This process doesn't necessarily need to be funded. In my own field, most journals are published by learned societies. They were founded with endowments large enough to cover the costs of publication (i.e. printing) in perpetuity, but the work of editors and peer review is unpaid. This doesn't strike most of us as a problem.

Even the big publishers do not compensate peer reviewers or sometimes even editors. They don't even provide typesetting or copyediting anymore -- authors are expected to provide camera-ready output. So, a lot of the money being gained by the big publishers does not actually go to fund the whole process of creating those journals.

It sounds like they (major journal publishers) provide practically no value whatsoever. Why even use them then?

For example, in my country, every assessment we have to take (be it for a tenure-track hiring process, for getting tenure, for asking for a grant, etc.) has as the most important criterion "publications in journals indexed by ISI JCR" together with their quartile.

Most of the journals in ISI JCR follow this model where they cost money (be it to publish or to read) and provide very little value... except for being on that list and being necessary to (aspire to) stay in academia and feed your family, of course.

Other countries have better systems in the sense that they may be more open to other venues not in ISI JCR, some may even actually look at the quality of the papers instead of just blindly following rules to score quartiles. But scientists everywhere have the same problem in larger or smaller degree.

A solution that is sometimes proposed is that authors who are no longer struggling for their career (e.g. tenured full professors) take a stand and refuse to publish there. Some movements have been made in that direction, e.g. in mathematics. But in most fields a senior professor will work together with Ph.D. students and postdocs who are in the struggle, so it isn't realistic either.

The truth IMO is that the solution must come top-down, from governments. The EU has made some progress, e.g. mandating open access for EU grant holders, but what happens then is that publishers will let you make your paper open access in exchange for a hefty fee (which again, is paid from taxpayer money). The real solution would be to mandate by law that research paid by taxpayer money is published in non-for-profit venues, period.

Historically, coordination has worked sometimes. In 2003, after prodding by Don Knuth [1], the editorial board of the Elsevier Journal of Algorithms resigned en masse [2] and started a new cheaper journal, ACM Transactions on Algorithms. A few years later the Elsevier journal was shut down.

But I agree, it seems we can't rely on this process, and the solution must involve regulation.

[1] https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf

[2] https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2004/02/09/journal-algorithms-...

I don't know what benefits reviewers receive, but they are gatekeepers to the journal's brand, so conceivably they are able to obtain some benefit to themselves.

As a reviewer, you get to read relevant new research in your field several months before it gets published. This doesn't work in physics and maths, thought, where the whole field has the habit of pre-publishing manuscripts in arXiv, so everyone gets to read everything before it's published.

My impression is that journal selection is doing some work of signaling how awesome scientists think a particular paper is, either actually or aspirationally, and so is capturing some sense of group regard. It seems like just keeping track of views, downloads, and "likes" on arxiv might serve much the same function although would clearly require a lot of work to get right to be credible.

However, to get to your actual question a big reason people use journals is simply the name. As a researcher getting your paper published in Nature is not only big because the prestige but presumably more people read/see nature articles so you have a better chance at high impact.

TL;DR Their value is their reputation and reach.

I have been a peer reviewer over the last 5 years or so for multiple journals and conferences in Computer Science like Elsevier, IEEE etc. Not once have I receive any remuneration for my comments in the article. Most of us do this as voluntary community service.

Would it be possible for you to prioritize review of open-access work? (This is a question, not a criticism!)

EDIT: by most standards that at least don't involve some situation of comfort. If you're comfortable in academia, you're probably enabling some unethical shit, is what I've come to believe. It's up to you to decide if you can live with the degree of it.

It's also a chance to stop major errors being published, and again authors usually appreciate things like that being caught before the paper becomes public.

This is fraught with ethical problems.

Would that still have problems?

I mean if you publish a paper and get four reviews, you then review another four papers at some point - perhaps at an entirely different conference later that year. You just make sure you review at least 4n papers for each n papers you publish.

There's a big difference: arXiv papers are open-access (everyone can download them), but ACM papers are closed-access (you need a subscription to read them). I wish that computer science research were published on arXiv, but we're not there yet...

1) the ACM lets each author link to their papers on the ACM library with free access.

https://www.acm.org/publications/authors/acm-author-izer-ser...

