9 ms·

The big news here are that there are journals in the Springer and Elsevier network that do not read the papers they publish whatsoever. For this service of cop

The big news here are that there are journals in the Springer and Elsevier network that do not read the papers they publish whatsoever. For this service of copy-pasting text into a digital PDF they charge their crazy premium. This is amazing. In a sane world this would finally destroy their reputations so we could replace them with a reasonable solution for evaluating researchers.

mathisfun123 3y ago
> The big news here are that there are journals in the Springer and Elsevier network that do not read the papers they publish whatsoever. This is only news to people outside of academia. Anyone who has ever submitted a paper has gotten comments that can be attributed to the reviewer either being braindead or the reviewer not actually having read the paper. Since it's safe to assume said reviewer actually tied their shoes and put on their underwear the morning they reviewed the paper, it's also safe to assume it's the latter and not the former.
- sigmoid10 3y ago
  Exactly. Journals have sucked for a long time and practically all of academia just went along because publishing lots of stuff is the only way to have a career. The big news is that the rest of the public is starting to catch on how their tax dollars (that were supposed to go to research) end up in publisher's pockets even though they provide hardly any real value.
  - mathisfun123 3y ago
    > Exactly. Journals have sucked for a long time It's funny people are raising their pitch-forks about the journals. I guess it's not widely known/understood that the journals aren't reviewing anything ever. So when I say reviewers I'm talking about PhDs in academia that do this work as "community service". So if peer review is fundamental to the scientific method then your tax dollars are being wasted but the bulk of the waste is on worthless, lazy, BS spouting academics not journal admins. > and practically all of academia just went along because there were no other options. Arxiv has been around for a long time now. Do you really think "the academy" couldn't have come to some consensus on how to allocate review duties for papers that are uploaded/stored/submitted there? The fact that they haven't strongly indicates that lazy ass peer review as orchestrated by the journals is to the benefit of the academy. Journal (and conference) reviewers are completely anonymous and there's absolutely no appeal process (rebuttal phase is BS). Does that sound like a democratic/fair/auditable/meritocracatic setup to you? Sounds like review by inscrutable tribunal to me. So if the process were open/community driven (ie democratic) then people wouldn't be able to hide from the shitty job they do.
    - sigmoid10 3y ago
      I didn't talk about the peer review process (which is indeed not done by the journal and on top of that usually unpaid). I was talking about the journal taking all that money purely for editing and publishing - a service that has become next to worthless in the age of the internet.
    - thaw13579 3y ago
      Beyond this, some reviewers use their position to take advantage of the process to suppress, slow, or preempt work that overlaps or disagrees with their own. The journal editors are supposed to police this kind of thing, but they are similarly providing a community service that is lacking quality.
      - mathisfun123 3y ago
        > slow, or preempt work that overlaps or disagrees with their own. No doubt - past two papers I've submitted I can basically deanonymize my reviewers based on the other papers/projects they insist my work is inferior to.
    - wizzwizz4 3y ago
