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Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

newscientist.com

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Re: Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

#11

Post by rsa4046 »

justinpombrio wrote: post #5

For anyone who still doesn't know this: publishers do not pay paper authors, in any field. I am also not aware of a publisher paying peer reviewers. (Lowly soon-to-be-postdoc here; a professor would be able to say more.)

In academia (at least the hard sciences), no faculty are ever paid for publishing in mainstream, peer-reviewed journals. No reviewers are ever paid either, although recently Elsevier has started to publish the names of its "star reviewers", presumably as a token for the large investment in time and expertise required to evaluate papers for publication and improve the field. Even book deals (or editorships) yield no real income, beyond some nominal amount (between $0 and $50). What's more, the lay public is hilariously misinformed about this, believing that faculty, researchers, etc., are paid royalties for journal papers. Where they got this idea, I don't know ...

Re: Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

#12

Post by rsa4046 »

Y7ZCQtNo39 wrote: post #10
justinpombrio wrote: post #5

For anyone who still doesn't know this: publishers do not pay paper authors, in any field. I am also not aware of a publisher paying peer reviewers. (Lowly soon-to-be-postdoc here; a professor would be able to say more.)

How do peer reviews happen, then, if nobody gets paid to do them? Does research money (that goes to the production of the paper) not also cover peer-reviews? I wouldn't see any incentive for any work to be peer-reviewed, ever, then.

The incentives are 1) professional responsibility; 2) the opportunity to participate in the direction of new research, stay abreast of the field, and maintain a high level of integrity; 3) young researchers joining the field benefit from the process, both as reviewers and authors.

Re: Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

#13

Post by Y7ZCQtNo39 »

rsa4046 wrote: post #12
Y7ZCQtNo39 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do peer reviews happen, then, if nobody gets paid to do them? Does research money (that goes to the production of the paper) not also cover peer-reviews? I wouldn't see any incentive for any work to be peer-reviewed, ever, then.

The incentives are 1) professional responsibility; 2) the opportunity to participate in the direction of new research, stay abreast of the field, and maintain a high level of integrity; 3) young researchers joining the field benefit from the process, both as reviewers and authors.

I can't remember the last time I've read a headline about the peer-reviewer that confirmed some groundbreaking finding.

Maybe it gives you the opportunity to network with higher-profile contributors to your field, if you offer to peer review their work (though to be honest, I don't know how the peer review process works, and if you can even "offer" to perform it for a specific paper).

Re: Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

#14

Post by ylmm »

Y7ZCQtNo39 wrote: post #10
justinpombrio wrote: post #5

For anyone who still doesn't know this: publishers do not pay paper authors, in any field. I am also not aware of a publisher paying peer reviewers. (Lowly soon-to-be-postdoc here; a professor would be able to say more.)

How do peer reviews happen, then, if nobody gets paid to do them? Does research money (that goes to the production of the paper) not also cover peer-reviews? I wouldn't see any incentive for any work to be peer-reviewed, ever, then.

I've only worked with professors in economics and political science but I'm under the impression that this is true more generally of academia. Some people do it to help advance the state of the field. Career incentives and standing in the field also come into play. As the poster above mentioned, a professor would be able to say more.

To respond succinctly to your comments: money isn't the only incentive in life, so it seems weird to not see "any incentive" as soon as money is taken out of the picture.

Re: Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

#15

Post by ylmm »

Y7ZCQtNo39 wrote: post #13
rsa4046 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The incentives are 1) professional responsibility; 2) the opportunity to participate in the direction of new research, stay abreast of the field, and maintain a high level of integrity; 3) young researchers joining the field benefit from the process, both as reviewers and authors.

I can't remember the last time I've read a headline about the peer-reviewer that confirmed some groundbreaking finding. Maybe it gives you the opportunity to network with higher-profile contributors to your field, if you offer to peer review their work (though to be honest, I don't know how the peer review process works, and if you can even "offer" to perform it for a specific paper).

At least in the social sciences, journal editors delegate papers to reviewers. Your first sentence also suggests that you don't know what peer review is.

Peer review is not the same thing as replication, which is replicating the results of a paper after it's been published (e.g., confirming some groundbreaking finding). Peer review happens at the stage before publication of the original paper. Researcher(s) submit the paper to the journal. The journal editor sends the paper out to some reviewers, who review the paper (this is the "peer review" stage). Pending reviewer feedback and editor approval, the paper is published.

Edit: also the "benefit" that rsa4046 refers to probably doesn't mean networking. AFAIK, reviewers are always anonymous to the authors (which can generate its own problems e.g., if the reviewer gets a paper authored by someone he/she doesn't get along with). The benefit being referred to, I believe, is that of learning to write better reviews, and having reviewed other's work, learning how to improve your own.

Re: Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

#16

Post by zhoujieyang »

rasengan wrote: post #4

From the article: > the business of publishing tax-funded research and then selling it to tax-funded institutions has produced the most profitable industry in the world How is this not illegal?

Even outside of research, in most economies there's a lot of money flows that look like this. Visited Europe last year, it's crazy how many of them are both funded by government grants and provide services to the government. Unfortunately curbing that would involve even more regulation making everything worse perhaps.

Re: Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

#17

Post by williamstein »

ylmm wrote: post #14
Y7ZCQtNo39 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do peer reviews happen, then, if nobody gets paid to do them? Does research money (that goes to the production of the paper) not also cover peer-reviews? I wouldn't see any incentive for any work to be peer-reviewed, ever, then.

