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Comment by hos234 | Hacker News Reader

Amazon pulls in thousands of unpaid reviews for any product. Now what do you do? Give all of them the product free?

Lets say 3 in 100 reviews are good. And you want those 3 to come back and review the next product. You are even willing to pay them something. Is there a guarantee that they have interest and will show up, and if they do, is there a guarantee that they produce a useful review of the same standard the second time around?

Thats just one simplified reason about the dynamics of this process, that is going to block everyone from getting things for free.

Its easy to react, to push to dismantle it and you just end up with YouTube style mega mass of comments under every vid where the best comments are guaranteed to get buried unless they pander to the will of the herd.

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This is a really weak comparison. Peer-reviews are used as a gating mechanism for papers unlike products on Amazon. Reviewers on Amazon don't have a say on what gets on the list and what gets off.

Additionally, published papers are often cited by other papers and peer-reviews are necessary to prevent a false premise from being propagated through citations unlike products on Amazon.

An Amazon review is not comparable to a review in a scientific journal. In a scientific journal a review is done by experts of the field and they invest a couple of hours / days. Scientists do this because it is part of their job. It is a contribution to the scientific community.

The academic reviews I write take me about one to three days of work. I have to work through a usually densely written paper, maybe read up on some background that I'm not entirely familiar with, develop a good understanding of the content, judge it, find places where the authors might try to hide some downsides of their work (it happens!) etc. Only then can I sit down and write an honest review.

This isn't the best comparison, since journals publish the reviewed articles, not the reviews themselves.

It's more like whether Amazon should pay the people who decide what should be in the Amazon Basics line, which I suspect they do.

Whether they publish the review or not misses the point completely of how they attract qualified reviewers. If you are capable of consistently attracting qualified reviewers and filtering out the masses and doing it for free by all means do it.

But anyone who has tried knows its very hard to do for free. Just ask the mods of HN whether they want to work for free and the costs to them to maintain a standard.

Currency here isn't money though, but reputation (for the researcher and their institutions) and advance of science.

One can imagine a world where high-quality reviewing entities exist and attract top researchers without being profit-driven publishers.

I considered mentioning this, but the way it works is editors ask specific scientists to review articles for them (for free). The editor sends the article (the "product") for them to review, in advance of possible publication.

Sometimes people agree to review articles because they get to see research before everyone else.

Reviewing an amazon article costs 5 minutes. Reviewing a paper costs a day.

Journals extort hundreds of man hours per conference from reviewers. The largest cost of all, research and writing the paper, isn't reimbursed in the slightest and largely covered by tax payers, who then still won't be able to access the results because of paywalls.

The entire business plan of journals is to take research and peer review for free, and then sell it. Back when distribution was costly that may have made sense, but nowadays with the internet the cost of distribution is a fraction of what it used to be.

Cost of distribution maybe free but attracting qualified and useful reviews is definitely not.

People who think open access is the solution to that are dealing with a focusing illusion - https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11984

Attracting good reviews is the editor's job which is often unpaid too

You seem to repeatedly ignore people claiming that they are doing peer-reviews for free. I guess free facts are not qualified and useful facts ;)

The reviews are by and large free. I've known multiple phd candidates to be given papers by their advisor and they do the initial review for their advisor. Often these are additional reviews asked for by the advisor. That is to say, the advisor is usually not trying to avoid doing work, but they want their students to gain experience reviewing papers. Neither the advisor is paid for their individual reviews or supervised reviews, or is the student compensated in any way.

Amazon reviews are not remotely a good comparison. There is huge incentive in terms of experience gain, getting a bit of a sneak peek at research, and reputation gain(lets be real, its not that uncommon for people to be fairly confident they know who an anonymous reviewer etc is).

I'm not trying to make any point other than to add further disagreement to the idea that these reviews are not currently obtained essentially for free.

And anybody can make an amazon review. Very few people have the skills required to peer review a scientific paper.

do companies also give their products for free to amazon to sell?

Reviews are voluntary.

Peer review is not (if you want to keep your career, that is).

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