5 ms·

This is insightful, thanks, but there's a little problem here: The cost is borne one way or the other, the $500 is a matter of comp, not cost. If someone is g

by jariel 6y ago

This is insightful, thanks, but there's a little problem here: The cost is borne one way or the other, the $500 is a matter of comp, not cost. If someone is going to review your work, that's an act of very material labour. That they are not really compensated for it, at all, is inconsistent with the basic premise of labour and comp. You would not be a researcher if you weren't comped in some way, so the absence and/or misalignment of comp is the issue. It's not free to publish and have 2 reviewers (!!) there is a very material cost that you're just not paying. Allocating at $1K cost for publication more accurately reflects the labour involved in checking it out (at least a little bit). It'd seem to me a lot of folks might want to take up the $500/review as a job to earn some reasonable income, they might even get good at it. It's entirely plausible that one of the 'dysfunctions' of science is 'not enough review' and it's simply because there is no incentive structure for it at all. We pay people for literally every other function in life. Doctors are paid to 'save lives' even though there is a moral obligation. The notion that we don't pay people for academic work seems odd. Perhaps journals could identify the papers with the most promise and offer payment for review, or something like that.

Mediterraneo10 6y ago
Unpaid peer reviewing is certainly not incentive-free. For example, oftentimes one enjoys peer reviewing because the author cites some publications that are useful or important, but which one wasn't previously aware of. Sometimes the author makes some observation tangential to his/her main argument which proves an inspiration or key to one's own research. These sort of things may be more common in the humanities versus hard STEM, but in my own field peer review is not generally seen as drudgery or exploitation.
- foobarbecue 6y ago
  To add to your list: getting to see the research before the rest of the community.
- michaelmior 6y ago
  As someone who is in a STEM field (CS) I would say that all the reasons you mentioned apply to me personally. There are some conferences where being a reviewer can be very tedious due to the massive number of submissions (many of which are unfortunately fairly poor quality) but I haven't had this problem in my own subfield.
jrochkind1 6y ago
Do you realize that the article authors are generally not paid? > It's not free to publish and have 2 reviewers (!!) there is a very material cost that you're just not paying. Who is the "you"? The author I think? So you do know that article authors don't get paid, you're talking as if they are the "customer" that should be paying? Generally, for non-open-source journals, which are still the majority in most fields, it is subscribers, the readers, who are the customers who pay the costs (plus enough for a healthy profit for the publisher). (Usually university libraries. The same universities who are paying most of the authors, who don't get paid by the journals, but produce the content that makes a journal valuable). Elsevier is quite profitable, with a high margin on revenue. You are painting an economic model of publishing that I'm not sure is connected to the actual real world economics of scientific/academic publishing, it seems to be very hypothetical.
- jariel 6y ago
  'Authors' i.e. researchers are generally paid to do research and publish, it's absolutely the assumption or implication of their role.
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    Depending on the country and the field, authors are often faculty who are presently being paid a meagre salary only to lecture, and researching and publishing is something they do on their own time unpaid.
  - jrochkind1 6y ago
    Right, but not by the journal. Peer reviewers also usually hold full-time jobs, they are usually the same people that are authors on other articles. Is peer review also the assumption or implication of their role? If not, should it be, since it's just as essential to the production of research articles as authorship?
    - jariel 6y ago
      Yes, paying researchers to 'review' could be a solution but incentives are still misaligned - there's far too much upside in publishing vis-a-vis reviewing. It's a prisoner's dilemma type thing and it would require a kind of broad, institutional practice to make sure everyone was helping out with the reviewing part. Economic incentives are never perfect either, but they might help. Since we have a giant oversupply of PhDs looking for positions it'd seem maybe this wold be nice work for them, and frankly anyone applying for any kind of job should have a big list of articles they've reviewed as one of those resume checkmarks.

by jariel 6y ago

Mediterraneo10 6y ago

Unpaid peer reviewing is certainly not incentive-free. For example, oftentimes one enjoys peer reviewing because the author cites some publications that are useful or important, but which one wasn't previously aware of. Sometimes the author makes some observation tangential to his/her main argument which proves an inspiration or key to one's own research. These sort of things may be more common in the humanities versus hard STEM, but in my own field peer review is not generally seen as drudgery or exploitation.

foobarbecue 6y ago
To add to your list: getting to see the research before the rest of the community.
michaelmior 6y ago
As someone who is in a STEM field (CS) I would say that all the reasons you mentioned apply to me personally. There are some conferences where being a reviewer can be very tedious due to the massive number of submissions (many of which are unfortunately fairly poor quality) but I haven't had this problem in my own subfield.

jrochkind1 6y ago

Do you realize that the article authors are generally not paid? > It's not free to publish and have 2 reviewers (!!) there is a very material cost that you're just not paying. Who is the "you"? The author I think? So you do know that article authors don't get paid, you're talking as if they are the "customer" that should be paying? Generally, for non-open-source journals, which are still the majority in most fields, it is subscribers, the readers, who are the customers who pay the costs (plus enough for a healthy profit for the publisher). (Usually university libraries. The same universities who are paying most of the authors, who don't get paid by the journals, but produce the content that makes a journal valuable). Elsevier is quite profitable, with a high margin on revenue. You are painting an economic model of publishing that I'm not sure is connected to the actual real world economics of scientific/academic publishing, it seems to be very hypothetical.

jariel 6y ago
'Authors' i.e. researchers are generally paid to do research and publish, it's absolutely the assumption or implication of their role.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  Depending on the country and the field, authors are often faculty who are presently being paid a meagre salary only to lecture, and researching and publishing is something they do on their own time unpaid.
- jrochkind1 6y ago
  Right, but not by the journal. Peer reviewers also usually hold full-time jobs, they are usually the same people that are authors on other articles. Is peer review also the assumption or implication of their role? If not, should it be, since it's just as essential to the production of research articles as authorship?
  - jariel 6y ago
    Yes, paying researchers to 'review' could be a solution but incentives are still misaligned - there's far too much upside in publishing vis-a-vis reviewing. It's a prisoner's dilemma type thing and it would require a kind of broad, institutional practice to make sure everyone was helping out with the reviewing part. Economic incentives are never perfect either, but they might help. Since we have a giant oversupply of PhDs looking for positions it'd seem maybe this wold be nice work for them, and frankly anyone applying for any kind of job should have a big list of articles they've reviewed as one of those resume checkmarks.