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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

Were the reviewers paid?

As an academic (unrelated to this journal and field), I’ve more or less stopped accepting to review papers because of the low reward… that is, there are virtually no incentives to me as a professor to do this and it takes a lot of time to do proper reviews. I have better things to do with my time.

I attended an ACM webinar some years ago on the topic of open access, and while the OA fees weren’t as high as this one, I asked how they could defend these fees… the answers weren’t entirely satisfactory to me — in general they claimed obviously admin costs, but also that such funds were used to support other well-meaning things ACM deals with such as scholarships/workshops etc for young and female researchers among other things… Personally, while these are good things for ACM to support, I dislike the somewhat arbitrary connection to OA publishing… PS: I’m not sure if this is still their policy.

I think the ACM should support young and female researchers by making all their papers open access, publicly endorsing Sci-hub, and committing to send Sci-hub some money every month. That would have a much bigger impact than scholarships and workshops.

I mean sure, making papers by underrepresented groups open access to increase their reach is actually a nice idea. Not sure what this has to do with sci-hub though, publishers are not going to fund sci-hub in the same way that the RIAA is not going to fund the pirate bay.

I don't mean they should make papers by underrepresented groups open access. I mean they should make the papers researchers need to read open access so that access to those papers isn't conditional on getting into a rich university, thus reducing the barriers to underrepresented groups and everyone else. By "their papers" I meant "the ACM's papers", not "the papers of young and female researchers".

It's extremely unfortunate that the ACM has been degraded into being a "publisher" rather than a learned society, and I agree that as long as they think of themselves that way, they will continue to obstruct progress and reproduce patterns of social and economic inequality in the way they are currently doing.

Cannot agree more.

ACM members can offer their papers open-access legally and for free, helped by the ACM.

ACM has an authorizer service that allows you as an author, to publish special links on your personal website, that will offer all visitors of your personal web-site free downloads of your papers.

Those who are interested in your paper don't need an account, they just need to click on the special links published on your website and the paper will be free to download in PDF.

A lot of the relevant authors are already dead, and many more of them will be in the next ten years, so this is not good enough. It may reduce ACM's conflict with authors but it doesn't particularly help a researcher who's trying to track down a result someone published in CACM 40 years ago.

Whoa! Best advice I ever received: accept everything. Here’s why:

(1) Editors will not send you garbage, but they will try at first

(2) You, in turn, torture yourself to find a path for the worst papers in your field (see “garbage” above) to make it through to publication—as in you do sooner of the work for the authors—anonymously of course, and you package it nicely in your review letter

(3) Editors still think: wow, that’s incredible—still going to reject this paper but this referee has skills

(4) Letter writing time you say? Good news, there’s a stack of editors that think you walk on water

(5) Tenure earned

(6) QED?

To me it sounds absurd to have to pay reviewers, when you have nothing guaranteed in return. If the publication would give insurance "we pay back 10'000 USD to the buyer of the paper in case we did a mistake because that's our guarantee of quality", then yes, but here, nothing guarantees you the quality / result, only that they tried to do reasonable efforts to somehow review and exfiltrate some of the most obviouses scams.

I'm just thinking that if Nature didn't pay the reviewers (and I agree it is very unlikely that they did) then the quality of the reviewing probably is not a result of money flowing into Nature, whether from the authors or from the readers.

Reviewers are selected not picked out of a hat....

> ... we pay 10000 in case of a mistake ...

Now please apply the same standard to software.

> reasonable effort

for many hours/days/weeks. Otherwise known as "work". Why is it absurd to pay for work?

Never. I've reviewed for over 30 journals from low to high quality and you don't get a dime. And sometimes get the editor hinting you what they want you to say.

I'm thinking that if Nature didn't pay the reviewers then the quality of the reviewing probably is not a result of money flowing into Nature, whether from the authors or from the readers?

You have some incentives to review. In the US they are a factor to get visas and green cards. They are used for getting tenure in some places. It is also a way to get in the "club" because now the editor that revuews grants nows your name...

I didn't mean to say that no incentives exist. I meant to say that those incentives wouldn't get stronger if authors or readers sent more money to Nature.

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