Hacker News Reader

Comment by chestervonwinch | Hacker News Reader

what's the reason it's boycotted? appeal to authority isn't very informative for those not keeping up with this stuff

Subscription fee requirements for access, mostly.

and fees for publishing.

i.e. Why should people have to pay to view the results of what is often publicly funded research? Even more so why should researchers have to pay to publish work that the publishers profit off of but the researchers don't.

Because being a peer reviewer shouldn’t be done for free? Do you like being paid to work? Because Nature has established themselves as a premier journal over the the past 150 years and are known for their quality?

Or maybe I’m just taking crazy pills..

Peer reviewers are not ever paid, making this whole arrangement somewhat bizarre and unsavory to reviewers and authors alike.

There's a strange thing, there seems to be a universal rule of Open Access discussions:

There will always be someone who defends publishers based on not knowing anything about how scientific publishing works.

My favourite article about open access, about the Journal of Machine Learning Research, and really the ultimate smackdown, all done very politely: https://blogs.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-j...

That's the problem: publishers don't pay reviewers but charge for their work.

Peer review is not paid work. Mostly it is done as an overhead that is understood as part of being an active researcher.

I would even venture to say that most researchers will be against the idea of paid reviews, just like Amazon found out that paid product reviews are a very bad idea.

>Or maybe I’m just taking crazy pills..

You are. Where did you ever get the idea that nature pays for reviews?

Haha, reviewers getting paid. That's a good one. This journal charges the authors for Pete's sake.

Have any alternative journals in that area popped up that are both open-access and without submission fees?

The premiere journal in Machine Learning, the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), has existed in this format since 2001. It is explicitly mentioned in the petition for the boycott: https://openaccess.engineering.oregonstate.edu/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com