this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2025
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Science Memes

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Costs to thee, but none for me! (lemmy.world)
submitted 4 days ago by Maroon to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 days ago (2 children)

It's still free labor since besides reading the review papers, scientists are expected to read the relevant daily papers of their field. Try usually do it in their free time and expending some of it reading non curated papers and then writing a review takes out preious time.

Elsevier doesn't even reward them with free subscriptions to their services, no, they work for free and then have to pay (uni pays for them) to read what they curated.

The only thing Elsevier has for it is the notoriety of their platform.

If arXiv had a way to curate the uploaded papers and voluntary reviews from researchers, Elsevier would be gone.

There's a reason why researchers themselves publish their papers into the "pirate" hub since they aren't allowed to publish it publicly legalyl (but are allowed to privately send you the paper if you contact them by email for example).

[–] [email protected] 15 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

fun fact: the academic publishing business model was invented by robert maxwell. you’ve probably heard the name maxwell before, due to his daughter, ghislaine

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

This article blew my mind when I first read it. The unsustainability of the current academic publishing situation made a lot more sense after learning how we got to this point. Strongly recommended this article to anyone who doesn't know how huge Maxwell's influence was in this area.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago

Robert Maxwell was a known sleeze bag in his own right.

[–] Thwompthwomp 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

For professors it’s somewhat included but in the pay structure and an expected part of service. So you could argue that it’s not necessarily “free” time, but it’s not a great argument. Reviewers should still be paid and not expected to do this for free.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Having someone review things because it's "expected" is a great way to get people rubber stamping stuff.

[–] Thwompthwomp 2 points 4 days ago

Ooh, and add in ever increasing journals and submissions, and you are correct!

(Or pass them along to grad students who take it extremely seriously)

The entire peer review system is somewhat of a mess since publish or perish and citation indexes have been embedded into promotion and tenure as metrics.