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Comment by Mediterraneo10 | Hacker News Reader

No, please. There are still fields where journals are both open-access and not pay-to-publish. This is because they are published by the same non-profit learned societies they always have been for many decades, and overhead costs are low.

Bring in a culture of paying peer reviewers, and suddenly authors (or the learned society) will be under more pressure to get more grant money to pay the new publication costs. Also, as someone who works in academia on an occasional basis, taking years off from funded positions at a time, I appreciate being able to write the occasional article on my own time and get it published without paying hundreds and hundreds of euro out of my own pocket -- fields with pay-to-publish traditions make it hard for non-permanent faculty to contribute.

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Almost all scientific journals in my fields currently charge authors to publish, but don't pay reviewers. (Earth Science, Planetary Science, Robotics)

I don't think your idea that publication costs need to increase to pay reviewers is valid. Elsevier et al would just cut some of their obscene bloat.

I have an inside line to Elsevier. Elsevier will NEVER cut anything, bloat or otherwise.

They will, however, use their market dominance to punish people who rebel against their publishing machine. They've done it consistently every time there's the whiff of shakeup in the publishing industry, going back decades.

Sad face

You are right, they will never do something considered good for the public or research, just because they want to retain their dominance and maximize profits. For example, my old university needs to pay in order to access papers, which they sent in and paid to publish. It's completely crazy.

Fortunately there is https://arxiv.org/ and similar sites. And most researchers are happy to provide you their papers free of cost if you ask.

This is insightful, thanks, but there's a little problem here:

The cost is borne one way or the other, the $500 is a matter of comp, not cost.

If someone is going to review your work, that's an act of very material labour. That they are not really compensated for it, at all, is inconsistent with the basic premise of labour and comp.

You would not be a researcher if you weren't comped in some way, so the absence and/or misalignment of comp is the issue.

It's not free to publish and have 2 reviewers (!!) there is a very material cost that you're just not paying.

Allocating at $1K cost for publication more accurately reflects the labour involved in checking it out (at least a little bit).

It'd seem to me a lot of folks might want to take up the $500/review as a job to earn some reasonable income, they might even get good at it.

It's entirely plausible that one of the 'dysfunctions' of science is 'not enough review' and it's simply because there is no incentive structure for it at all.

We pay people for literally every other function in life. Doctors are paid to 'save lives' even though there is a moral obligation. The notion that we don't pay people for academic work seems odd.

Perhaps journals could identify the papers with the most promise and offer payment for review, or something like that.

Unpaid peer reviewing is certainly not incentive-free. For example, oftentimes one enjoys peer reviewing because the author cites some publications that are useful or important, but which one wasn't previously aware of. Sometimes the author makes some observation tangential to his/her main argument which proves an inspiration or key to one's own research.

These sort of things may be more common in the humanities versus hard STEM, but in my own field peer review is not generally seen as drudgery or exploitation.

To add to your list: getting to see the research before the rest of the community.

As someone who is in a STEM field (CS) I would say that all the reasons you mentioned apply to me personally. There are some conferences where being a reviewer can be very tedious due to the massive number of submissions (many of which are unfortunately fairly poor quality) but I haven't had this problem in my own subfield.

Do you realize that the article authors are generally not paid?

> It's not free to publish and have 2 reviewers (!!) there is a very material cost that you're just not paying.

Who is the "you"? The author I think? So you do know that article authors don't get paid, you're talking as if they are the "customer" that should be paying?

Generally, for non-open-source journals, which are still the majority in most fields, it is subscribers, the readers, who are the customers who pay the costs (plus enough for a healthy profit for the publisher). (Usually university libraries. The same universities who are paying most of the authors, who don't get paid by the journals, but produce the content that makes a journal valuable).

Elsevier is quite profitable, with a high margin on revenue.

You are painting an economic model of publishing that I'm not sure is connected to the actual real world economics of scientific/academic publishing, it seems to be very hypothetical.

'Authors' i.e. researchers are generally paid to do research and publish, it's absolutely the assumption or implication of their role.

Depending on the country and the field, authors are often faculty who are presently being paid a meagre salary only to lecture, and researching and publishing is something they do on their own time unpaid.

Right, but not by the journal.

Peer reviewers also usually hold full-time jobs, they are usually the same people that are authors on other articles.

Is peer review also the assumption or implication of their role?

If not, should it be, since it's just as essential to the production of research articles as authorship?

Yes, paying researchers to 'review' could be a solution but incentives are still misaligned - there's far too much upside in publishing vis-a-vis reviewing. It's a prisoner's dilemma type thing and it would require a kind of broad, institutional practice to make sure everyone was helping out with the reviewing part.

Economic incentives are never perfect either, but they might help.

Since we have a giant oversupply of PhDs looking for positions it'd seem maybe this wold be nice work for them, and frankly anyone applying for any kind of job should have a big list of articles they've reviewed as one of those resume checkmarks.

> Yes, paying researchers to 'review'

Literally not at all what i'm saying, but I am apparently failing to communicate today, so I'll give up.

But yes, I think changes in "broad, institutional practice" are required to fix the current severe problems in academic publishing, of which a lack of peer review labor is only a small part.

"Is peer review also the assumption or implication of their role?

If not, should it be,"

This is what I was responding to assuming you were implying that in general should 'researchers also be paid to review, implied as part of their job description'.

As if to say 'reviewing should go hand in hand with publishing' as part of the normal paid activity of researchers.

That probably makes the most sense but would require a lot of institutions getting on board.

The system is wickedly broken. Is there a way to fix the reproduction issue in science that has been raging for decades, without affecting the good players? I'm not sure there is.

And what percentage of published papers would be affected by this?

I surmise the amount is anywhere between small and tiny.

There are arguments against paying peer reviewers, but this is not a good one.

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