ML researcher replies to request to review paper for closed journal

This is a very forthright reply by the researcher asked to review the paper. Right now, reviewing submissions to scientific journals is anonymous, and not well rewarded. Jelte Wicherts, writing in Frontiers of Computational Neuroscience, (an open-access journal) suggests new procedures

Jelte M. Wicherts, Rogier A. Kievit, Marjan Bakker and Denny Borsboom. Letting the daylight in: reviewing the reviewers and other ways to maximize transparency in science. Front. Comput. Neurosci., 03 April 2012 doi: 10.3389/fncom.2012.00020

http://www.frontiersin.org/Computational_Neuroscience/10.338...

for making the peer-review process in scientific publishing more rewarding and more reliable too. Wicherts does a lot of research on this issue to try to reduce the number of dubious publications in his main discipline, the psychology of human intelligence.

"With the emergence of online publishing, opportunities to maximize transparency of scientific research have grown considerably. However, these possibilities are still only marginally used. We argue for the implementation of (1) peer-reviewed peer review, (2) transparent editorial hierarchies, and (3) online data publication. First, peer-reviewed peer review entails a community-wide review system in which reviews are published online and rated by peers. This ensures accountability of reviewers, thereby increasing academic quality of reviews. Second, reviewers who write many highly regarded reviews may move to higher editorial positions. Third, online publication of data ensures the possibility of independent verification of inferential claims in published papers. This counters statistical errors and overly positive reporting of statistical results. We illustrate the benefits of these strategies by discussing an example in which the classical publication system has gone awry, namely controversial IQ research. We argue that this case would have likely been avoided using more transparent publication practices. We argue that the proposed system leads to better reviews, meritocratic editorial hierarchies, and a higher degree of replicability of statistical analyses."

I heard about him from his Google tech talk on learning visual models. Interesting guy.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3boKlkPBckA

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 they grant exclusive rights to the journals. If the authors own the copyrights, what is to stop them from uploading their papers to one of these Open access sites?

Weird. Terry Tao posting a note on his Google+ feed saying "this is a good paper", with few relevant +1s, should be more of a resume booster than any journal publication.

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 they had to start with.

Of course, the companies that _publish_ the journals take a cut. But that's what it is, a cut. There are really communities of professors participating in a zero sum game.