I've only worked with professors in economics and political science but I'm under the impression that this is true more generally of academia. Some people do it to help advance the state of the field. Career incentives and standing in the field also come into play. As the poster above mentioned, a professor would be able to say more. To respond succinctly to your comments: money isn't the only incentive in life, so i…

I'm a professor (in mathematics), and there are some reasons why I personally might say "yes" to review a paper. (1) If the paper is so interesting that when I see it I think "I really, really want to read this paper!", then I am likely to peer review it because as a reviewer when I read it, I get to ask any question and the author will take my questions and concerns very seriously. (2) I owe the editor who is asking me to peer review the paper (or maybe even the author of the paper), e.g., if the editor put a lot of work into ensuring a paper I once wrote got properly reviewed. (3) Even if I say "no" to fully reviewing a paper, as an expert in the area I can often provide quick valuable feedback about the relative value of the claimed contribution, and who is most likely to be suited to review it; I'll do a quick informal review like that in some cases.

From the outside, it is easy to forgot the extreme extent to which academics are motivated by (or view themselves as motivated by) principles of "good citizenship". This is selection -- the people who aren't this way, often do not get hired or promoted. Also, many academics (at least in pure math) view motivation for money as a "lower order term". It's a good thing for them, because for much of your long career in academia there is little you can do to impact your salary, besides applying for a job somewhere else. For me it's always been: each year you get some maximum possible merit raise of between 0% and 4%, depending on external economics that the department has no control over. Academic book royalties might also raise your yearly salary by 2%. Being highly money-motivated in some parts of academia would end up being very frustrating indeed. E.g., even when I've got a big NFS grant, that doesn't change my salary one bit; instead, it changes how many students and/or postdocs I could support.

Re: Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

#18

Post by impendia »

Y7ZCQtNo39 wrote: post #10
justinpombrio wrote: post #5

For anyone who still doesn't know this: publishers do not pay paper authors, in any field. I am also not aware of a publisher paying peer reviewers. (Lowly soon-to-be-postdoc here; a professor would be able to say more.)

How do peer reviews happen, then, if nobody gets paid to do them? Does research money (that goes to the production of the paper) not also cover peer-reviews? I wouldn't see any incentive for any work to be peer-reviewed, ever, then.

I'm a math professor, I can answer this.

We tend to think of journals as being run by their editorial boards -- i.e., by scientists in our field. The publishers are in the background, not taking a very active role, simply skimming off truckloads of money in the process. In particular, peer-review requests tend to come from scientists whom we know at least by reputation, and often personally.

When I spend serious time peer-reviewing a paper, it will be on a quality paper on a subject that I enjoy reading about anyway. (If I get asked to peer-review a paper that looks uninteresting to me, or something outside my interests and expertise, I'll either decline the request or write a quick report recommending that the paper not be accepted.)

It's interesting work, it's important for the health of the field, it helps me support other researchers in my field (if I like their paper and give it a positive review), and it helps my own reputation (the journal editors are often bigshots). From this point of view, it's a win-win-win-win.

Finally, paying for peer review doesn't make much sense because the time required is highly variable. I might take between 20 minutes and 30+ hours to review a paper, and I wouldn't necessarily expect the editor to be able to predict how much (even within an order of magnitude) in advance.

However, I see no reason why high-profit publishers should be able to insert themselves as middlemen and engage in rent-seeking behavior. I hope we figure out a way to give them the boot, and then continue approximately as we have been doing.

Re: Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

#19

Post by avs733 »

Add in that the quality of the system is massively massively broken...peer review is about as accurate as the flip of a coin. It does not promote gorund breaking or novel research, it barely (arguably doesn't) even contribute to quality research. I had a colleague recently be told by a journal editor 'we don't publish critiques from junior scholars.' So much for the nature of peer review being entirely driven by the quality of the work.

As one of those academics...I keep getting requests to peer review, I respectfully make clear I don't review for non open source journals anymore. Same with publishing. I'm not tenure-track so am not primarily evaluated based on output.

Publishing is broken, but it is really just part of the broader and even more broken nature of academic research.

Re: Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

#20

Post by impendia »

rsa4046 wrote: post #11
justinpombrio wrote: post #5

For anyone who still doesn't know this: publishers do not pay paper authors, in any field. I am also not aware of a publisher paying peer reviewers. (Lowly soon-to-be-postdoc here; a professor would be able to say more.)

In academia (at least the hard sciences), no faculty are ever paid for publishing in mainstream, peer-reviewed journals. No reviewers are ever paid either, although recently Elsevier has started to publish the names of its "star reviewers", presumably as a token for the large investment in time and expertise required to evaluate papers for publication and improve the field. Even book deals (or editorships) yield no r…

> No reviewers are ever paid either

That's almost true. Elsevier once surprised me with a $100 Amazon gift card, which they said was in recognition for a particularly good job of peer review that year.

I'd laugh at the prospect of Elsevier rewarding me with "recognition" -- certainly something I would not put on my CV -- although I did take their money.

Another time, the American Mathematical Society (which is non-profit, and perfectly ethical) asked me to do a book review, and then gave me $150 in bookstore credit afterwards -- again by surprise.

My understanding is that book authors can make a reasonable amount in royalties (a few thousand, anyway). For journal papers, as you say I've never heard of any author getting a royalty.

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