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Comment by michaelhoffman | Hacker News Reader

This is the norm in academic publishing. Not only do publishers (often for-profit publishers with huge profit margins) ask us academics to critically review submitted manuscripts gratis with short deadlines, but they also want us to use their poorly designed, byzantine online systems to do it.

It's most fun when you are just trying to decline this invitation because you do not have time and are asked to create an account and password (with stupid password rules, naturally), and fill out an amount of personal information just to do that.

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You make it sound as if you are required by law to do this. Short deadlines, for free, on poorly designed systems, behind a login wall. Then you just don't, right?

And if it is a government agency asking you to review a grant proposal? Besides the obvious service aspect, you don't want to unnecessarily offend someone with money, that you might have to apply for yourself someday.

I understand you're also helping colleagues, but in the case of wanting peers to review your paper it's a simple matter to send emails with PDFs to those peers.

But I'm not sure how this world works anyway. I read about research in books that refer to it, Hacker News and Reddit that links to it, etc. but never in a magazine. Yet the magazines seems to be what everyone is aiming for to be published in, they are apparently some big deal. I suppose there is some reason why "peer reviews" are not between "peers".

The peer review is supposed to be anonymous. So what happens in practice is you upload your paper to a central website from which a set of reviewers can download a copy for review and give feedback with comments, anonymously. This is also why there is a login system: to ensure the comments are from actual peers which have their own papers up in the repository too.

I'm not saying this is the best way to do it, just how it is now.

Also, if you want someone to just read your paper, sure, email is fine. One does not exclude the other. The central system is there to ensure that should any doubt arise over the quality of the work, the feedback can be read and interpreted.

Again, there might be many other more high-tech solutions out there to solve this problem.

Ah, anonymity is the issue here. That explains it a bit. Thanks for replying.

The process, as I've experienced it, is:

1. Authors write paper.

2. Authors send paper to journal or conference address. (...using a web form)

3. The editor gives the paper a once-over and decides to send it out for review.

4. (Editor sends links to reviewers, who log in, read paper, and leave comments.)

5. Lather, rinse, repeat until accept/reject decision is made.

They used to send pdfs, but now use web systems for roughly the same reason HN isn't a mailing list.

Note: the last time anyone let me review a paper was a long time ago, when they sent paper forms to fill out. Parts in (...) are how I assume it works now.

That's exactly what the original post said: he won't do it any more.

It's not about the individual, it's a lot of people I hear about this. Yet it is apparently the common practice. I'm asking why.

I guess it is because people see it as necessary in order to build relationships, and have a name. But it looks like it's time to draw a line.

For the same reason it happens in other websites/services: to collect personal data and to subscribe the user to their spam^H^H^H^H mailing list.

Eventually they will bar you from publishing with them. How bad that is depends on the journal and what you intend to do with your life.

Speaking as an outsider who mostly knows how academic publishing really works from reading occasional blogs that complain about the subject, the entire system seems like something straight out of a Douglas Adams novel.

"Why don't you just stop doing X thing you don't like?"

"Because if we do, they won't let us do Y thing we do like. Or, well, we would like it, except the way they make us do it is so awful."

"So stop doing that, too, or go do it your own way instead."

"But if we don't do Y thing we don't like, then they also won't let us do Z thing. Incidentally, we don't like that one, either. But we need it to be able to do X."

It is totally bananas.

There are two questions: why review at all, and why are the review systems so crappy? For the first, the whole system in the academic world is based on peer review, and I think peer review has mostly proved its worth. For the second: 90% of everything is shit, and the academic world is struggling with the legacy of for-profit journals and trying to get better systems in place. But opting out of everything crappy leaves you with almost nowhere else to participate.

If you are early in your career and want to make your name heard, then you do accede to all these requests (which probably is why they get made with ridiculous requirements in the first place)!

I think people are too polite sometimes. These requests are an abstracted "GFY" so I think the exact proper response is a non-abstracted "GFY" - with a CC BY-ND 4.0. Basically it's a reply that's congruent with the request, but without the bullshit.

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