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I don’t understand how we know that a whole lot of money is spent on it. A lot of volunteer (unpaid) time is spent on it, but not much money. And I’m also unaw

I don’t understand how we know that a whole lot of money is spent on it. A lot of volunteer (unpaid) time is spent on it, but not much money. And I’m also unaware of the “proven” downside. But you might ask yourself, why do so many scientists waste so much of their time doing peer review. Perhaps they are ignorant, or easily duped, or perhaps they believe that peer review is a valuable use of their time.

ProjectArcturis 4y ago
That time is coming from somewhere -- it's time that's not spent doing actual research. It's certainly not free. When I was in academia, I did peer review initially because it was fun to be on the other side for once. And later mostly as a favor to the editors who asked me.
- pixl97 4y ago
  And how many things did you find that were incorrect in the peer review? That seems to be the point that the anti-peer review people are missing.
  - ProjectArcturis 4y ago
    I found some things wrong. Occasionally these were minor things that the authors corrected. Sometimes they were major problems, and I recommended that the paper be rejected because they were unfixable. In that case I'd usually see the same paper get published in a different journal later on.
    - cauch 4y ago
      So your conclusion should be: peer-reviewing is working, but some people are not using it right. You then need to assess exactly what is this percentage of still being published despite having things wrong in it. If this percentage is small, peer-reviewing is still more profitable then no peer-reviewing at all (in which 100% of the bad papers are published).
- cauch 4y ago
  > it's time that's not spent doing actual research Actual research includes keeping up to date with peers progress. If you were doing research but not regularly reading new publications anyway, either you were working on a less-fundamental-research side of things, or, without even realising it, you were exploring directions already explored or losing time by not profiting from a new useful approach. It is just incorrect to say that the time used to read carefully a peer paper is taken over the time of doing research: if you were not peer-reviewing this paper, you maybe would have been reading carefully the same paper in order to keep up to date with your peers. In fact, one can lose its time peer-reviewing, but its their own fault: in general, you just need to target the review for articles that are useful for you to read anyway.
_aavaa_ 4y ago
For starters we know that a lot of money is spent on it in terms of getting the end results. As you say the peer review is done by volunteers, but the final product is then sold back to those same reviewers (or their institutions) for an insane markup. > or perhaps they believe that peer review is a valuable use of their time. Or perhaps they believe that if they don’t do that work then bad papers will be published under the authoritative rubber stamp of the journals and that they will not need to spend the same amount of time down the road finding out if/how the fascinating study is wrong after having paid 40$ for the pdf.
Vinnl 4y ago
The proven downside is the money/time spent on it. And plenty of that "volunteer" time is time researchers would otherwise have spent on research. (Note: I'm not counting the time spent doing the review and feeding that back to the researcher — that can be valuable. I am counting time spent doing countless revisions just to please a reviewer, time spent resubmitting work elsewhere, etc.) And don't get me started on money wasted on price-gouging publishers thanks to their role as gatekeepers of career credentials. The question is not why scientists spend time doing peer review. The question is: why do academics waste time bending over backwards to adapt to the whims of a particular reviewer even beyond when they feel the input is useful? (And the answer is above: the career credentials.) Again, I'm not agains peer review by itself. But it should not be a gatekeeper to publication, nor have this much leverage on people's careers (a binary decision for every article).

ProjectArcturis 4y ago

That time is coming from somewhere -- it's time that's not spent doing actual research. It's certainly not free. When I was in academia, I did peer review initially because it was fun to be on the other side for once. And later mostly as a favor to the editors who asked me.

pixl97 4y ago
And how many things did you find that were incorrect in the peer review? That seems to be the point that the anti-peer review people are missing.
- ProjectArcturis 4y ago
  I found some things wrong. Occasionally these were minor things that the authors corrected. Sometimes they were major problems, and I recommended that the paper be rejected because they were unfixable. In that case I'd usually see the same paper get published in a different journal later on.
  - cauch 4y ago
    So your conclusion should be: peer-reviewing is working, but some people are not using it right. You then need to assess exactly what is this percentage of still being published despite having things wrong in it. If this percentage is small, peer-reviewing is still more profitable then no peer-reviewing at all (in which 100% of the bad papers are published).
cauch 4y ago
> it's time that's not spent doing actual research Actual research includes keeping up to date with peers progress. If you were doing research but not regularly reading new publications anyway, either you were working on a less-fundamental-research side of things, or, without even realising it, you were exploring directions already explored or losing time by not profiting from a new useful approach. It is just incorrect to say that the time used to read carefully a peer paper is taken over the time of doing research: if you were not peer-reviewing this paper, you maybe would have been reading carefully the same paper in order to keep up to date with your peers. In fact, one can lose its time peer-reviewing, but its their own fault: in general, you just need to target the review for articles that are useful for you to read anyway.

_aavaa_ 4y ago

For starters we know that a lot of money is spent on it in terms of getting the end results. As you say the peer review is done by volunteers, but the final product is then sold back to those same reviewers (or their institutions) for an insane markup. > or perhaps they believe that peer review is a valuable use of their time. Or perhaps they believe that if they don’t do that work then bad papers will be published under the authoritative rubber stamp of the journals and that they will not need to spend the same amount of time down the road finding out if/how the fascinating study is wrong after having paid 40$ for the pdf.

Vinnl 4y ago

The proven downside is the money/time spent on it. And plenty of that "volunteer" time is time researchers would otherwise have spent on research. (Note: I'm not counting the time spent doing the review and feeding that back to the researcher — that can be valuable. I am counting time spent doing countless revisions just to please a reviewer, time spent resubmitting work elsewhere, etc.) And don't get me started on money wasted on price-gouging publishers thanks to their role as gatekeepers of career credentials. The question is not why scientists spend time doing peer review. The question is: why do academics waste time bending over backwards to adapt to the whims of a particular reviewer even beyond when they feel the input is useful? (And the answer is above: the career credentials.) Again, I'm not agains peer review by itself. But it should not be a gatekeeper to publication, nor have this much leverage on people's careers (a binary decision for every article).