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Comment by ksk | Hacker News Reader

Well, all of those things you mentioned are voluntary, optional and not guaranteed. I think having people whose job it is to peer-review, be selective, be vigilant of bad-science, etc is a good thing. I'm completely for open-access, but I'm against having zero selection criteria. It puts a drag of everyone if they have to wade through thousands of junk papers while doing research.

If hacker news did not have a voting system/flagging system/banning system it would just be a giant cesspool of links and comments submitted by bots.

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>"It puts a drag of everyone if they have to wade through thousands of junk papers while doing research."

If something that sounds interesting was published in Nature/Science around 2000, I will usually just skip it. I already know the methods section will be crap and I will be unable to figure out what process generated the data (at least in the case of biomed). When I needed to dig through that stuff and try to make sense of what was going on in detail, that was an awful nightmare. And that was an editorial policy... now they at least let authors put the required info into supplements.

I think that was the era of "peak peer review", the idea has been losing clout ever since (mostly due to the internet).

No one's job is to peer review for established journals. Peer review is unpaid.

To your point, yes, there are plenty of journals that don't pay (but pay for other activities). Perhaps I should have just called it a fee instead of a job. Here are some that do pay - http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/20930/

Interesting link! I wasn't aware of anyone paying for peer review when I was in academia. It appears from the linked examples that it's still rare and relatively small dollar amounts, so indeed not a job.

I love the example of the New England Journal of Medicine finding that paying $5 was worse than not paying, as potential reviewers found it insulting.

As to other activities, yes, I think companies behind journals typically pay people to do administrative functions for the journal, and the editor may or may not be paid (for Nature, I believe the editor is paid). However, it is possible to replicate the traditional review structure in a completely free OA journal with volunteered resources; in computer graphics, I think JCGT does this: http://jcgt.org/about.html

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