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Comment by tux3 | Hacker News Reader

Isn't peer review performed by authors, not by journals?

This comes up every time there's an article about academic publishing. Yes peer reviewers do the reviewing, but it's the long-term infrastructure and coordination that the journal provides.

AirBnB's content is generated by users, but AirBnB itself requires software development, legal, customer support, HR, program managers, quality control, etc. Same with publishers.

Note that this journal now has a publishing fee for authors to cover these costs, rather than a fee for the reader as before. The 2022 fee for each author is $1,705 according to the FAQ. So moving to open access it not about removing the costs (which many people on Hacker News seems to always assume), but changing who pays for it.

Before Airbnb there was Couchsurfing. I think academic publishers are a better argument against the unnecessity of Airbnb than Airbnb is an argument for the necessity of academic publishers.

A few things:

- AirBnB serves a significantly-larger infrastructure than a website hosting up PDFs. Github with Jekyll can do it.

- Software development is really at a minimum for journals. Hosting can be a static blog, and review infrastructure could literally be replaced with e-mailing PDFs / text files back and forth, and often devolves to that anyway.

- The editor of the JFP uses their university and external grant budgets to cover most, if not all, of their operating time and expenses.

- Legal is likely the largest cost (ensuring the journal has sole publication rights, and contracts to that effect), but open access can also simplify this.

- Without customers (e.g., open access), there is no need for customer support. HR and program management is a very small minimum, as well.

- Nobody involved in the actual journal work (editing, reviewing, etc.) is paid.

The cost of $1075 is, frankly, kind of absurd. What does it cost to host a PDF online forever? Volume 31 of the JFP published ~25 research articles, which would be ~$25k. When Github has the infrastructure to entirely eat the hosting cost, what justifies this much money?

So I think your assumption that academic publishing is "a website hosting up PDFs" is the source of confusion for "what justifies this much money." Just like AirBnB isn't just a website hosting JPEGs, while being worth 129 billion dollars. Hosting PDFs can already be done by arXiv or Google Drive or Github as you said.

Customer support is for peer reviewers who can't log into their account, for managing issues dealing with misconduct, for handling issues with payments, for post-publishing corrections and errata, for passing accounts from editors who become non-responsive to other editors, etc. Not just dealing with readers or subscribers.

As someone who has been on both sides of journal peer review, let me assure you that there is no "customer support" framework like what you are describing. The model simply doesn't work that way. The primary editor of the JFP, in particular, plays an active role and individually manages feedback and reviewer corralling. They are not paid for that service. When submitting to the JFP, my feedback was hand-delivered by the editor via email.

Sure, as someone who has also been on both sides, that's not what I was describing at all though. None of the examples I gave are handled by an editor, except maybe "managing issues dealing with misconduct" depending on the situation, but maybe by the publisher's legal team. But the other issues are not handled by an editor in my experience.

AirBnB is useful because it helps people wanting to rent their homes for short periods to people willing to rent them, which otherwise would be harder for both sides; without out, people would have more trouble traveling on a budget or making spare money from their homes. The service they're providing is a marketplace for the two parties to meet and communicate. I don't think this translates that well for journals; academics aren't getting paid by the readers of the articles published in the journals, and readers wouldn't have much trouble finding papers on arbitrary websites due to search engine nowadays. Moreover, renting your home to AirBnB once doesn't mean you're forbidden to let a family friend use it for a week next summer, but many journals forbid authors from sharing their papers for free.

The devils are in the details. This does not still justify current model and the steep price they are paid (by taxpayers, FYI a typical university pay millions of dollar to these institutions). Consider openreview by ICLR[1] as an counter example for your claim. The maintenance, quality control, software development is not as steep as current gatekeepers advertise yet their review quality is much higher (network/transparency effect). Not to mention the profit margin of scientific publication is 3x of the Apple (38% for Elsevier) and it should be because the science workers, works free for these institutions (fighting for credit).

The current business model as a whole is a legacy institution based on earlier monopoly by a charlatan named Maxwell [2]. He basically lured scientist by shiny hotels+extra packages to build the initial reputation and then monopolize the entire industry for decades. It's interesting how the model works by rip off the taxpayers twice (by publishing and access) while still peer-review process is free (from money, not credit).

You can find a good review of this scheme from below YouTube video[3].

[1] https://openreview.net/group?id=ICLR.cc/2022/Conference

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Maxwell

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PriwCi6SzLo

The coordination and most of the infrastructure (except for archival) is actually also performed by us peer reviewers... We set up the conference's websites, we find the committees, the reviewers, we distribute the work, we do the reviews, we organize the meetings, we create the instructions for formatting, editing, publishing, etc.

We require that some institution is there milking us and the institutions so that we can collect stamps to get to the next level, making everybody waste resources and then finding ourselves not being to access our own publications for free! sometimes requiring (for formal applications) extra paper copies at a high cost!

Yes. I have peer reviewed for JFP. I have never been paid for it.

Peer review is performed by other experts in the same field, and the journal has to arrange that for the authors.

as a complete outsider to peer reviewing and academic journals, this sounds like that scene from "office space", the "what is it you'd you do here?", one.

Journals don't "do" anything, but the professors, PIs, postdocs, etc are evaluated for jobs or promotions based on the "quality" of their work approximated by the "quality" of the journals they were able to publish in. A Nature or a Science paper gets you a lot more than an arxiv preprint (in most fields, anyway). My best bet is we need a new way of evaluating scientific work, without relying on proxies like journal impact factors. Not sure what those might be, probably depends on the field.

[Deleted for inaccuracy.]

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