2) in practice you could always find pre-print copies of any CS paper on their author's website already and everyone knew and nobody ever cared

3) the ACM also let you negotiate an agreement so that you retain copyright for the paper so you can publish it yourself - my company does this

1) Essentially no one knows about the author-izer system or understands how it works, especially outside academia. Readers in companies, poorer countries, etc., can't be expected to guess that the way to read an article is to go to the author's webpage and follow author-izer links (assuming they have been set up). What these potential readers will do is: search something on Google (or follow a link from somewhere else), hit the paywalled ACM DL page, give up. This convoluted system of "open-access from one place, closed-access from another" makes no sense.

2) For authors who actually post preprints of their work, yes, you can read it this way. But then you end up with multiple versions of the same work, that are often subtly different: does the author's preprint integrate reviewer feedback? does it fix some bugs that were found after the camera-ready version was submitted? And anyways, preprints posted on authors' websites usually disappear when they change institutions or retire, so it's not a good solution.

3) Yes, you can retain copyright on papers published with ACM, but then you need to give them an exclusive license to publish, so this still limits what you can do with your work (besides some narrowly worded exceptions). There is also a 3rd option of making the work open-access with no exclusive transfer, but this costs at least $700 per article, which is obviously excessive compared to the actual costs of hosting a 12-page PDF.

So I don't think it's fair to compare publishing with ACM and publishing on arXiv, because ACM is not open-access and publishing with them requires you to pay excessive fees or sign agreements restricting how you can publish your work, i.e., the opposite of what's in the interest of science.

The biggest and most critical miss of the whole process is not having the data a paper is based on published along with the paper. If something is irreproducible, is it really scientific? If I don't have your data, can I really reproduce your results?

I can give you data that say anything. The reproduction that counts is where you obtain similar data independently.

If you want to validate that my claims are justified BY MY DATA then you need my data.

If you want to validate that my claims are justified by the universe, you need to get your own data and should avoid being polluted by mine.

Having said that, I competely support publishing data by default. But not for the reason you state.

I think you may be unfamiliar with how the reviewing process works. I get an e-mail asking me to review an article for a journal. If I say yes, I donate between two and ten unpaid hours of my time producing a review. After I am done with my review, I send it to the AE. The associate editor donates additional hours of his/her time reading my review, plus one or two others, along with potentially the entire manuscript, in order make a decision on the paper. This recommendation gets forwarded to the editor, who makes the final call on publication. With few exceptions (the only ones I'm aware of being the biggies like Nature, Science and Cell) every single person involved in this process is uncompensated. In some cases the editor may receive a small honorarium, but it's trifling compared to amount of time it takes to run a large, prestigious journal.

You're absolutely correct that reviewing is a resource intensive process. But you're wrong if you believe that the publishers are shouldering a significant part of the resource burden. This is exactly why people are so pissed off when these same publishers turn around and charge our own campus libraries a five-figure sum to access the same journals that we work basically for free to produce.

A token-curated registry (TCR) is an emerging model of information curation developed by Mike Goldin & Simon de la Rouviere from Consensys. It's an incentive system which decentralises the work of creating and maintaining high-quality repositories of valuable information.

Academic publishing seems like an ideal use-case for this model. There's a frenzy of activity going on in this space at the moment, and hundreds of details to work out - rather than get wrapped up in theorising, we want to release a v1.0 quickly and learn from there.

Please reach out to me via LinkedIn if you want to contribute to the pilot, or can help us raise awareness among the academic community. We're a small but dedicated group, open to partnering with universities, journals, crypto-developers, and other interested parties (especially academics).

Note: we have no plans or desire to make money out of this project. We're a group of well-connected enthusiasts who want to make headway on solving this problem.

Here's Mike Goldin's intro to TCRs, for context: https://medium.com/@ilovebagels/token-curated-registries-1-0...

Is there a good introductory essay/book on how the academic publishing industry is setup, the workflow and the incentive structure for each party involved?

In fact the most common complaint from peer reviewers is about the length of the review period. Because open-access journals have authors as our customers, the market pressure is to provide excellent customer service, and authors prefer publishers who will process their papers quickly. This pressure is passed on to reviewers who must complete reviews much faster than the old norms under Springer.

