ML researcher replies to request to review paper for closed journal • Hacker News Board

Re: ML researcher replies to request to review paper for closed journal

#21

Post by afrozenator » Sat, Jan 19, 2013, 5:30 AM UTC

javert wrote: post #20

akeck wrote: post #10

Professors and researchers should start charging for time spent helping the closed journals at the very least. If you think your reviews are valuable, charge accordingly. You provide value to the publishing process and should capture that value. You are providing the service of "expertise". If you provided that service to a lawyer, you would earn several hundred dollars an hour. There's probably a business opportunit…

Professors are the producers and consumers of these journals. So, a group of your peers invests time reviewing your work and giving you helpful feedback, and you pay them back by reviewing other people's work. Basically, it's a zero sum game. So if everybody paid for the reviews they did and then got paid for doing reviews, a lot of money would change hands and everybody would end up with the same amount of money the…

I beg to differ a little, Professors should be paid to do reviews, and not pay to have reviews done.

The companies that publish the journals don't take a cut, they take the lion's share basically, paying a professor to review would work better in having them take a share of the pie.

Re: ML researcher replies to request to review paper for closed journal

#22

Post by mturmon » Sat, Jan 19, 2013, 6:41 AM UTC

pitchups wrote: post #16

This is a great first step. But for this to really make a difference to the current traditional publishers - every researcher would need to follow this example. The other problem is access to all the previously published papers. So my question is : Who owns the copyright to a paper published in a major academic journal? Is it the original authors / researchers? One would think so since they are the authors. Or do the…

Typically the publisher retains copyright, they make the author(s) sign it away as a condition of publication. There are some exceptions.

By inserting themselves into the somewhat "broken" system of scientific publishing, the large publishers have been making a killing. (It's broken from an economic point of view because too much work is done for free.)

Re: ML researcher replies to request to review paper for closed journal

#23

Post by jrogers65 » Sat, Jan 19, 2013, 9:29 AM UTC

michael_nielsen wrote: post #7

The earliest really large-scale instance of this occurred in 2001, when more than 30,000 researchers signed a letter boycotting any journal which didn't make articles open access within 6 months of publication. The boycott meant not reviewing for, editing for, or publishing in, any such journal. Signatories included many of the best-known scientists in the world. One of the authors of the boycott was Nobel Laureate H…

I feel that it's important enough to reiterate that PLOS is a non-profit organisation and relies on donations to keep it going:

http://www.plos.org/support-us/individual-membership/#make-a...

Re: ML researcher replies to request to review paper for closed journal

#24

Post by Radim » Sat, Jan 19, 2013, 10:01 AM UTC

jrogers65 wrote: post #23

michael_nielsen wrote: post #7

The earliest really large-scale instance of this occurred in 2001, when more than 30,000 researchers signed a letter boycotting any journal which didn't make articles open access within 6 months of publication. The boycott meant not reviewing for, editing for, or publishing in, any such journal. Signatories included many of the best-known scientists in the world. One of the authors of the boycott was Nobel Laureate H…

I feel that it's important enough to reiterate that PLOS is a non-profit organisation and relies on donations to keep it going: http://www.plos.org/support-us/individual-membership/#make-a...

Huh? They actually charge a hefty fee for publishing: http://www.plos.org/publish/pricing-policy/publication-fees/

The donations and open-access merchandise are a nice extra.

They are turning fabulous profits (almost $3 million in 2010; $4 million in 2011 -- these are net profits), but, being a non-profit, must invest them back in the organization.

Re: ML researcher replies to request to review paper for closed journal

#25

Post by ElliotH » Sat, Jan 19, 2013, 2:00 PM UTC

I did a course this semester at university about bioinformatics. I was very impressed by their attitude to knowledge sharing. Almost every paper referenced by our professor and any citations in those papers that I used were published online for no charge. But even better than that, the data and code used to generate their results was shared too. Our professor noted that in the bioinformatics field a paper is considered pretty much worthless if the data isn't made easily available in one of a few archives.

I really hope the rest of acadaemia can follow through. It seems to be we might make more progress in all of the sciences if results are easily replicable and research is published to all.

Re: ML researcher replies to request to review paper for closed journal

#26

Post by javert » Wed, Jan 23, 2013, 10:17 PM UTC

afrozenator wrote: post #21

javert wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Professors are the producers and consumers of these journals. So, a group of your peers invests time reviewing your work and giving you helpful feedback, and you pay them back by reviewing other people's work. Basically, it's a zero sum game. So if everybody paid for the reviews they did and then got paid for doing reviews, a lot of money would change hands and everybody would end up with the same amount of money the…

I beg to differ a little, Professors should be paid to do reviews, and not pay to have reviews done. The companies that publish the journals don't take a cut, they take the lion's share basically, paying a professor to review would work better in having them take a share of the pie.

But if you pay professors, you either pay them enough to make it worth their time, or you pay them less than that.

In the former case, you are incentivizing people to do reviews who are not actually qualified to do them. Or, incentivizing people to do more reviews than they have time to do a good job on.

In the latter case, there's not really any point.