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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 init

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.

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.