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 for $35 apiece.

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 who runs the ACM and other organisations? The community does! People from the community serve as leadership and help run things.

Yes the ACM gets some money to run their website, conferences and outreach programs. I don't think that's crazy.

I don't have a huge issue with the ACM or even so much with IEEE. But have you ever submitted to or reviewed for Springer or Elsevier? It's an emasculating and thankless experience, and Springer and Elsevier go get to make huge profits off of everyone's free work. (haha, we just did it for exposure, right???)

I don't mean to imply that peer review is this shitty thing that we "have" to do. I review papers regularly and generally enjoy the process. But I think it's important to point out that no, we are not being paid for it, and actually typically the incentives in our jobs mean that peer review is a "thing we have to stuff in there somewhere", and certainly not a primary task.

> emasculating

that's an unfortunate word.

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.

> 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

The whole reason they charge money is that not everyone who wants to read the papers has access. I work for government cancer lab. We subscribe to a lot of journals. Even so, I see these paywalls come up regularly because we can't subscribe to all journals.

> I can't think of a position I've ever seen where "review X papers" a year is part of the job requirement.

I work in an industry research lab in the bay, and while there isn't a requirement to review X papers a year, it is expected that you keep up with the literature, and actively engaging in peer review is one way to do so. A few of my colleagues are on the paper committee for our major academic conference, and they end up reviewing 40+ papers a year and using a week or so to take part in the committee meetings.

It is unpaid. A lot of reviewing for conferences is actually being done by Ph.D. students. They have to do it, whether they are on a stipend or not. Equally, a lot of reviewing is being done by (in some cases, former) academics whose current occupation does not provide resources (time) for doing peer review.

> They have to do it, whether they are on a stipend or not.

This is like saying that undergraduate students are unpaid for doing their homework.

It's part of their education to learn how to take part in the community by doing things like reviewing papers.

Well sure, but nobody benefits financially or reputationally from an undergraduate student's homework. There's clearly some proportion of having an academic's PhD students do this type of work for them which would stop being educational and start being an abuse. The question is, is too much of this type of work being pawned off on grad students?

> It's part of their education to learn how to take part in the community by doing things like reviewing papers.

And this "part of their education to learn" keeps really cheap labor running science. Even postdocs are considered trainees, because they will always be learning because is part of their "job"

> A lot of reviewing for conferences is actually being done by Ph.D. students. They have to do it, whether they are on a stipend or not.

Most (all?) PhD students in science and engineering are on fellowships, at least in the US. Major research universities will not admit unfunded PhD students.

Oh boy, would I love that to be the case as an unfunded PhD student, working a separate job as visiting faculty.

Engaging in the profession is a part of your job. Doing editorial work for a journal (many of which are for-profit) is arguable. It is certainly accurate to say that reviewers are unpaid by the journal.

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.

> you are not being paid to do a job (research) you are being paid to bring in even more money

And research funding is going towards big hotel, travel expenses, and conference fees.

> Grad students are the laborers

Making the business highly profitable as there is no need to hire a large number of professors where you can offer tuition waivers and cheap stipends to a larger number of people who wants to get another degree

The point is that it's done largely out of a feeling of obligation to the community. There's a chance that if you declined all of it you'd get a reputation for being an asshole, but there would be no other consequence for you. Whoever pays your salary would probably not notice.

I have actually been paid by some journals, but only a token amount, like $30/paper.

I tend to do most of my paper reviewing during the weekend. No one is going to complain if I do it during my normal work hours, but the demands on my time are high enough that it's hard to focus on it. So in some sense, for me, it is unpaid, outside of my paid day job.

Trust me that a minute spent reviewing a paper is one less minute you have toward your actual KPI’s. About the only value of peer review is to give the paper to your students and tell them to find all the mistakes and holes in the paper. This is actually quite a good for the education of grad students as they learn what not to do.