The editor has to put in the hours to reject the crap that people submit, and those hours don't come free.

At least in theoretical computer science these tasks are all done by the volunteer conference organizers.

It's possible that this is different than in fields that primarily publish in journals, but it certainly seems like the volunteer approach works just fine.

I have also never seen anything getting improved typesetting or prose. The reviews may reject based on bad writing, or the journal may reject due to latex warnings, but never more than that.

I wonder what journal you work for?

Sometimes conferences pay a publishing company to do the review process for submissions, by the way. I'm not sure that your submissions are actually getting processed for free by conference volunteers.

I'd rather not disclose details of my employer, sorry.

> just happens that the resume byline "conference organizer" is valuable enough in that field.

Being editor of a journal/PC chair is a valuable thing in any field, not just CS.

Well, I'm sure, because I also review for the same conferences and journals that I submit to!

The problem is about the business practices of the big publishers - asking huge amounts of money for access to journals, forcing universities to buy bundles of journals, to get access to interesting articles they also have to subscribe to stuff they don't want, and so on.

Unfortunately, I have to admit that most of the money I pay for scholarly papers goes to Springer/Elsevier shareholders and not the editors who barely edit.

But the principle still remains. Reading through crap papers so you don't have to is hard work that should be paid for. (And editors have to do this before sending stuff out to reviewers, or else the reviewers drop out.)

ANd I would rather pay the editors out of my own pockets than expect the authors to do it, or an ad-supported mechanism, because if you're not the customer, you're the product.

Does that process need to be any different from PRs on github? Can't all that be distributed across a team of researchers working on the topic of the journal, just as PRs on github are distributed across all developers working on the software?

It's not the same as a github PR because wading through a mountain of badly written papers is work researchers do not want to do. That's what a publisher (like Elsevier) does. See example of Elsevier employee Angelica Kerr.[1] It should be easy to see that scientists would think it's a waste of their time to do Angelica Kerr's work.

I didn't get a chance to respond to the reply by allenz that suggested that journal chiefs should hire their own editing and administration staff. Again, that "solution" makes the same mistake of thinking scientists will do something they have no interest in doing. They don't want the hassles of "contracting" an editing team.

The research publishing is not a "software problem" that's solvable by a "software platform solution." You can't solve it by applying social platform mechanics such as github PRs and/or votes of StackOverflow/Reddit. (My parent comment tries to explain this.[2])

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15278621

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15269673

The actual problem, which I think you implicitly identify when talking about Nature and Cell, is the "prestige" factor. As long as researchers are motivated by a prestige level of a journal b/c they may fear being ostracized by their peers or not getting recognition for their research - which has monetary and career costs involved - I think it will be very difficult to convince anyone to switch, regardless of how effective the platform could be.

I haven't thought about that problem before so I'm not sure how to address it as of now.

Here's the first paper off the top of today's submissions to gr-qc: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.11224

Is it right?

How do you know?

To whom should you send it in order to get an expert review?

Which of those people has an ax to grind with one of the authors?

Of the remaining people, who do you think you could convince to invest a day or more to carefully evaluate the paper?

Okay, so you got replies back from two of your carefully selected referees (after two months of badgering one of them):

Referee A thinks the paper is great, insightful, and advances the field, but wants extensive changes.

Referee B thinks the paper is derivative drek and should be rejected because his friend C has already done something similar.

Your journal publishes twenty similar articles a week but receives three hundred a week. The careers of the authors are partially on the line, as is the prestige of the journal, the attention of the readership, and the future submission of articles by prospective authors.

Good luck training a neural net to do this well. I suspect a neural net can be trained to reject the worst crackpots, but little more, without rejecting insightful but unique/important papers.

e.g.: https://www.nature.com/nphys/about/editors https://www.nature.com/nature/about/editors

> In addition to basic copy-editing, she prevents crackpot articles such as "Darwin's Theory of Evolution is proven wrong by Trump" from reaching the journal editors and wasting their time. (She may inadvertently forward some bad articles but she has enough education to reject many of them outright to minimize the effort by the journal's scientists.)

Do I read it right that an Elsevier manager with no degree in the subject rejects research papers without consulting the editors? To me as scientist this is a big red flag and concern about journal's quality. While the example given here looks obvious (and probably contrived), most real examples are less so. And while recognizing those takes little time and effort to a trained eye, this task certainly should not be left to a subject non-specialist. It will not save much time and create more concerns than help.

The PR model would have to answer the question of how reputation is built. A "star" system would likely be inadequate for a number of reasons. But the major obstacle would be in getting researchers on board with the new model.

Early adopters would have to withstand scoffs from their peers who haven't accepted the new model yet.

Even Open Access, which could be regarded as an incremental improvement, has years, if not decades, of grueling work behind it.

The network effect is very strong within the research community, which results in a situation which is very close to "all or nothing."

More importantly: punishment from the people who give them money.

The reason the publishers charge their exorbitant rates is because they have acquired the journals leaving no freedom to switch to alternative providers offering better service at lower cost. Nor do they allow saving costs by not using services that are not needed.

More seriously though, peer review is usually free or almost free, reviewers do not get anything near to the ridiculous amount of the money that "open access" journals demand.

Besides, having articles on github, with all the data, so that any reader can check the results, and comment, would be much more powerful than the type of peer review we have today.

Let's say however that you need incentivization, I suppose one approach would be at a legislative level where you require all researchers publish on a decentralized open access platform where every citizen - they are the one's funding the research after all - can freely and uninhibitedly access the information.

Perhaps not. But people keep telling me in this thread that reviewers work because the journals expect them to or they will get future papers rejected/lose conference access, not for the love of the topic or because they get paid or otherwise any kind of special visibility for it. I wonder whether an approach that promised only publicity for having done reviews or relying on altruism would really produce the quality of reviews necessary.

> I suppose one approach would be at a legislative level where you require all researchers publish on a decentralized open access platform where every citizen - they are the one's funding the research after all - can freely and uninhibitedly access the information.

That's not really incentivizing the _reviewers_, though, right?

But no seriously, this seems like an actual technology / problem fit, although you'd need a decent amount of tooling, product design, etc for it to work - but some of that's already being explored by the "open source + blockchain" endeavors.

In basic form, I imagine you'd basically turn the transaction fees into review fees.

(The product design and tooling comes from how you prevent abuses to that basic format, I think)

> some of that's already being explored by the "open source + blockchain" endeavors.

Any links?

I for one would be also be interested in links.

One thing we don't want to do is reinvent the actual blockchain technology, so we're also interested in finding partnerships in terms of platform technology.

Ideally, we'd also like to set up a foundation to maintain and manage the ecosystem and invite both old and new players to participate. A lot of blockchain efforts seem to be a little too much like a hope for a monopoly wrapped in a thick layer of talk about free markets and democracy.

We're actively looking for collaboration and partnerships around this. If you, or anyone, would like to get involved we'd be happy to discuss. My email is in my profile.

I agree with an above post that the starting point is that you get paid to review, and you pay to get reviewed; although you'd need another way to monetize the token or it's limited to this use case.

The overlap with open-source seem clear: How do you validate the value of the crowd-sourced contributions? In code, you could do it via TDD...

OH! OR - (well, you could make both), you pay to review by _betting for it's validity_. There may be a way to combine or borrow from each approach to fill in the gaps in the other.

I am shamefully bad at encryption stuff. How do I get your email from the string in your profile?

The central overlap is validating the value of contributions.