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Your concerns are valid, and I think that my proposal of paying reviewers and replicators addresses them all. > It's not obvious that a journal is fundamental
by rhelz 3y ago
Your concerns are valid, and I think that my proposal of paying reviewers and replicators addresses them all.
> It's not obvious that a journal is fundamentally better at organizing unpaid voluntary reviewers compared to a preprint server.
So, let's not rely on unpaid, voluntary labor. Pay them.
> they are selling prestige first and foremost,
Yes. So give them a better business model--if they can make money reviewing papers, they won't have to create artificial value by creating artificial scarcity.
> The role of peer review is misrepresented in journalism and the expectations are not met.
If you pay somebody, you can specify the expectations you think should be met. If they don't meet those expectations, they don't get paid.
> this prestige is overvalued.
The prestige is not overvalued--it is just too easily obtainable by fraud. Something has got to be done.
> Preprint servers, open data and more direct science communication seem like steps in the right direction.
They are vanity presses.
And they don't even do what you think they are doing. Today, the problem isn't too little information, it's too much misinformation. LLMs can chug out papers by the millions. Is a search engine going to help you cut through that and find what you are looking for? What if 2 million papers which match your search criteria? You gunna read through them all, trying to find the 5 papers which were actually written by a real scientist?
Are you even going to see them? Is the search engine going to do a better job than peer review of presenting you the papers you actually want to read?
- staunton 3y ago> my proposal of paying reviewers and replicators addresses [all concerns] Your other comment didn't say who might be paying reviewers. Journals clearly won't (why should they, they have grrat profits in the current system and will fight tooth and nail to delay any changes whatever). Universities and even funding agencies cannot (conflict of interest). > Is the search engine going to do a better job than peer review of presenting you the papers you actually want to read? I do actually expect to see that happen.
- rhelz 3y ago> Your other comment didn't say who might be paying reviewers. In the parent comment to this thread, I talk about this. My proposal is that when a researcher writes up the grant to get their research funded, they should estimate how much it would cost to pay reviewers and replicators, and include those figures in the cost. If the researcher gets the grant approved, then the funding agency will put the money for peer review/replication into escrow. When the research is finished and the investigators have written up a paper to describe their methods and results, the money in escrow is disbursed to the reviewers and replicators. If reviewers agree its good, and if it replicates, then the paper is published. If not, well we just dodged a bullet. > I do actually expect to see that happen. Are search engines getting better or worse for you? It was a lot easier getting the right paper from a search engine 10 years ago. Now, you just get half a page of irrelevant ads, and another half page of links boosted by payola. Just imagine what it will be like when there are literally MILLIONS of bad papers for each good paper. Then Billions. There is no finite limit to the amount of bullshit that LLMs can--and therefore will--output.