5 ms·

You cannot really blame Elsevier here. They are just taking advantage of a dysfunctional academic system. The cost of reviewing a paper properly is high, but ac

You cannot really blame Elsevier here. They are just taking advantage of a dysfunctional academic system. The cost of reviewing a paper properly is high, but academia is not paying that cost by simply not doing a proper review. If the money saved by cutting Elsevier out (in this case £2700 per accepted paper) would actually be added to a pool out of which reviews are financed, I would see the point. But as it is, they will just continue to pretend that reviews are free, and the quality continues to go down the drain. Elsevier itself obviously adds very little to no value, but it is laughable that reviews are supposed to be free. If reviews were priced properly, the £2700 would probably appear to be a minor cost not worth worrying about.

AraceliHarker 3y ago
The article states that peer review is done on a volunteer basis, right? All Elsevier does, at best, is put PDFs of the papers on their servers.
- auggierose 3y ago
  My comment is not about the value that Elsevier adds. You are reading my comment as reviewers review papers these days.
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    I think your point is the GBP2700 gatekeep is better than no gatekeep as you’d get worse junk if it were free?
- tsbischof 3y ago
  They also manage the review process (screen papers, find reviewers, communicate with authors and reviewers), make sure that papers are accessible long-term (decades to centuries), typeset manuscripts, print paper issues, and several other tasks. But yes, reviewers are not paid. A half-decent review can easily take 3-4 hours, and a typical paper gets 2-3 reviews, so something like 8-12 hours of PhD-level labor which are not currently compensated.
  - auggierose 3y ago
    A half-decent review is not a proper review. Just the fact you are saying it like that is basically accepting that nobody is doing proper reviews.
    - tsbischof 3y ago
      It's definitely been my experience that reviews are hit-or-miss. Sometimes you get 1-2 reviews where there are valid points that need to be addressed, sometimes you wait 3 months for the reviews to come back, only to find that reviewers 2 and 3 dropped out and reviewer 1 basically said "looks fine". Part of the challenge of peer review is that it comes _after_ the paper is written, when the cost of changing anything is quite high. I find much more value in peer review when planning experiments, and do so informally with my peers.
    - rwalle 3y ago
      You'll be surprised how many scientific papers published in reputable journals are not "properly reviewed". In many cases there simply isn't enough time or knowledge to go through every detail of a paper. One example -- if a paper says go to a github repository to look at our source code, guess how many people actually review the code as part of the peer review process? Very few. There could be serious bugs in the code that would affect the results, or maybe the code is difficult to set up and run, but nobody would notice them for a long time.
      - auggierose 3y ago
        After reading my previous comments, why would you think that surprises me? I know for a fact that academics of the highest reputation do very poor reviewing. The cost of a low-quality review is basically zero for the reviewer, while the cost of a high-quality review is high. The consequences of this are not surprising.
  - gradstudent 3y ago
    The only thing elsevier manages is their website. The review process is managed by academics who also work for free. Typesetting is done by authors. Paper printing is basically extinct.
