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If they are doing work, they should be paid
The whole system is broken. Putting a financial incentive in front of the review process is not going to fix that.
Well it’s not about incentive but because people deserve to be paid for their labor more than the publisher deserves to make profit. If we’re talking about the evils of financial incentives then we really should be looking at the publishers, not the people doing work for them.
Adding extrinsic rewards for tasks like this can often introduce dark patterns eg maxing reviews to max rewards. It’s not as simple as “just pay someone to read papers.” As much as I detest academic publishers, it’s also not as simple as just throwing everything into open access (which we should do no matter what) and then having folks do it for the good of the community. There will have to be some experimentation with a balance of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards.
In the US I directly pay for the funding for papers through tuition and taxes. I shouldn’t have to fucking pay a parasitic publisher on top of that just to access that shit. In math at least I don’t mind paying a little here and there for an MAA or AMS journal though.
It should be part of people’s jobs.
As in, they are expected to do it, and get time to do it. And they probably should work within the publisher… that should probably be some consortium of academic institutions.
You could easily implement some sortation between the universities and have the “winners” dedicate a day a month for 6 months to do it.
The crying ones probably are the 0.1% tbh, like, are there even people that thinks that way?
I know quite a few people who fit into that category, although I imagine they would take issue with how this meme characterises them.
A widespread concern that I see is that paid peer review may make things worse via a perverse incentive. Consider, for example, paper mills, and the conditions that cause them to arise: Publish or Perish; poor pay in academic research; lack of stability of jobs in academic research (tenure Vs adjunct) etc… If we’re concerned about the quality of peer review, then it doesn’t seem unreasonable to be concerned that paying may exacerbate the problem.
If you’re not being paid for reviews, then only review for open access (and ideally non-profit) journals.
Are there really any people in the middle who aren’t publishers? I find it hard to believe that any of the actual community members feel this way (well, specifically feel that their work should be free but publishers should be able to charge for their journals)
Paying people to review articles is just going to make things worse. The real problem is open access. In the current system the author of the manuscript has to pay to publish it, and the publisher turns around and asks readers to pay to access it. Its a scam. If research was conducted with any public money the knowledge generated should be public. This is why Elsevier needs to go. If you saw how much money institutions have to pump into these useless publishers to get access to knowledge funded by the public for the public there would be more outrage.
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It’s still free labor since besides reading the review papers, scientists are expected to read the relevant daily papers of their field. Try usually do it in their free time and expending some of it reading non curated papers and then writing a review takes out preious time.
Elsevier doesn’t even reward them with free subscriptions to their services, no, they work for free and then have to pay (uni pays for them) to read what they curated.
The only thing Elsevier has for it is the notoriety of their platform.
If arXiv had a way to curate the uploaded papers and voluntary reviews from researchers, Elsevier would be gone.
There’s a reason why researchers themselves publish their papers into the “pirate” hub since they aren’t allowed to publish it publicly legalyl (but are allowed to privately send you the paper if you contact them by email for example).
fun fact: the academic publishing business model was invented by robert maxwell. you’ve probably heard the name maxwell before, due to his daughter, ghislaine
This article blew my mind when I first read it. The unsustainability of the current academic publishing situation made a lot more sense after learning how we got to this point. Strongly recommended this article to anyone who doesn’t know how huge Maxwell’s influence was in this area.
Robert Maxwell was a known sleeze bag in his own right.
For professors it’s somewhat included but in the pay structure and an expected part of service. So you could argue that it’s not necessarily “free” time, but it’s not a great argument. Reviewers should still be paid and not expected to do this for free.
Having someone review things because it’s “expected” is a great way to get people rubber stamping stuff.
Ooh, and add in ever increasing journals and submissions, and you are correct!
(Or pass them along to grad students who take it extremely seriously)
The entire peer review system is somewhat of a mess since publish or perish and citation indexes have been embedded into promotion and tenure as metrics.
That’s like saying you shouldn’t be paid if you like your job because enjoying work is rewarding enough
(n.b. I got here after OP deleted their comment, so I don’t have the context of what you were replying to. This is just a reply to you)
I felt a sad wistfulness upon reading your comment, because of how deeply I wish this were possible.
I’m reminded of an exhausting dinner in which a friend and I were trying to explain to his Dad why doctors and the like don’t work for free. It took us a while to figure out what he was actually saying, but in the end, we understood him to be arguing roughly: “It sure would be nice if people could work for free, because things like the NHS and other social safety nets only exist if people feel a duty to society, or their community. It sucks that selfish motivations seem to be guiding people’s decisions instead, and this isn’t their fault, but a product of them having to struggle to fulfill their basic living needs under capitalism. Maybe if we had a comprehensive, universal basic income, we would see more people able to exercise their duty to society”.
This memory sticks out to me because we spent most of that conversation exasperated and confused because it seemed like he was arguing that people should work for free, in the here and now. Your comment brings me back to that memory because I do believe that sufficiently robust social safety nets would lead to far more people doing work because they find it rewarding; I’m imagining a world where they still get paid, but the money is far less of a determining force in people’s decisions. It would be nice to be able to be an idealist like this, but we’re a long way off from that world
Reviewing is on average about reading bad papers that won’t get accepted in great detail to try to figure out what’s actually going on.
At best, it tends to be reading solid work adjacent to your subfield which you can respect but aren’t really that into.
It’s pretty rare for it to be as useful to me as actually choosing something to read.