      > your tax dollars are being wasted but the bulk of waste is on worthless, lazy, BS spouting academics Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't peer review usually volunteer work? With the job of the (usually paid) editors to select reviewers with a track record of basic competence. > Do you really think "the academy" couldn't have come to some consensus on how to allocate review duties for papers that are uploaded/stored/submitted there? Actually, there are several proposals! One such system is https://openreview.net/about https://openreview.net/about – it's not the first I've seen, but it's the most recent. (I first learned about these things from a fictional proposal in a Pokémon fanwork: it's far from the realm of niche.) > Journal (and conference) reviewers are completely anonymous To reduce the incentives for nepotistic anti-scientific behaviour. The system's flawed, sure, but it works how it does for a reason.
      - mathisfun123 3y ago
- adolph 3y ago
  > comments that can be attributed to the reviewer either being braindead or the reviewer not actually having read the paper. Since it's safe to assume said reviewer actually tied their shoes and put on their underwear the morning they reviewed the paper, it's also safe to assume it's the latter and not the former. Neural necrosis is rarely uniform across the entire organ. Adjust assumptions accordingly.
- apricot 3y ago
  I will not expand on the circumstances, but at one point during my career I did review a paper while naked.
- naniwaduni 3y ago
  > Since it's safe to assume said reviewer actually tied their shoes and put on their underwear the morning they reviewed the paper, I don't know, that's pretty questionable, especially since the plague.
criley2 3y ago
The reasonable solution for evaluating researchers has always been peer review, not publication. The gold standard in science (going back generations) has always been peer replication, not publication. A white paper that has been cited 0 times and never replicated is as good as scientific fake news as far as I'm concerned. We all saw this live with LK-99. Publication isn't the end, it's the beginning. Replication is literally all that matters.
academia_hack 3y ago
They don't even copy and paste the text! At least in my experience, once done with peer-review I spend a few hours wrestling with the "print ready" LaTeX template provided by the publisher to get my paper and tables to render correctly. Often they'll have an out of date LaTeX compiler or something else in the pipeline, so there's actually quite a lot of unpaid labor involved in getting a paper into a PDF that a journal will host. The main services they supply are basically document hosting and search functionality. Both at extortionate rates.
- nvm0n2 3y ago
  The main service they supply is a form of pseudo-price discovery like h indexes and more vaguely quantified reputation, needed because it's not a market economy.
- SonOfLilit 3y ago
  I admit this is not a part of my comment I expected to have refuted
notahacker 3y ago
Tbf, whilst the obviously AI-written parenthical note in Resource Policy is extremely embarrassing it looks like the vast majority of examples were garbage-tier versions of the open access journals and conference papers HN insists can replace the big publishers...
skilled 3y ago
It's actually quite common in regular journalism/copywriting as well. If you've got a few big names on your resume, there's extremely high chance that whomever you send your work to for publishing simply isn't going to read it. Of course, that isn't always the case and it certainly isn't the case when writing for some of the larger editorials, but it happens a lot. Once you establish a name for yourself, you can get away with a lot. For example, submit your first draft even though it can probably be improved upon if you let it sit. But the person you're sending it to doesn't know that. They need the story, they know your resume, and they don't want to sit there and go through your submission examining every single word.

