[taneq]

Now imagine your state funded public highways were vetted by some private company, let's call them "Elsewhere, Inc", who wrote a 3-line review of each highway and then charged taxpaying members of the public $30-$50 per journey to use those highways. And then Elsewhere, Inc managed to convince most civil engineering companies to gauge employees' performance solely by whether or not Elsewhere, Inc has reviewed the roads they built.

[jhbadger]

Actually, imagine that rather than writing the reviews themselves, Elsewhere simply asked other road builders to evaluate the roads of their peers for free. That's the situation in publishing -- the publishers don't even do the peer review -- they get content for free from authors, get peer review for free from reviewers, and then charge readers to access the final papers!

[taneq]

You know it's bad when I'm being snarky and I still don't push it as far as they do with a straight face.