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  Reviewers don't get paid indeed. It used to be that in exchange for getting published, you'd join a pool of reviewers that got to review new submissions. I reviewed plenty of papers like this. Many of them pretty bad too. It's not a fun job and it's important to do it well because some other sorry person is going to be reviewing your paper at some point. The price of publishing is having to read a lot of poorly written papers. Editors don't actually get involved with the review process unless there is some conflict. Editors are of course paid positions. Their job is to keep supply and quality up. Generally, they get more hands on later in the process. The only cost beyond that is indeed some simple, mostly automated, layout work and file hosting. Some of the more prestigious publications have actual professional editors on staff that work with authors to improve style and quality. But most scientific journals don't do any of that. Actually printing the papers is rare these days. It's mostly online at this point. I've been out of academia for twenty years now, so things have changed a bit probably. But even back then, it was all pdfs and I rarely used printed media (other than laser printed copies of pdfs). Visiting a library or handling actual printed journals or a photocopier just wasn't a thing. Most of that went away in the nineties.
quickthrower2 3y ago
Thats one expensive s3 bucket
currymj 3y ago
i think the reality is that, while peer review can be helpful in various ways to a research community, the filtering function of journals less helpful for academics than it is for outsiders. (usually people in a field know which preprints are “good” and don’t care much if they’ve been peer reviewed yet.) so research communities themselves don’t intrinsically want to pay the cost of high quality compensated peer review when most of the value goes to others.
ramraj07 3y ago
If you’re gonna say you have to pay for reviews, it might be a bad precedent that might establish “professional reviewers” whose main job becomes this. Already reviewing papers is become a stupidly important criteria in green card applications and you see a huge deluge of postdocs emailing editors requesting papers to review (though the top journals will never give a manuscript to a postdoc).
- auggierose 3y ago
  No, what I am saying is that proper reviews are expensive, and that cost should be made explicit. How that should be done, I don't know. Giving prestige to reviews is difficult, given that reviews are anonymous. Personally, I feel reviews should be public and non-anonymous, just like the paper is. If the argument against this is that scientists are so petty that they will hold a negative review against you, well. Even more reason to make everything public, because why would you then trust petty scientists to do proper reviews?
  - kelipso 3y ago
    Hah, the power dynamics involved will be brutal with non-anonymous review. You have new phd students reviewing papers submitted by tenured profs with decades of experience and connections and ability to impact their careers. People will be people and so on.
    - auggierose 3y ago
      Maybe new PhD students shouldn't be reviewing papers in the first place. And people will be people is EXACTLY why you need everything to be public.
croes 3y ago
>They are just taking advantage of a dysfunctional academic system. Of course you can blame Elsevier, you can blame the system too, but that's no excuse in exploiting the system and even worse the people.
- mangecoeur 3y ago
  Especially when they take such huge fees but their article submission systems is awful. Even logging in is a mess.
UncleMeat 3y ago
You absolutely can blame Elsevier here. A corporation taking advantage of a dysfunctional system to extract profit at the expense of others is bad. "Oh, the system is something that can be exploited so of course corporations should exploit it" is something worth criticizing, IMO. Peer reviews are usually two reviewers who maybe do two rounds of reviews. Even if people are getting a reasonable fee, £2700 is more than enough to cover it.

