On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 2:12 PM, Mark delirium@hackish.org wrote:
On 9/25/12 12:32 AM, George Herbert wrote:
On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 2:52 PM, Richard Farmbrough richard@farmbrough.co.uk wrote:
On 24/09/2012 03:49, Risker wrote:
the costs of peer review
I have academics complaining to me that they don't get paid for peer review, so I'm not sure what these costs are.
Someone has to edit the magazine, pre-accept papers, and handle the peer reviews.
The actual organization of peer reviews generally isn't paid even at for-profit journals, at least in my field. The editor-in-chief and editorial board are usually responsible for finding and assigning reviewers, and then making a decision based on their reviews, and those aren't paid positions. There are indeed editing/layout costs at some journals, though it varies widely. In computer science, the costs are typically lower to nonexistent, because of an expectation that authors will be able to deliver publication-ready PDFs, using LaTeX and a template provided by the journal.
The two top journals these days in my field (artificial intelligence) both run on fairly low budgets, one a rounding error away from $0, and the other a modest nonprofit:
- http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/ -- donated server space from MIT, and a
completely volunteer editorial process
- http://jair.org/ -- nonprofit organization with a small budget (funded by
donations and grants) pays for server space and a small staff
-Mark
Computer Science seems to have taken the lead there, but my understanding (as an outsider, interested, but not participating much) is that physical and biological sciences, and most other engineering, usually pay a staffer and the editor-in-chief, but usually not reviewers or the editorial board.
I'm sure it's wildly across the map from field to field and publication to publication, though...
The important part of the discussion is to get on the table that there are real production EFFORTS involved in all of these journals; it's not just an email balancing act, a large part of people's work time is dedicated to coordination and reviewing reviews and finding reviewers and the like. Authors are asked to review. Lots of effort is happening.
Whether most of that is "free" - supported by institutions or done by people out of the goodness of their heart (or for prestige) - or paid, it's happening.
If I'm paying $1,000 a year for a journal I darn well expect that they're both paying the coordination and production staff and also exercising not academic interference, but having an organizational review board to make sure the editor and editorial committee aren't running off the rails (as has been known to happen in lesser known journals).