It’s hard enough to find good papers without the literature being further polluted with substandard work.

The job of a reviewer isn’t a simple yes/no answer. Reviewers often suggest sweeping changes to work to make it publishable. This helps to ensure that the literature is populated with well put together work that is free of bias and glaring mistakes. Otherwise we’d spend every minute helping students to spot the difference and wading through misleading research.

I already spend far too much time doing this. I can't imagine how futile literature research would be without peer review. There are already enough illogical conclusions and poor study designs to wade through.

Before peer review they were not dealing with the volume of scientific content that is submitted nowadays. One could debate whether citations are the only metric necessary, but there needs to be a filter before that even happens, or else we will be flooded with an avalanche of garbage research. It would be trivial for someone with deep enough pockets to order a network of junk papers citing each other and debunking climate change or evolution and make a real mess. As painful as reviewing is, it's a necessary evil for now.

Things might be ignored, but only after a person has already wasted their time looking at it and determining it is crap.

It was harder for cranks to publish back when journals were purely physical and a crank would have to come up with the printing costs himself. Now that anyone can publish for free on the internet, peer review is even more important for establishing what content out there is worth paying attention to and which is not.

Peer review happens anyway, but faster, and in public, without the insanity of revise and resubmit.

Journals are not where the action is in Economics or Computer Science. It works for them. Why not for everybody?

I neglect those because journals in my own field are both free to publish in and, more often than not, open-access. I do understand that not everyone is so fortunate, however.

The otter article, for example, appears to be a well-researched analysis of otter populations in Alaskan waters correlated with human settlement and economic activities. The pumpkin latte article looks into the correlation of light colors and whiteness and advertising in the US, an issue which frequently pops up in marketing gaffes (including one as recently as last week for a beer commercial). The queer organizing article looks at diversity in organizations, analyzed using sociological framework (i.e., "norms") rather than the business management framework. The Sausage Party article is an academic analysis of the movie, which is a surprisingly deep commentary of race, gender, and ethnicity in the U.S.

The above is a completely fraudulent article that was accepted for publication to demonstrate the counter point to your argument. The article is literally gibberish, but got through 'peer-review'. I know the lead author on this one and she did this to make a point about the inconsistency of peer review. The article so clearly fake that its laughable, but that is the point.

I don't want to discuss the merits of individual papers, but I think as a whole they say something worrying about the current state of academic publishing.

So, let me just tell you why I am annoyed and concerned with these and similar papers:

1. Often, they torture language, in that the authors don't seem to write to elucidate and educate, but to obfuscate. (I'm well aware that scientific fields develop their own jargon; that it is useful; that the meaning of a term doesn't necessarily correspond with the ordinary meaning; etc. But even granting all that, it seems to me that a lot of that writing is wilfully opaque and unnecessarily jargon laden.) (Note BTW that you communicated the gist and utility of the articles much better than the authors themselves.)

2. Publishing "pursuant to mandatory thesis requirements" is part of the problem: people get degrees and university positions with research that does not expand the frontiers of human knowledge. Autoethnographic research is particularly galling in that respect (such as a recent paper about the time the author fell of a chair).

3. They delegitimise academia. There used to be a very broad consensus in most societies that education and research is immensely valuable and ought to be supported by government, and that academics should have immense freedom to pursue what they deem important and valuable without any interference and censorship (the essence of tenure). Papers such as these corrode that consensus.

4. Critical theory papers are ineffectual, I'd say, in achieving their laudable goals. I was going to mention MLK and Marx and Keynes ("Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist."), but this is too long as it is.

5. "Publish or perish" and Pay-to-publish open access also rear their ugly head.

I maintain that not only rejected papers, but also some accepted papers are shocking.

So, yes, you would need to assign a reputation to citations. I don’t think that’s a solved problem or even simpler than the problem of assigning reputation to papers.

So in the short run, you still need a prospective measure of scientific value, and acceptance for publication in a selective journal ("impact factor") serves that purpose well.

Note that my supposed idea was to use 'pagerank' to replace reference count as the value of a work. Not to replace peer review.