Yes exactly - was going to add that this is common in econ, finance, and many of the applied sciences. Not all academics are opposed to markets, only in the humanities :)
For those worried about the burden this would impose on grad students: wouldn’t you like to referee fewer half-baked grad student submissions? I know I would.
The Pay-to-Play system won't help grad students (at least those without generous patrons) much and will help junior people much less. In general, these people don't have the reputation to pull enough referee requests to cancel out the triple digit submission fees you're envisioning. So at least if change is partly motivated by making things easier for junior scholars, introducing fees may not do that as well.
I think the idea of payment in (perhaps transferable) submission credit works better, and still has the same basic market structure that I agree would help with the problems in the system. You give people a "free" submission per year or something like that and then charge referee credits for additional submissions. This also avoids all the tax paperwork.
I proposed a similar idea in this post, as well as a discipline-wide database where people can volunteer to referee papers, to cut down on the need for editors to seek out referees and the various inefficiencies that involves.
Maybe there could be a quota per student or something? But idk, sone people are just way more productive, and they’re the ones academia should be selecting for anyway!
There are different ways you might implement it (depending on your department's budget flexibility); requiring faculty advisor approval - certifying "this is worth sending to a journal" - in order to get a department subsidy, might work well.
This is more of a marginal worry, but mightn’t there be some controversial or paradigm challenging ideas that might get held hostage by blinkered academic supervisors? (Even so, I assume that would be a price worth paying to fix the referee crisis)
Yeah, always possible. Not the end of the world if a visionary has to pay a few hundred dollars from their stipend in some cases. (But you may prefer that depts include at least one "freebie" subsidy for each student to use at their own discretion, even if they can't find a faculty member to approve it.)
You need so much faculty buy-in to get enough feedback to revise a paper to the level needed for publication, that I’m not particularly worried about this particular issue. Especially since paradigm-threatening papers are the ones that likely need the most faculty buy in already to get revised into a shape that could possibly be published.
For all of the people who say "this is bad for grad students/independent scholars who can't afford it", what do you think of this idea: a completely free pre-print archive with a section whereby early career or underemployed people post their papers, and after they are downloaded, the archive ask readers to give money toward a paper's submission fee, for example, it can ask "Do you think this paper gave you $1 in value?" If you click yes, you give a dollar toward its submission fee. A person who offers 300 people at least $1 in value would have their submission completely covered. Obviously if you're famous and well-employed, it would be shameful for you to accept this money, so you would opt out of this section of the archive. I also think, if you pocket the money and not submit it to a journal, on account that 300 people already read it and found at least $1 in value for your paper, then that's fine too.
The exorbitant amounts for-profit journals make in exchange for essentially free labor of peer-reviewers is a case of our feelings of obligations being arbitraged. They can be forced to pay for reviewing if people simply withhold their labor unless they're offered the market price for their time. If people don't like the idea of a straightforward cash market to solve this problem because of lower-income researchers, there are credit markets that will solve this problem, and Richard is correct, the incentive is not just the individual but universities and departments.
Insofar as the trade in research-prestige already exists as a market, which it does, it is a highly inefficient one, and already trades in a lot of inequalities. This does not mean of course that a cash market for research and reviewing will not have its own problems. I like completely open publishing for all with crowd-sourced peer review, but that also has its own problem. The people who all preserve the status quo are the ones who benefit from the highly inefficient prestige-based market that is currently in existence.
This is the way. If this becomes a norm, many departments and universities will restructure their budgets to help graduate students and junior faculty members cover these costs.
I'm really not interested in any objections that say this is somehow unfair. Here's another unfair thing: doing a lot of unpaid labor by refereeing low-quality submissions from authors who are not incentivized to do anything differently because the barrier to entry is so low!
I don't actually think that unpaid refereeing is "unfair" (at least for salaried academics, our salary is partly meant to cover general service to the profession). I just think it *doesn't work well*, and I'd rather optimize for functionality than for "fairness".
We definitely need to fix things, but I have some concerns about charging submission fees (especially "hefty" ones) and I don't think your response settles that concern. You suggest that a person can referee a few times and this should balance it out. But if we're talking about an independent or junior researcher, how is this supposed to work? Do they volunteer to review and then can't submit anything until they do so? What if the journal doesn't give them something to review? A student, even a graduate student, may not be an ideal choice for a reviewer even if it would make sense for them to submit papers.
Likewise, journals may be reluctant to have independent scholars serve as reviewers. So charging a hefty fee could serve to further gatekeep academic fields, and may increase publication rates for those who are wealthy or well-connected.
I agree the benefits could outweigh the downsides so it might be worth it. I do wonder though about a couple things:
(a) What kinds of profits are journals making as it is? If those profits are high, why do we need to charge people for submissions? I wonder if there are alternative means of paying people to do reviews that wouldn't put the burden on those submitting papers.
(b) I'm not convinced we need to maintain the present peer review form as it is, but that's a much bigger issue than I think we could address here. Not sure if you've seen Adam Mastroianni's take on peer review but, if anything, I hold an even more pessimistic stance towards current practices.
Could also consider some sort of virtual currency system. Would require a lot of thought for how to design it and might ultimately fail, but there are precedents in other settings.
The Feeding America food bank network uses some sort of virtual currency to allocate food across banks. Alessandra Casella has some cool work on "storable votes". Some schools have related stuff with course allocation (e.g. Wharton).
