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Comment by YuriNiyazov | Hacker News Reader

Thanks!

I've now read https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/dravling/grice.html and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooperative_principle and am curious how exactly I've claimed that; I am sure you are correct but it's not obvious to me.

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Maxim of relevance: "Be relevant — i.e., one should ensure that all the information they provide is relevant to the current exchange; therefore omitting any irrelevant information."

You talked about the act of peer review as if it were a relevant source of cost, when in practice the work done by the peers is unpaid.

The act of peer review is a relevant source of cost because at least at some publishers, the cost of shepherding a paper through peer review (not the actual peer review, but the process of peer review management - the costs of which I've already broken down elsewhere in the thread, and they are measured in hundreds of dollars of employee time) is borne by the publisher, not by the unpaid editors or the unpaid reviewers.

When you say "paying for peer review", the immediate interpretation would be that the peer reviewers get paid. By not phrasing it as "work related to getting peer review done" you violate the first maxim, effectively cementing that idea, which makes it a bit of a lie.

Now, these maxims aren't laws, just descriptions/theories of how information is interpreted, but they work pretty well.

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