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Comment by snarf21 | Hacker News Reader

I am not an insider but could the reviewer turn into more of an endorsement? Meaning the paper is published and the endorsers are listed as well, e.g. "Reviewed and endorsed by Jill Jones of Cornell University." Organizations could then have clauses that if you endorsed papers that you didn't review and test that you would lose your job. I know that seems harsh but we need to find a way to get "skin in the game". I don't think having a paid organization would work and I think having something at the government level would be worse.

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>'Meaning the paper is published and the endorsers are listed as well, e.g. "Reviewed and endorsed by Jill Jones of Cornell University."'

If you read papers from like the 1700s you will see stuff like this. Basically you wanted respectable members of the community to vouch for you.

Say it was some experiment with dogs and blood pressure. It would say "My servant Mr. X recorded the readings I read off the dial while Mayor Y restrained the dog and Pastor Z observed it was correct".

I like this idea, but I think it might make the whole system collapse, with few people willing to review papers at all.

The ‘nobody wants to do job X’ problem has the usual solution: compensation.

That compensation would come at the expense of research grants. This is not the same world as commercial development.

Some journals do offer compensation - I think the American Economic Review used to offer £100. The solution hasn't been widely adopted, though, perhaps because academics enjoy the kudos of being a reviewer (and the chance to savage other people's work anonymously :-P... ). And while you can pay for reviews, it is hard to pay for review quality, which is very subjective.

Also because a price that would significantly incentivise a senior academic is a price that is way too high for most journals to pay. If you have prestige, a decent if not exorbitant salary, bulletproof job security, a project you're passionate about and want to spend time on, and way too many obligations to actually spend time on your project, how much would you take in exchange for adding yet another obligation to the pile, taking time away from what you really want to spend your time doing?

Maybe that's OK? Going a bit slower but with more solid footing seems like a reasonable tradeoff to me, though I'm a layman.

My husband reviews papers. He works a 40h/wk industry job; he reviews papers on Saturday mornings when I talk to other people or do personal projects, pretty much out of the goodness of his heart. There is no way he would ever have time to download the required third party libraries for the average paper in his field, let alone figure out how to build and run it. We're not talking about a highly in demand reviewer here -- he's an average expert with a PhD.

That system essentially can't work unless 1) you make 1st-year grad students do the review and 2) you somehow make people OK with publication delays being extended by months.

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