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Peer review: the end of an error?

the-tls.co.uk

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Re: Peer review: the end of an error?

#21

Post by svat »

chrisseaton wrote: post #10
heckless wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although reviewership is a useful thing that gets put on CVs, I can't think of a position I've ever seen where "review X papers" a year is part of the job requirement. A more salient point about why it is important to note that peer review is unpaid is that academics, as authors, submit their work---for free---to a journal, where reviewers review it for free, and then the journal turns around and sells the article fo…

This is such an adversarial way to look at it. I see it as a community. We write and share our papers as part of our jobs, we review each others' papers as part of our jobs, we help to run the conference as part of our jobs. Everyone contributes to run the system. Nobody buys articles for $35 a piece. All major universities and companies subscribe to the ACM or whatever your field's organisation is for you. And guess…

> I see it as a community.

Maybe you'd like to take a look at these members of the community, who show they care about the community by refusing to participate in journals for certain publishers: http://thecostofknowledge.com/ It even has a Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_Cost_of_Knowl... And here's an example of one of them: https://www.scottaaronson.com/writings/journal.pdf

Re: Peer review: the end of an error?

#22

Post by scott_s »

chrisseaton wrote: post #10
heckless wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Although reviewership is a useful thing that gets put on CVs, I can't think of a position I've ever seen where "review X papers" a year is part of the job requirement. A more salient point about why it is important to note that peer review is unpaid is that academics, as authors, submit their work---for free---to a journal, where reviewers review it for free, and then the journal turns around and sells the article fo…

This is such an adversarial way to look at it. I see it as a community. We write and share our papers as part of our jobs, we review each others' papers as part of our jobs, we help to run the conference as part of our jobs. Everyone contributes to run the system. Nobody buys articles for $35 a piece. All major universities and companies subscribe to the ACM or whatever your field's organisation is for you. And guess…

The ACM model is a good one, but it's not the norm in the other sciences. By which I mean that the main publisher of computer science work is actually a professional organization, which is community run and managed. But for people in fields where their professional organization and main publishers are different, it's not the same.

As computer scientists, we have it pretty good.

Re: Peer review: the end of an error?

#25

Post by aldoushuxley001 »

kelnage wrote: post #2

The initial examples the author uses really do reflect the magnitude of the third problem. All of them were big breakthrough results in their fields - and hence people cared enough to do proper reviews - especially in the latter two cases. As an academic, I have participated in reviews of papers that I would have never otherwise read, but could still contribute to the process. Without something pushing all academics…

"Only interesting problems/solutions/results get published"

I'm afraid we're already there. Journals are very much strongly incentivized to publish only interesting or novel results.

Re: Peer review: the end of an error?

#26

Post by dhilistrian »

chrisseaton wrote: post #4

This article says that peer review is unpaid - it isn't. If you are an academic or work in industrial research, it's part of your paid job to do peer review as part of the community. You are paid for it - it's part of your job and it's normal to do it during work hours.

That's the way it should be seen, but it's often not.

I was at a conference not too long ago and chatting with a fellow faculty member at another university, pretty well-known in his field (in a medical school department), who told me a story about how his chair berided him for doing peer reviews at all. The colleague was like "but this is part of our job as a scientist" and the chair's response was "but what account number is that coming out of", as in, "who is paying for that?" The chair proceeded to explain that unless the department was being paid for his peer reviewing time, he shouldn't be doing it.

He subsequently explained that he feels like he's checking out of academics per se and trying to shift to public outreach activities because he's tired of trying to make a case for research integrity for its own sake, as opposed to being a vehicle for bringing funds into the department.

Things in higher education are quickly moving toward a state (or have already moved toward a state) where it is implicitly assumed that your job as a researcher is to bring in money, not to do research. That is, if you are paid by the state, you are not being paid to do a job (research) you are being paid to bring in even more money. You're a salesperson or adsperson not a laborer. Grad students are the laborers. I strongly disagree with this model, but it's where we are.

I used to think that conversations like the one with my colleague were kind of fictional dystopian kinds of conversations until I actually had one. And he was dead serious.

Universities are quickly becoming places to rent space for research, basically.

Re: Peer review: the end of an error?

#27

Post by probably_wrong »

There are two points that I wished were addressed more often.

1. New researchers. The examples he mentions include researchers who were already important in the field, and whose prestige guarantees review. But if you're a new researcher, good luck getting noticed. Blind review doesn't have this problem.

2. The cost of journals. People say "journal" and think of Elsevier, but there are several journals and conferences that publish all papers for free. The ACL, the largest conference on computational linguistics, finances itself with the entry fee to their conference, and you can read all of their papers right now (disclaimer: I'm currently doing work for them). There is a middle ground between Elsevier and Arxiv.

Re: Peer review: the end of an error?

#28

Post by CharlesMerriam2 »

An interesting parallel can be found in the anonymous review of grant proposals. See "Fund ideas, not pedigree, to find fresh insight", https://bit.ly/2Fy64cP. It ends with "peer review may be the worst system, except for all the others". It can be found in Nature, a peer reviewed journal.

Re: Peer review: the end of an error?

#29

Post by xamuel »

Not to defend peer review as it is now, but one of the things I've come to value from editorial gatekeepers is that they put the brakes on me publishing things that in later years I might regret. I wrote some pretty mediocre papers as a grad student and I'm grateful some of them were rejected, because I wouldn't want them forever part of my legacy. As a matter of fact, I wrote some "papers" when I was a teenager, which, if I had been allowed to freely publish at that time, might have become permanent albatrosses around my neck :P

Re: Peer review: the end of an error?

#30

Post by danieltillett »

xamuel wrote: post #29

Not to defend peer review as it is now, but one of the things I've come to value from editorial gatekeepers is that they put the brakes on me publishing things that in later years I might regret. I wrote some pretty mediocre papers as a grad student and I'm grateful some of them were rejected, because I wouldn't want them forever part of my legacy. As a matter of fact, I wrote some "papers" when I was a teenager , wh…

Didn’t your supervisor step in and say this is not up to scratch? When I was a supervisor a good chunk of my time was spent going through my student’s and postdoc’s manuscripts to ensure nothing was in them that might embarrass us both.
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