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Comment by dbcooper | Hacker News Reader

Peer review is not supported by publishers. Many editors are unpaid too.

I specifically said journals subscription fees support peer review infrastructure. Yes peer reviewers are unpaid but peer review also would not exist in anything resembling its current form in the absence of journal staff moving papers through the peer review system. Associate/deputy editors are unpaid but the main editor of the journal is often paid and does provide scientific oversight and review, particularly at the margin of acceptance/rejection. The main editor of course is also responsible for recruiting associate editors who in turn are responsible for finding appropriate peer reviewers, so having a good editor who can recruit and maintain quality deputy/associate editors is key. Some journals even have staff scientific reviewers which act as a check on the occasional oversights of unpaid peer review.

The "infrastructure" is terrible software called Editorial Manager. It doesn't have any document annotation or collaboration features. It merely allows documents to be uploaded and downloaded, and is a pain to work with.

The peer review process is almost entirely coordinated by unpaid associate editors. They make initial manuscript assessments, solicit reviewers, and moderate the review and response process.

"journal staff moving papers through the peer review system" may happen at a small number of prestige journals such as Advanced Materials, but for most Q1 journals it is all volunteer work. That is the business model that makes companies like Elsevier billions.

Infrastucture is not the same as software. I was mostly referring to the human infrastructure (although editorialmanager is not free and until someone makes an open source alternative the supscription fees do support that license). And I would argue that the existence of a small number of prestige journals with scientific staff makes the entire system worth it, even if it means we have to deal with the existence of Elsevier and the like.

prestige journals are good for careers, but are they good for science? I don't think I've ever read a CS or math paper in Nature or Science that's blown me away. all the classics are on arxiv.

The value of good editorial staff may very well be less important in some fields. In the biomedical field subject-matter expertise still matters a lot in terms of discerning good research from seemingly good research. Which also means that prestige journals won't make research any more groundbreaking but if functioning properly should enrich for papers that are less likely to be junk science. I'd also argue that generic journals like Nature and Science are so unfocused that their staff probably provides little to no additional expertise and they rely entirely on peer review. Whereas staff at more specialized journals with lower but still very respectable impact factors are probably doing more informed work to select for quality science.

Pretty sure there are already FOSS options for file sharing, document management, revision management, process management, workflow management, and all-of-the-above management.

Also, are publishing monopolies like Elsevier really all that necessary?

There's no need for "prestige journals". I have nothing really against them, but if they shut down today it wouldn't harm scientific progress at all.

platforms in general seem to be a pathological edge case for capitalism. capitalism is healthy when companies have to compete and innovate, rather than sitting on their assets like feudal lords. academic publishers and social media sites are almost pure rent-seeking, up there with patent trolls and private equity firms.

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