Bbut we all know what is even more important than peer-reviewers, right?
That antiquated, dysfunctional time-devouring mess the journals use for a journal management system. If there is one thing peer-reviewers should indeed be paid for, it's damages for the pain and suffering caused by the gross negligence of the corporations that have not implemented a modern system that does the job efficiently. 100% of profits ought to go towards these damages
It's on us to stop using them. At some point, we should start considering it a liability to publish on a legacy publisher: as in, the author is found lacking in collegiality. In its present form, it ought to be a negative [1]. To date, it still isn't.
It really is up to funder's grant panels and department's search and promotion committees. And the members of these panels are us.
[1] The only possible future for legacy publishers is to go back to the past, when a lengthy, detailed paper was published in e.g., the Journal of Neurophysiology, and a brief summary was sent to e.g., Nature for broad distribution beyond the immediate field of research.
I like the idea of a penalty for authors of journal articles 😆
But I see several issues with that general concept.
First and foremost, it helps propagate the myth that the onus and responsibility were on individuals, when it's the institutions that are keeping the system alive and flush with funds.
The broader point is that we are the institution. The institution doesn't exist without the people that are part of it, that run it, that can change it if they so choose.
@albertcardona@brembs@academicchatter This has been my point for a long time. The problem with that are perverse incentives. Everybody wants the eat their cake and have it, too. So there is a lot of open washing, but little systemic change in institutions because of it.
Indeed!
Which is why the target for us tenured faculty ust be to stop the money flowing, that keeps the legacy system alive. That is why I have joined our library committee a few years ago.
But even when we unanimously recommended to not sign with Elsevier, the president did aign anyway and falsely claimed he had giotten a recommendation!
That's about 250k in paxpayer money down the drain: nobody wanted it, nobody needed it.
Neoliberal and/or market-based individuals may argue that once nobody reads or publishes in journals any more, institutions will stop paying. I'd argue this is a false hope:
With the big deals, for each institutions there are literally thousands of journals no member of that institutions ever publishes in or reads and yet they pay.
@brembs@albertcardona@academicchatter Did I mention that I once got a runner up price by Elsevier, for trying to improve the peer-review infrastructure.
What did we get, Publons, i.e. more baseless metrics. 🤷♂️
@brembs@albertcardona@academicchatter Some of this was actually covered by Hypothes.is. Which is actually open source, but nobody bothers. I think only the AGU journals use this for peer-review comments.
For reference, this has been possible for a good 10 years (as I didn't -invent- things for my submission, I only pointed out the obvious).
@brembs@albertcardona@academicchatter Thanks. But to be fair, I'm not going to claim the idea as such either. At the time the infrastructure was there to do this consistently, even when still dealing with PDFs on the backend (flawed as that "standard" might be). I was merely trying to point this out, in a idle hope of adoption (we're now a decade later, and I've given up #enshitification is the norm I fear).
To turn to the less fraught observation about the sheer awfulness of submission platforms, holy schmoly, what a hot mess! And now made double fun with two factor authentication that can’t penetrate my university firewall
@academicchatter Ooooh, I was wrong, it isn't a good faith move by the philanthropist after all (I should have known better). It is a move to capture market share in the pre-print business, pushing some #AI nonsense.
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