You cannot really blame Elsevier here. They are just taking advantage of a dysfunctional academic system. The cost of reviewing a paper properly is high, but academia is not paying that cost by simply not doing a proper review. If the money saved by cutting Elsevier out (in this case £2700 per accepted paper) would actually be added to a pool out of which reviews are financed, I would see the point. But as it is, they will just continue to pretend that reviews are free, and the quality continues to go down the drain. Elsevier itself obviously adds very little to no value, but it is laughable that reviews are supposed to be free. If reviews were priced properly, the £2700 would probably appear to be a minor cost not worth worrying about.
Reviewers don't get paid indeed. It used to be that in exchange for getting published, you'd join a pool of reviewers that got to review new submissions. I reviewed plenty of papers like this. Many of them pretty bad too. It's not a fun job and it's important to do it well because some other sorry person is going to be reviewing your paper at some point. The price of publishing is having to read a lot of poorly written papers.
Editors don't actually get involved with the review process unless there is some conflict. Editors are of course paid positions. Their job is to keep supply and quality up. Generally, they get more hands on later in the process.
The only cost beyond that is indeed some simple, mostly automated, layout work and file hosting. Some of the more prestigious publications have actual professional editors on staff that work with authors to improve style and quality. But most scientific journals don't do any of that. Actually printing the papers is rare these days. It's mostly online at this point.
I've been out of academia for twenty years now, so things have changed a bit probably. But even back then, it was all pdfs and I rarely used printed media (other than laser printed copies of pdfs). Visiting a library or handling actual printed journals or a photocopier just wasn't a thing. Most of that went away in the nineties.
They also manage the review process (screen papers, find reviewers, communicate with authors and reviewers), make sure that papers are accessible long-term (decades to centuries), typeset manuscripts, print paper issues, and several other tasks.
But yes, reviewers are not paid. A half-decent review can easily take 3-4 hours, and a typical paper gets 2-3 reviews, so something like 8-12 hours of PhD-level labor which are not currently compensated.
> They also manage the review process (screen papers, find reviewers, communicate with authors and reviewers),
They do not. That's the editor's job, and Elsevier journal editors are unpaid volunteers -- as the Guardian article correctly pointed out.
> A half-decent review can easily take 3-4 hours, and a typical paper gets 2-3 reviews, so something like 8-12 hours of PhD-level labor which are not currently compensated.
It generally takes much much longer than that.
The average article in Neuroimage is 14 pages long (~ 10000 words), not counting references and declarations. Pure reading, single-domain, technical: the chart says 10k words will take at least 60 minutes. And you'll definitely need to read the article more than once while doing peer review.
Then you'll need to look up references, do some sanity check calculations, evaluate artifacts if available, scrutinize figures, and unless you're up-to-date on all recent developments of the field, probably read at least one more article on prior work just to understand what's going on. If unusual methods were used in the evaluations, you have to understand these too, so better add a few more days.
And you still have to actually write the review: at that point, you only have some notes and scribbles! In neuroscience, we're talking about at least 2-3 days of FTE work. And that's only the first round of reviews. About 80% of articles go through multiple rounds of review-response, according to Neuroimage's own statistics.
In other fields, review times might be significantly longer (weeks, or in mathematics even months, instead of days).
Elsevier profit margins are 40%, according to their own admission. They could afford the costs of compensating this labor. But why would they?
I think it would be interesting to actually evaluate review time. I've seen journal and conference paper reviews go all over the place. Some people blast them out in an hour. Other people dig deep and spend way more time. I don't think I have ever heard of a reviewer sanity checking calculations.
Ultimately, the taxpayer funds the researchers' salaries, and the researchers spend some of their research time on peer review instead of advancing their research.
But these hours dedicated to peer review are not the issue: something scientifically useful gets done. It's the tax dollars that go to Elsevier, in exchange for literally nothing*, that we should worry about.
* sometimes they charge you, the taxpayer, in exchange for access to the research output
Technically, no one; in practice, it gets done by both faculty and grad students/postdocs paid by universities as something that's expected of them to keep getting their wages for their primary work.
The only thing elsevier manages is their website. The review process is managed by academics who also work for free. Typesetting is done by authors. Paper printing is basically extinct.
