One of the big publishers asked me to write a chapter of a bioengineering textbook. Compensation? Digital access to the book for 12 months.
Not even a hardcopy!
If you're employed as a researcher, then it's (implicitly) a paid part of your job to review papers. We all contribute to the community so that we give and taken equally.
Someone who is taking peer-review but not giving any is being very selfish.
You mean like the publisher that makes you work for free and then comes back selling your work to you for a ton of money?
They don't make you do anything. I don't even understand under what mechanism you think publishers are making people do things?
And you aren't working for the publisher - you're working for the community, paid by your employer.
> selling your work to you
They don't sell my reviews or my papers to me.
Read Nature's original mission statement, does this sound like the publisher we know today?
> It is intended, FIRST, to place before the general public the grand results of Scientific Work and Scientific Discovery; and to urge the claims of Science to a more general recognition in Education and in Daily Life; and, SECONDLY, to aid Scientific men themselves, by giving early information of all advances made in any branch of Natural knowledge throughout the world, and by affording them an opportunity of discussing the various Scientific questions which arise from time to time.
https://media.nature.com/full/nature-cms/uploads/ckeditor/at...
If so, I’d say the publisher definitely is exploiting academics for free review.
Nowhere in my job prescription nor when I submit to the journal it is stated that I am expected to review, and I do not view it as my moral obligation to review. If there is a shortage of reviewers, I am sure journals will start paying them (as they should).
You don’t pay them to do this… because they don’t do it! The community does it via peer-review.
It's not. Instead, it's unbounded in terms of time and effort, and hence allows unbounded amounts of pressure to be applied.
There's a "bullied child" mentality in academia: I went through it, now you have to go through it too.
It's ridiculous and unsustainable.
I’ve decided right now to never do free review for a journal that isn’t also free.
Contribute back at least as much reviewing as you consume. For example if you submit one paper and get five reviews, contribute back at least five reviews.
Or do you think you should get reviews without contributing anything back?
At the most basic level, a junior author will not be invited to be a peer-reviewer until they have published several papers. A proportion of academics leave academia before they are invited to review other papers. This means there process has "debt" built in. It's the academic version of "original sin".
Regardless, it's still nonsense even if the original sin is repaid. There is no meaningful way in which the pressure to give free labour is bounded. You insinuate that it's balanced: the amount you withdraw should be equal to the amount you deposit. There are absolutely no forces that promote this or enable it; instead, all forces protect the incumbent power structures.
You pose a false dichotomy, using the frankly hackneyed "or did you think...?" followed by some baseless suggestion of my expectations. This final question not only doesn't follow from my previous comment, it's so far off track that it "isn't even wrong".
But this is all splitting hairs. The process is bankrupt. I stand by my previous points.
You know how we know your claim isn't true? If an employed researcher says "no" to a review request, there are no negative job consequences.
I've not heard of employers keeping track of how many papers each employee has reviewed, much less using that information in promotion or bonus schemes.
While I have heard of employers using the employee's number of published papers that way.
Let's say I take 15 hours to review a paper, making detailed notes, and over multiple revisions. Which I've done.
Let's say my co-worker reviews 10 papers taking one hour total, each with "looks good to me."
How does my employer determined which is appropriate "community service"?
You know how much @$%@*$% crap I get in my email asking to be a reviewer for junk journals from fields completely outside of mine? And that's in addition to requests mostly in my field for topics I am not qualified to peer review.
How does my employer know I'm not inflating my "community service" through worthless volunteering?
Research is a small community. Within your field most people know each other and know who's contributing reviews and who isn't. If someone's being a jerk in the community everyone knows about it.
I've been in my field for 20 years. I only know a handful of people who are contributing reviews.
(Some have have told me told me directly, regarding a specific paper they reviewed. Some refuse to be anonymous in their reviews.)
It's not just "being a jerk". There's a whole range of network effects which also confound the issue.
Suppose I am the world experts on $SPECIALIZED_TOPIC, but it isn't a hot topic, and only three people in the world publish in the area. I'm a reviewer on all ten papers published on $TOPIC in a year.
Suppose my co-worker works in $DEEP_AI_TOPIC, with thousands of papers published per month, and reviews 100 papers in a year.
How does my employer weigh information about our respective peer review contributions?
Or, suppose my co-worker and I are equally competent, but my co-worker was in grad school with the editor, so the editor is more likely to send papers to my co-worker.
Also, the industry researchers I know tell me their respective employers have increasingly de-emphasized community service, including in conference organization, where there's no issue of anonymity.
Why do think anyone does it then?
- friendship with the editors, who have asked them to do the review
- belief that providing peer review for a journal helps weigh the scales in their favor when publishing in the journal
- or even be a path to becoming an editor for the journal
- a way to keep up with the field
- they love to criticize and nitpick, and peer-review comments are more likely to get a reaction than HN
- desire to be a gatekeeper
Those are the ones I've come up with on the top of my head. I'm sure there are others.
While dbcooper's comment mentions "No one cares", I believe that's specifically that employers don't care.
I believe that because dbcooper's comment was in response to your previous comment 'When you apply for a promotion and they ask ...' and your earlier 'If you're employed as a researcher...'.
No one disagrees with the anodyne statement that "people care". I know people who are not employed (eg, retired) and do peer review even though there is no possible career advancement involved.