AraceliHarker 3y ago

The article states that peer review is done on a volunteer basis, right? All Elsevier does, at best, is put PDFs of the papers on their servers.

auggierose 3y ago
My comment is not about the value that Elsevier adds. You are reading my comment as reviewers review papers these days.
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  I think your point is the GBP2700 gatekeep is better than no gatekeep as you’d get worse junk if it were free?
tsbischof 3y ago
They also manage the review process (screen papers, find reviewers, communicate with authors and reviewers), make sure that papers are accessible long-term (decades to centuries), typeset manuscripts, print paper issues, and several other tasks. But yes, reviewers are not paid. A half-decent review can easily take 3-4 hours, and a typical paper gets 2-3 reviews, so something like 8-12 hours of PhD-level labor which are not currently compensated.
- auggierose 3y ago
  A half-decent review is not a proper review. Just the fact you are saying it like that is basically accepting that nobody is doing proper reviews.
  - tsbischof 3y ago
    It's definitely been my experience that reviews are hit-or-miss. Sometimes you get 1-2 reviews where there are valid points that need to be addressed, sometimes you wait 3 months for the reviews to come back, only to find that reviewers 2 and 3 dropped out and reviewer 1 basically said "looks fine". Part of the challenge of peer review is that it comes _after_ the paper is written, when the cost of changing anything is quite high. I find much more value in peer review when planning experiments, and do so informally with my peers.
  - rwalle 3y ago
    You'll be surprised how many scientific papers published in reputable journals are not "properly reviewed". In many cases there simply isn't enough time or knowledge to go through every detail of a paper. One example -- if a paper says go to a github repository to look at our source code, guess how many people actually review the code as part of the peer review process? Very few. There could be serious bugs in the code that would affect the results, or maybe the code is difficult to set up and run, but nobody would notice them for a long time.
    - auggierose 3y ago
      After reading my previous comments, why would you think that surprises me? I know for a fact that academics of the highest reputation do very poor reviewing. The cost of a low-quality review is basically zero for the reviewer, while the cost of a high-quality review is high. The consequences of this are not surprising.
- gradstudent 3y ago
  The only thing elsevier manages is their website. The review process is managed by academics who also work for free. Typesetting is done by authors. Paper printing is basically extinct.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
Reviewers don't get paid indeed. It used to be that in exchange for getting published, you'd join a pool of reviewers that got to review new submissions. I reviewed plenty of papers like this. Many of them pretty bad too. It's not a fun job and it's important to do it well because some other sorry person is going to be reviewing your paper at some point. The price of publishing is having to read a lot of poorly written papers. Editors don't actually get involved with the review process unless there is some conflict. Editors are of course paid positions. Their job is to keep supply and quality up. Generally, they get more hands on later in the process. The only cost beyond that is indeed some simple, mostly automated, layout work and file hosting. Some of the more prestigious publications have actual professional editors on staff that work with authors to improve style and quality. But most scientific journals don't do any of that. Actually printing the papers is rare these days. It's mostly online at this point. I've been out of academia for twenty years now, so things have changed a bit probably. But even back then, it was all pdfs and I rarely used printed media (other than laser printed copies of pdfs). Visiting a library or handling actual printed journals or a photocopier just wasn't a thing. Most of that went away in the nineties.

quickthrower2 3y ago

Thats one expensive s3 bucket

currymj 3y ago

i think the reality is that, while peer review can be helpful in various ways to a research community, the filtering function of journals less helpful for academics than it is for outsiders. (usually people in a field know which preprints are “good” and don’t care much if they’ve been peer reviewed yet.) so research communities themselves don’t intrinsically want to pay the cost of high quality compensated peer review when most of the value goes to others.

ramraj07 3y ago

If you’re gonna say you have to pay for reviews, it might be a bad precedent that might establish “professional reviewers” whose main job becomes this. Already reviewing papers is become a stupidly important criteria in green card applications and you see a huge deluge of postdocs emailing editors requesting papers to review (though the top journals will never give a manuscript to a postdoc).

auggierose 3y ago
No, what I am saying is that proper reviews are expensive, and that cost should be made explicit. How that should be done, I don't know. Giving prestige to reviews is difficult, given that reviews are anonymous. Personally, I feel reviews should be public and non-anonymous, just like the paper is. If the argument against this is that scientists are so petty that they will hold a negative review against you, well. Even more reason to make everything public, because why would you then trust petty scientists to do proper reviews?
- kelipso 3y ago
  Hah, the power dynamics involved will be brutal with non-anonymous review. You have new phd students reviewing papers submitted by tenured profs with decades of experience and connections and ability to impact their careers. People will be people and so on.
  - auggierose 3y ago
    Maybe new PhD students shouldn't be reviewing papers in the first place. And people will be people is EXACTLY why you need everything to be public.

croes 3y ago

>They are just taking advantage of a dysfunctional academic system. Of course you can blame Elsevier, you can blame the system too, but that's no excuse in exploiting the system and even worse the people.

mangecoeur 3y ago
Especially when they take such huge fees but their article submission systems is awful. Even logging in is a mess.

UncleMeat 3y ago

You absolutely can blame Elsevier here. A corporation taking advantage of a dysfunctional system to extract profit at the expense of others is bad. "Oh, the system is something that can be exploited so of course corporations should exploit it" is something worth criticizing, IMO. Peer reviews are usually two reviewers who maybe do two rounds of reviews. Even if people are getting a reasonable fee, £2700 is more than enough to cover it.