Who's downloading pirated papers? Everyone

I think it's because no one can agree on a price, tax and international payments is too expensive, and there's a tit-for-tat understanding.

First, the price. The last paper I reviewed took me about 10 hours. I charge $200/hour. Should I charge $2000 for my time? If I'm paid by the hour, who tells me when to stop? If I'm paid a flat fee, how much is that fee?

I have seen a reviewer write something like "I read the paper twice. It seems good. Publish it." Does that get the same as someone who spends 10 hours for a detailed critique?

Second, does payment constitute work-for-hire? Does the publisher and/or reviewer need to pay taxes? Might some reviewers have a contract which prevents them from taking on part-time work? What if the reviewer is overseas? Do tax agencies from two different countries need to be involved?

Third, most people expect to publish, and get their papers reviewed. If a single author has three reviewers, then that author should expect to do about three reviews. This is an imperfect system which rewards publishing rather than reviewers, but there are also some compensations to the reviewer.

Moreover, I recall one story - I don't know the validity of it, but it has a ring of truth - where a daycare got annoyed with parents who picked up the children late. They decided to fine parents should that happen. As a result, children were picked up late more often because the fine was interpreted as a fee for extra daycare, and no longer social chastisement.

I suspect that reviewers are in a similar boat. I'll feel different about it if I get paid a pittance than if I were to do it for free, so long as others do the same for me in the future.

It's hard to explain how important the journals are for a scientists. It's not even the effect that a paper in Nature is (in some disciplines) the fastest way to tenure. It's got an even bigger psychological factor: If you get into Science, you frame it and hang it on the most prominent wall in your living room or office. With a Nobel too rare to practically hope for, this system is the only reward all those mice-conditioning mice are conditioned to.

I find a login at my alma matter and an HTTP proxy over SSH quite useful for accessing research papers.

I've published several dozen papers through these academic publishers. I get no royalties. I have no problem with people pirating them, and I have no qualms about pirating other people's papers.

The quality of reviews of conference papers is mostly terrible, though. I've been on both sides of it, here are some major complaints:

* There is only one round of reviews, with a binary accept/reject outcome. In case of rejection, feedback cannot be incorporated. In case of acceptance, there is basically no incentive for incorporating feedback, as the paper is already "through" and putting in any more time is considered a waste.

* Assigning papers to reviewers is very arbitrary and often the reviewers are not at all familiar with the field. Getting a paper reassigned to another reviewer is often so complicated and time-consuming that reviewers just do the bare minimum (if asked to rate novelty/originality etc., on a scale 1-5 they give it a "3", which given the usual acceptance rate of * Reviewers usually get a lot of papers to review. They don't have time (who does?) but have to finish by a two-week deadline. If one of the papers is relevant to the research of the reviewer or has been written by colleagues they know (double-blind does not help, you recognize who wrote it..), that paper will receive attention; the other papers are seen as distraction and are dealt with as outlined above.

Peer-review is important, though. Some fields of research, particularly those where a lot of research is done by actual practitioners and not just pure research scientists, are mostly driven by conferences with short (one page or less) abstracts without full papers. There are often very few citeable sources that have been peer reviewed; conference websites and abstract books vanish over the years. An arxiv-like repository can help with that, but it does not solve the problem of peer review. Community-run open-access journals seem to provide a solution, but rarely take off.