mathisfun123 3y ago

> The big news here are that there are journals in the Springer and Elsevier network that do not read the papers they publish whatsoever. This is only news to people outside of academia. Anyone who has ever submitted a paper has gotten comments that can be attributed to the reviewer either being braindead or the reviewer not actually having read the paper. Since it's safe to assume said reviewer actually tied their shoes and put on their underwear the morning they reviewed the paper, it's also safe to assume it's the latter and not the former.

sigmoid10 3y ago
Exactly. Journals have sucked for a long time and practically all of academia just went along because publishing lots of stuff is the only way to have a career. The big news is that the rest of the public is starting to catch on how their tax dollars (that were supposed to go to research) end up in publisher's pockets even though they provide hardly any real value.
- mathisfun123 3y ago
  > Exactly. Journals have sucked for a long time It's funny people are raising their pitch-forks about the journals. I guess it's not widely known/understood that the journals aren't reviewing anything ever. So when I say reviewers I'm talking about PhDs in academia that do this work as "community service". So if peer review is fundamental to the scientific method then your tax dollars are being wasted but the bulk of the waste is on worthless, lazy, BS spouting academics not journal admins. > and practically all of academia just went along because there were no other options. Arxiv has been around for a long time now. Do you really think "the academy" couldn't have come to some consensus on how to allocate review duties for papers that are uploaded/stored/submitted there? The fact that they haven't strongly indicates that lazy ass peer review as orchestrated by the journals is to the benefit of the academy. Journal (and conference) reviewers are completely anonymous and there's absolutely no appeal process (rebuttal phase is BS). Does that sound like a democratic/fair/auditable/meritocracatic setup to you? Sounds like review by inscrutable tribunal to me. So if the process were open/community driven (ie democratic) then people wouldn't be able to hide from the shitty job they do.
  - sigmoid10 3y ago
    I didn't talk about the peer review process (which is indeed not done by the journal and on top of that usually unpaid). I was talking about the journal taking all that money purely for editing and publishing - a service that has become next to worthless in the age of the internet.
  - thaw13579 3y ago
    Beyond this, some reviewers use their position to take advantage of the process to suppress, slow, or preempt work that overlaps or disagrees with their own. The journal editors are supposed to police this kind of thing, but they are similarly providing a community service that is lacking quality.
    - mathisfun123 3y ago
      > slow, or preempt work that overlaps or disagrees with their own. No doubt - past two papers I've submitted I can basically deanonymize my reviewers based on the other papers/projects they insist my work is inferior to.
  - wizzwizz4 3y ago
    > your tax dollars are being wasted but the bulk of waste is on worthless, lazy, BS spouting academics Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't peer review usually volunteer work? With the job of the (usually paid) editors to select reviewers with a track record of basic competence. > Do you really think "the academy" couldn't have come to some consensus on how to allocate review duties for papers that are uploaded/stored/submitted there? Actually, there are several proposals! One such system is https://openreview.net/about https://openreview.net/about – it's not the first I've seen, but it's the most recent. (I first learned about these things from a fictional proposal in a Pokémon fanwork: it's far from the realm of niche.) > Journal (and conference) reviewers are completely anonymous To reduce the incentives for nepotistic anti-scientific behaviour. The system's flawed, sure, but it works how it does for a reason.
    - mathisfun123 3y ago
adolph 3y ago
> comments that can be attributed to the reviewer either being braindead or the reviewer not actually having read the paper. Since it's safe to assume said reviewer actually tied their shoes and put on their underwear the morning they reviewed the paper, it's also safe to assume it's the latter and not the former. Neural necrosis is rarely uniform across the entire organ. Adjust assumptions accordingly.
apricot 3y ago
I will not expand on the circumstances, but at one point during my career I did review a paper while naked.
naniwaduni 3y ago
> Since it's safe to assume said reviewer actually tied their shoes and put on their underwear the morning they reviewed the paper, I don't know, that's pretty questionable, especially since the plague.

criley2 3y ago

The reasonable solution for evaluating researchers has always been peer review, not publication. The gold standard in science (going back generations) has always been peer replication, not publication. A white paper that has been cited 0 times and never replicated is as good as scientific fake news as far as I'm concerned. We all saw this live with LK-99. Publication isn't the end, it's the beginning. Replication is literally all that matters.

academia_hack 3y ago

They don't even copy and paste the text! At least in my experience, once done with peer-review I spend a few hours wrestling with the "print ready" LaTeX template provided by the publisher to get my paper and tables to render correctly. Often they'll have an out of date LaTeX compiler or something else in the pipeline, so there's actually quite a lot of unpaid labor involved in getting a paper into a PDF that a journal will host. The main services they supply are basically document hosting and search functionality. Both at extortionate rates.

nvm0n2 3y ago
The main service they supply is a form of pseudo-price discovery like h indexes and more vaguely quantified reputation, needed because it's not a market economy.
SonOfLilit 3y ago
I admit this is not a part of my comment I expected to have refuted

notahacker 3y ago

Tbf, whilst the obviously AI-written parenthical note in Resource Policy is extremely embarrassing it looks like the vast majority of examples were garbage-tier versions of the open access journals and conference papers HN insists can replace the big publishers...

skilled 3y ago

It's actually quite common in regular journalism/copywriting as well. If you've got a few big names on your resume, there's extremely high chance that whomever you send your work to for publishing simply isn't going to read it. Of course, that isn't always the case and it certainly isn't the case when writing for some of the larger editorials, but it happens a lot. Once you establish a name for yourself, you can get away with a lot. For example, submit your first draft even though it can probably be improved upon if you let it sit. But the person you're sending it to doesn't know that. They need the story, they know your resume, and they don't want to sit there and go through your submission examining every single word.