Cascades in peer-review
Maxine Clarke
Thursday, 01 May 2008 20:58 UTC
Juan Carlos Lopez, Editor of Nature Medicine_, came under some attack for his talk and Spoonful of Medicine blog post identifying open access publishing as one of several publishing models. He’s therefore writing some additional posts on the topic at Spoonful of Medicine, which on the basis of the firstlunch.html, will be well worth reading:
the peer-review process is free, but only in a most superficial way. Reviewers get compensation from evaluating manuscripts for high-profile journals, provided that an initial screening of manuscripts takes place and truly identifies the contributions that will be of interest to the reviewers. The golden rule that there is no such thing as a free lunch also applies to our trade.
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Replies
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Does this mean compensation in the form of the intellectual satisfaction derived from reading a presumably good paper in your field ahead of the pack, or is it more concrete?
It hardly seems fair; there are papers I read that I do think I ought to be be paid to read because they are painful, but these are not from “high-profile” journals.
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I think that, in the context of his piece (at link), Juan-Carlos is saying that people who evaluate the costs of publishing often briefly summarise peer-review as “free” because the journal does not pay its peer-reviewers. Whereas, in fact, for many reasons including the one you rightly state, it isn’t.
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