Typesetting is done by authors (in some fields) and then completely redone by Elsevier staff. The value they add is questionable at best, but they certainly spend a lot of effort making the paper conform to their standards.
...or detract, one might add. I know of a researcher who has been meticulous about editing and wording, only to have the submissions "corrected" for publication to use the wrong word (existing, and meaning something different) for key concepts.
I'm guessing incompetence combined with standard dictionary computer spellchecking at the publisher's end.
Which the author then has to go back and fix because they don't understand what they're typesetting. Some journals provide the LaTeX template too so they don't even do THAT step.
As far as I am aware, they don't necessarily even do the final editing themselves; at least with the APS journals, they outsource the final typesetting to another company.
It's been a few years and I know it depends on the exact journal, but I thought Elsevier had paid editors? My memory is that society journals tend to be unpaid but that Elsevier, Nature, Frontiers, etc. had paid editors.
Not true. Every (decent) journal has someone who goes through the typesetting process again is very time consuming. Whether that plus the review process, website maintenance etc it is worth £2,700 is a separate question.
> But yes, reviewers are not paid. A half-decent review can easily take 3-4 hours, and a typical paper gets 2-3 reviews, so something like 8-12 hours of PhD-level labor which are not currently compensated.
They aren't paid, but that doesn't mean they aren't compensated; those reviewers will later submit papers which will receive reviews, for which they don't have to pay.
When I published with a journal, we had basically direct contact with the reviewers and little interposing. I did all of the typesetting. The journal just executed my latex files. The long term accessibility of papers via journals is largely overblown and it isn't even actual accessibility paid for by the submission - since that is covered by subscription fees.
You'll be surprised how many scientific papers published in reputable journals are not "properly reviewed". In many cases there simply isn't enough time or knowledge to go through every detail of a paper. One example -- if a paper says go to a github repository to look at our source code, guess how many people actually review the code as part of the peer review process? Very few. There could be serious bugs in the code that would affect the results, or maybe the code is difficult to set up and run, but nobody would notice them for a long time.
After reading my previous comments, why would you think that surprises me? I know for a fact that academics of the highest reputation do very poor reviewing. The cost of a low-quality review is basically zero for the reviewer, while the cost of a high-quality review is high. The consequences of this are not surprising.
It's definitely been my experience that reviews are hit-or-miss. Sometimes you get 1-2 reviews where there are valid points that need to be addressed, sometimes you wait 3 months for the reviews to come back, only to find that reviewers 2 and 3 dropped out and reviewer 1 basically said "looks fine".
Part of the challenge of peer review is that it comes _after_ the paper is written, when the cost of changing anything is quite high. I find much more value in peer review when planning experiments, and do so informally with my peers.
You absolutely can blame Elsevier here. A corporation taking advantage of a dysfunctional system to extract profit at the expense of others is bad. "Oh, the system is something that can be exploited so of course corporations should exploit it" is something worth criticizing, IMO.
Peer reviews are usually two reviewers who maybe do two rounds of reviews. Even if people are getting a reasonable fee, £2700 is more than enough to cover it.
i think the reality is that, while peer review can be helpful in various ways to a research community, the filtering function of journals less helpful for academics than it is for outsiders.
(usually people in a field know which preprints are “good” and don’t care much if they’ve been peer reviewed yet.)
so research communities themselves don’t intrinsically want to pay the cost of high quality compensated peer review when most of the value goes to others.
If you’re gonna say you have to pay for reviews, it might be a bad precedent that might establish “professional reviewers” whose main job becomes this. Already reviewing papers is become a stupidly important criteria in green card applications and you see a huge deluge of postdocs emailing editors requesting papers to review (though the top journals will never give a manuscript to a postdoc).
No, what I am saying is that proper reviews are expensive, and that cost should be made explicit. How that should be done, I don't know. Giving prestige to reviews is difficult, given that reviews are anonymous. Personally, I feel reviews should be public and non-anonymous, just like the paper is. If the argument against this is that scientists are so petty that they will hold a negative review against you, well. Even more reason to make everything public, because why would you then trust petty scientists to do proper reviews?
Hah, the power dynamics involved will be brutal with non-anonymous review. You have new phd students reviewing papers submitted by tenured profs with decades of experience and connections and ability to impact their careers. People will be people and so on.
