171–180 of 312 posts
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What would be a good alternative to peer-review though? Genuinely interested.
Why not just build a kind of a social network where people would post research papers, "like" interesting and high-quality papers and reference papers relevant to their research, post their comments and for every participant you would be able to see what papers they have published and reviewed? Sounds fairly simple. Why not?
Academic publishing is a favorite recurring topic on HN, and it's one I've occasionally dipped into discussing, although these discussions are typically 99% one-sided and void of nuance or reasoned arguments. It's like discussing politics online. I'm a shareholder and board member of a large privately-held, family-owned academic publishing company. If anyone is interested in trying to understand what makes the indust…
> You have to realize publishers are in the reputation business. That's right, and that's also why the prestigious researchers and universities, those with an already established reputation, have a responsibility: collectively leave the editorial boards of for-profit publishers, set up alternative venues with the help of university libraries. Share the archival, indexing and discovery effort among universities via pe…
As a young tenured academic I have been systematically refusing to do reviews for non-open-access journals. (I'm certainly not senior enough to create a new journal and be taken seriously.) I hoped that this might give some ideas to my peers but it's seen at best as a weird quirk, at worst as a selfish move (because "the community" needs my help to review papers). Usually the answer is some variation of "yeah the system is not perfect".
The only argument I have seen which motivates researchers to care about open access is when it's mandated by funding agencies (e.g., in Europe, the ERC). Researchers really want to get these grants, so when these agencies talk about open access, they listen very carefully. It both makes me somewhat optimistic and quite cynical that the only way to move towards open-access seems to be via funding agencies (as opposed to researchers caring about the problem). Plus, for many agencies, "open access" here means "gold open access", i.e., continuing to work with the usual publishers, who make the articles available online, but move the "costs" (and huge margin) to the authors, with "article processing charges" of $1000-$2000.
How about this: after 1 year peer reviewed publications get released under a BSD license? Because this research needs to be available to all and this would give publishing shops enough time to sell to universities and people who want it now.
Academic publishing is a favorite recurring topic on HN, and it's one I've occasionally dipped into discussing, although these discussions are typically 99% one-sided and void of nuance or reasoned arguments. It's like discussing politics online. I'm a shareholder and board member of a large privately-held, family-owned academic publishing company. If anyone is interested in trying to understand what makes the indust…
Sorry if my reply seems trite, but the same sorts of things could be said about the cab, bookstore, and music industries. They were entrenched and difficult to take down, but most are better for it.
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There's a difference with scientific publishing for most disciplines. I work for a non-profit scientific publisher. Much of the research today that is coming out is extremely specialized. Thus there aren't many people in the world that have the expertise to referee a paper. So the review is anonymous in order to get a more frank and honest review (we hope). I am also a developer. There are far more people that can gi…
Anonymous doesn’t have to mean secret, although it isn’t always trivial to achieve.
- Many research fields have anywhere between 3 and 10 groups working in them.
- A review always transpires the background of the reviewer. You just cannot "mask" the shape of your knowledge around a highly-specialized subject. This includes your approach to the problem, the issues you are most interested in (and hence know more about), the references you give, etc.
With a closed system, you only get to see:
- Reviews of your own paper, without knowing who wrote them.
- Reviews of the papers you review (there are usually 3-4 reviewers per paper, and you get to see the other reviewer's reviews and who they are).
With these pieces of information, academia is already full of grudges and strong-arming around. Here's an anecdote:
I was once in a conference, and met a colleague that made the effort to approach me and comment that he was great friends with my advisor (who didn't attend), and just wouldn't stop praising him. After a while, he switched to ranting about the review process, and how a specific reviewer was a moron that wouldn't understand anything and so on. Of course, that reviewer was my advisor and I did know but he obviously didn't.
Given the high egos involved in academia, I am pretty sure that if there was a track record of all reviews, researchers would figure out who reviewed their papers. The backlash would then be ugly, and the entire ecosystem would end up more corrupt that it already is (imho).
I've been on all sides of the fence, and I just don't see a better solution than just having secret reviews. Nice words don't matter (much, to most people) when the e-mail starts reading "We are sorry to inform you...".
Academic publishing is a favorite recurring topic on HN, and it's one I've occasionally dipped into discussing, although these discussions are typically 99% one-sided and void of nuance or reasoned arguments. It's like discussing politics online. I'm a shareholder and board member of a large privately-held, family-owned academic publishing company. If anyone is interested in trying to understand what makes the indust…
Academics, I have a proposal/question and was curious if such a system would work for you. Here it goes: Take a P2P program similar to Kazaa or BitTorrent to share paper pdfs and datasets. Next to these files also share indexes, derived data for searching. Next to that, also share user generated review comments and endorsements to implement peer review and quality filtering. Finally, digitally sign all these data to…
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> 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-pr…
What's your hourly rate? How many hours did you spend reviewing? Divide that $100 by the hours and see if it was worth it.
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…
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.)