(lets be real, its not that uncommon for people to be fairly confident they know who an anonymous reviewer etc is). I'm not trying to make any point other than to add further disagreement to the idea that these reviews are not currently obtained essentially for free.

BiteCode_dev 7y ago

And anybody can make an amazon review. Very few people have the skills required to peer review a scientific paper.