[thechao]

I was in academia for only a few years. I did a lot of reviewing (one of the chores for graduate students). I don't know what to say, here; there needs to be an economically based gate keeper for publication & review. Otherwise you'll get spammed by hundreds (per graduate student) of crazy-people papers. I was in a niche PL subfield (generic programming in the mid-2000s), and there was this one guy I called "guitar dude" that kept submitting PL papers using "guitar theory". The basis of the theory was an "algorithm" he developed to determine if a number was prime in O(1) (constant!!?) time in the size of the number. He was by far the most determined; he had a "swap" scam he ran to get his papers in. OTOH, submissions to the editor (my PI) numbered in the THOUSANDS, and we only had, like, 35 attendees at GPCE? I can't imagine what Nature or Science have to deal with.

I don't know how submission works for non-Western subsidized countries; but, just wading through the pre-AI submission process was a 50+-hour a week job for one, tiny, niche conference. Making the cost $1000 cuts that down by at least 2 orders of magnitude.

On the flip side ... paying the reviewers just seems like a bad idea? Reviewers need to be skeptical AF. Even the best scientists can throw out turds every now and then.

[lmc]

> paying the reviewers just seems like a bad idea? Reviewers need to be skeptical AF

Sorry, it's not obvious to me - how might payment for reviewers affect their decision making?

[thechao]

Let's be real: graduate students are not paid well. Even a modest payment scheme would be a dramatic boost in their income. What payment schedule would you use for review? By paper? By journal? If it's "by paper" then the students will be motivated to churn through the papers to get paid. I'm not sure what the incentive structure is there, but it doesn't sound right.

I guess the journals could turn around and pay the PI? But, then what? The "reviewers" still aren't being paid; just the PI? The incentive then is for the PI to have as many grad students as possible just reviewing papers. (FREE. MONEY.) If there was ever a dynamic I've been in where one agent doesn't need MORE power, it's the PI-grad-student one.

And, I've not even considered (in depth) the Bad Actors™ in such a situation. I'm just thinking about basic humans humaning along...

[lmc]

Interesting, thanks for the reply. I wasn't aware grad students were so heavily involved in the review process, thought it was more postdocs.

[thechao]

PostDocs review the review. PI's sign off on PD's to make sure they're not idiots. Only big labs have enough PD's to let them do reviews. And, for sure, in CS there's almost no big labs. I was under Bjarne Stroustrup, and the larger umbrella group was probably 40ish staff, in total. That'd be: 3 lead PIs (Bjarne, Nancy, Lawrence); there were a small core of assistant profs (Jaakko, Gabi, etc. — maybe 4 or 5 of them?) There were no PD's: just 25ish grad students, and then a rotating stable of undergrads. We were extremely well funded (JP Morgan, MSFT, the fed).

Our "sister" lab over in computational biology had a few PD's, but was 2x as big, and had easily 5x the funding.

[lmc]

Cool, thanks for the perspective.