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Comment by bad_haircut72 | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately I think charging money is a necessary signal that this particular gatekeeper is doing a good job. We should recognise that money is a necessary part of this process, else there is no gate to keep. But we shpuld reverse the economics by having people pay to get their stuff peer reviewed. Imagine if reviewing research papers was something you could get paid to do, the incentive then isnt to rubber stamp things, actually your rating as a reviewer would come down to quality of reviews

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> I think charging money is a necessary signal that this particular gatekeeper is doing a good job.

I’ve never seen the slightest relationship between the charge to read a paper and the quality of review.

Because there isn't such a relation. It's a thing people believe when they don't have actual experience with peer review. If anything, predatory journals and low-quality pubs can charge more, since publication is more guaranteed (and researchers reaching for these pay-to-publish journals are more desperate).

It's a reputation economy. Like review sites. They start off truthful, and then as time goes on incentives shift to bad actors to subvert it. Or they just sell out their reputation.

Yelp, TripAdvisor, wire cutter, hell even Google results themselves.

Once you start poisoning that well, it's difficult if not impossible to claw it back.

I tend to agree, but keep in mind that most likely you just don't even bother reading the shittiest of the shittiest papers just based on title and abstract. And for every good article there are like 10 unindexed shitty ones.

Yeah review takes time and time is money. This needs to be priced in somehow. Bonus side effect: Frauds get discovered and filtered out (in theory).

But who watches the watchers? I guess review fraud will need to be considered as well.

Scientific publishers do not pay for peer review. Reviews are done by researchers as part of their jobs which are paid for by their research grants.

> But we shpuld reverse the economics by having people pay to get their stuff peer reviewed.

Not really. There would be perverse incentives where the publisher benefits from accepting more articles. For good journals that would be a conflict of interests at best where they would optimise the marketing-to-acceptance ratio. I can’t believe I am writing something good about scientific publisher, but at least when the reader pays they are incentivise to publish things that have an audience. Otherwise, they are going to cut corners, and I mean more than they currently do. And it’s not hypothetical, there are already terrible publishers doing this.

The problem is that this becomes a race to the bottom of actual quality and turns into advertising.

Sponsored reviews of products are basically this. If you are paying a reviewer for a stamp of approval and the reviewer sets the bar too high, why would you want to pay that reviewer? On the other end of the reviewer, it's easy to get more money by providing that stamp of approval to more people--not fewer--so they're incentivized to make it fairly easy to achieve.

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