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Comment by dudydidudy | Hacker News Reader

That seems more like not speaking English than not being a native English speaker. If you can't be bothered to pay for something until it's published why should the reviewers be obligated to give you the benefit of the doubt?

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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21847340 and marked it off-topic.

It is possible for researchers to have limited institutional budgets and relatively low wages. Of course, final versions should be properly corrected. But please keep in mind that some might not have the best means / fortunes. Science does benefit from the substance of the paper getting reviews before the final version that will be there for the ages.

>> why should the reviewers be obligated to give you the benefit of the doubt?

That is a technical paper with 5 pages of text. Their PI has a few hundred papers published so he probably just does not care. The reviewers usually don't care as well as long as the core contribution is legit.

> why should the reviewers be obligated to give you the benefit of the doubt?

because that's what they are supposed to be doing? and beside, i wonder if those reviews are actually free...

You do not get paid to review papers.

Yes you do. If you’re a professional researcher than reviewing papers is part of your paid job.

No it is not. Research institutions do not explicitly pay people to do peer reviews and it is not generally (ever?) in the job description.

It is essentially an etiquette concern. Peer review is important so generally you should do peer review if you every publish papers.

> it is not generally (ever?) in the job description.

You're wrong! Just one counter-example I could find in seconds - 'participation on program committees, advisory panels, and editorial boards'. And that's not even an academic position - it's industry.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/careers/

In fact I'm literally reviewing a paper myself... right now... while being paid.

None of those activities are actually the act of peer reviewing papers.

It’s well known that getting sufficient peer reviewers is a problem in computer science (and I’d bet most fields) specifically because it’s not actually anyone’s job. Anyone doing peer review is either doing it on their own time or taking the time away from their “real” job. I’m sure there are employers that will say “yes, you should be doing peer reviews as part of your job” but those same employers probably won’t reward you any differently regardless of whether you do peer reviews.

You are also technically getting paid for browsing Hacker News right now. The company employing you probably wouldn’t say it pays you for that.

> None of those activities are actually the act of peer reviewing papers.

Being on a program committee is reviewing papers. That’s what the program committee do.

> you should be doing peer reviews as part of your job

If it’s part of your job, which you agree it is, and it’s literally in the job description that companies post, which we saw that it was, then you’re being paid for it. Baffling that people still say it isn’t.

> those same employers probably won’t reward you any differently regardless of whether you do peer reviews

I’ve got a colleague at another company who gets a bonus for every program committee he’s on. He is literally rewarded more if he reviews papers than if he doesn’t.

I get review requests from journals and it is my personal decision to accept them. My employer (university) does not even know if I review papers or not. I do not have any obligation or get any kind of compensation for doing them. This is normal, and I consider it not being paid for reviewing. Baffling that you find it baffling.

And, although it is true that being in a program committee may involve reviewing, that is not the same thing as peer review for a journal. I find weird that you have so strong opinions about this if you do not understand the difference.

Shrug. Once I was a published grad student I got asked to do a fair bit of peer review and was always told they really needed help because they didn’t have enough peer reviews and that most people avoided it because it was not actually their job (not in reality, regardless of whether it hypothetically counted). Maybe I was misinformed.

Because being cheap has no correlation with being a bad scientist?

If you can't be bothered to communicate clearly then you have expressed a lack of interest in being understood clearly. If you don't want to publish in English then don't publish in journals that require English.

Hark at Mr Gatekeeper here. It’s up to the journals whether they’re content to allow the editing once they’ve finished the reviews

Whatever. There are ways you can signal that you care about what you're doing, and there are ways you can signal that you don't. Blowing off the grammar of the language you're writing in is one of the latter signals.

In a world where there's always more stuff to read than time available to read it, signals of diligence and competence are important if you want to be taken seriously.

There's a difference between bad grammar/spelling and ambiguity; ambiguity is the worse issue. Some journals have fields in their review report where reviewers can say if the text is unambiguous, but no field about grammar or spelling in general.

It is not unusual (at least on some fields) seeing specific questions about grammar. It must be checked and maybe fixed, and in some extreme cases it can even imply rejection independently of content, but in most cases a revision is enough.

Oh, by field I meant it as a field in a record, not an area of study. For example in some reports I had to check a box for unambiguous text but I had no check box for grammar or spelling. That's some ambiguous text from my part! :)

Your text was fine! I understood what you mean. I have seen the specific box about grammar in some journals. But my field is not computer science or physics, so my experience may be quite different from most people here.

I work for a journal which is in this field. Grammatical errors are OK for a manuscript as long as reviewers can understand what you are reasoning. We will copy edit for grammar or style later if accepted. We won't change the significant findings of a manuscript though, so if the paper is unclear and gets rejected by referees, that is how it stands. Referees will usually ask for revision if something is not particularly clear. But if a manuscript came in that was not comprehensible it runs the risk of being summarily rejected.

Can you write fluently on a deeply technical subject in a foreign language?

Are you judging them in their English because you dont have the skills to actually judge them on the merits of scientific work?

Why should all of society lose on scientific progress just to appease your linguistic sensitivities?

The main author has many papers in Physical Review but here it is just arXiv, which journal you are talking about?

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