[dibanez]

One of the problems with the current peer review system is the ease with which a reviewer can recommend rejecting a manuscript based on personal conflicts of interest (for example, viewing the work as competitive with their own). Making reviews open, and possibly de-anonymizing them, could alleviate this (allowing the public to review the review itself). Since the review requires the manuscript itself as context, the manuscript then needs to become publicly visible regardless of the reviewers' decisions.

Another problem is the difficulty that editors have in finding reviewers (to work for free essentially). One solution could be to require authors to act as reviewers before they can submit their own work. For example, if a manuscript requires N favorable reviews to be accepted, then for each manuscript an author submits, they must provide N reviews of other manuscripts.

There is still something missing from the above in terms of "reviewing a review". The closest thing I can think of is comment threads where the post is the manuscript... There needs to be a way for low-quality reviews to be reported as such and invalidated. Right now all this is on the shoulders of the editor, who doesn't have time to do more than add up the recommendations of the reviewers.

[chrisseaton]

> to work for free essentially

I don't understand this. If you are an academic, or in industry R&D, then it's part of your job to take part in the community - you are being paid for it.

[jorgemf]

You pay to publish in a journal, you pay to have access to the papers of the journal and you review for the journal for free. Do you see the problem? You review for free but pay to access the content and to publish.

Note: the journal is not related with the people who pay you to do research.

[chrisseaton]

People review my papers for me and don't ask for any extra money for it. So I review their papers for them and don't ask for any extra money for it.

Neither me nor my employer have never had to pay to publish any of my papers, but my employer does pay a few dollars a year for access to a papers repository run by a non-profit who just help the community come together - web hosting isn't free. I imagine it's one of the cheaper of the web services we pay for and a trivial cost of running a business.

I really don't see any problem.

[jorgemf]

Publish in a Congress is like $1000 (fee+trip), journals is less, access to the papers is millions for the universities.

They don't review the papers for you, they review for the Congress or journal, so they can decide which papers are worth to publish because otherwise they don't know.

Web hosting for universities would is nothing. So that is no an excuse to charge you for accessing the papers. Notice that the researches cannot have their papers in their web site because once they publish the papers the publisher has the rights.

Some things are changing but it is still so broken.