As an assistant prof at two different state schools and then as an adjunct at a variety of schools, I did a good bit of peer reviewing/refereeing both for journals and for book publishers for about 20 years. It's only been in the last few that I started responding to journal review requests by asking what compensation for my time they had in mind. The answer was always surprise from the editors, and saying that they didn't compensate reviewers, in which case I'd say more or less: "I've done enough of this, and my time is valuable, so without compensation, it's an imprudent use of my time". Responses from editors ranged from rueful understanding to indignation.
I will say that when it comes to reviewing academic book proposals, sample chapters, etc. for publishers, that's always been compensated in my experience. So clearly those publishers include paying reviewers as part of their business model. I'm willing to be most of the big academic journal publishers could do that as well. They'd make less profits, but they'd still be in the black.
The idea of high submission fees that would somehow be passed on to academic departments made me laugh. I've published a good bit in my career, and I've never worked in a place, whether in TT or as an adjunct, that would have contributed a dime to such fees. Even if they might consider doing that for TT people, they'd certainly not do so for adjuncts!
Unsurprisingly, economics journals already do this.
Ha, I had wondered! Sensible folks.
I honestly think a significant amount of our political dysfunctions would dissolve if everyone had to know a little more economics.
Yes exactly - was going to add that this is common in econ, finance, and many of the applied sciences. Not all academics are opposed to markets, only in the humanities :)
Also a quick fix for the organ supply crisis.
Many such cases.
For those worried about the burden this would impose on grad students: wouldn’t you like to referee fewer half-baked grad student submissions? I know I would.
The Pay-to-Play system won't help grad students (at least those without generous patrons) much and will help junior people much less. In general, these people don't have the reputation to pull enough referee requests to cancel out the triple digit submission fees you're envisioning. So at least if change is partly motivated by making things easier for junior scholars, introducing fees may not do that as well.
I think the idea of payment in (perhaps transferable) submission credit works better, and still has the same basic market structure that I agree would help with the problems in the system. You give people a "free" submission per year or something like that and then charge referee credits for additional submissions. This also avoids all the tax paperwork.
I proposed a similar idea in this post, as well as a discipline-wide database where people can volunteer to referee papers, to cut down on the need for editors to seek out referees and the various inefficiencies that involves.
https://dkfrubio.substack.com/p/refereeing-in-philosophy-pt-4
Second this — the proposal makes sense but it would be so peak for grad students. Maybe a big student discount?
I think it would make sense for their academic departments to cover the cost.
Just saw the comment about departments subsidies: wouldn’t that strip most of the incentive for students to only send in their best work?
Maybe there could be a quota per student or something? But idk, sone people are just way more productive, and they’re the ones academia should be selecting for anyway!
There are different ways you might implement it (depending on your department's budget flexibility); requiring faculty advisor approval - certifying "this is worth sending to a journal" - in order to get a department subsidy, might work well.
This is more of a marginal worry, but mightn’t there be some controversial or paradigm challenging ideas that might get held hostage by blinkered academic supervisors? (Even so, I assume that would be a price worth paying to fix the referee crisis)
Yeah, always possible. Not the end of the world if a visionary has to pay a few hundred dollars from their stipend in some cases. (But you may prefer that depts include at least one "freebie" subsidy for each student to use at their own discretion, even if they can't find a faculty member to approve it.)
You need so much faculty buy-in to get enough feedback to revise a paper to the level needed for publication, that I’m not particularly worried about this particular issue. Especially since paradigm-threatening papers are the ones that likely need the most faculty buy in already to get revised into a shape that could possibly be published.
Sounds pretty good to me, honestly, especially if academic departments cover, say, one submission per year per grad student or something.
For all of the people who say "this is bad for grad students/independent scholars who can't afford it", what do you think of this idea: a completely free pre-print archive with a section whereby early career or underemployed people post their papers, and after they are downloaded, the archive ask readers to give money toward a paper's submission fee, for example, it can ask "Do you think this paper gave you $1 in value?" If you click yes, you give a dollar toward its submission fee. A person who offers 300 people at least $1 in value would have their submission completely covered. Obviously if you're famous and well-employed, it would be shameful for you to accept this money, so you would opt out of this section of the archive. I also think, if you pocket the money and not submit it to a journal, on account that 300 people already read it and found at least $1 in value for your paper, then that's fine too.
The exorbitant amounts for-profit journals make in exchange for essentially free labor of peer-reviewers is a case of our feelings of obligations being arbitraged. They can be forced to pay for reviewing if people simply withhold their labor unless they're offered the market price for their time. If people don't like the idea of a straightforward cash market to solve this problem because of lower-income researchers, there are credit markets that will solve this problem, and Richard is correct, the incentive is not just the individual but universities and departments.
Insofar as the trade in research-prestige already exists as a market, which it does, it is a highly inefficient one, and already trades in a lot of inequalities. This does not mean of course that a cash market for research and reviewing will not have its own problems. I like completely open publishing for all with crowd-sourced peer review, but that also has its own problem. The people who all preserve the status quo are the ones who benefit from the highly inefficient prestige-based market that is currently in existence.
Yes! People always forget credit markets are there to help solve these kinds of problems.
Or we could just do away with peer review, per the suggestion of psychologist (and former Rhodes scholar) Adam Mastroianni:
https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review
Yeah, I've explored some more radical ideas in other posts: https://www.goodthoughts.blog/p/philosophys-digital-future
This is the way. If this becomes a norm, many departments and universities will restructure their budgets to help graduate students and junior faculty members cover these costs.
I'm really not interested in any objections that say this is somehow unfair. Here's another unfair thing: doing a lot of unpaid labor by refereeing low-quality submissions from authors who are not incentivized to do anything differently because the barrier to entry is so low!
I don't actually think that unpaid refereeing is "unfair" (at least for salaried academics, our salary is partly meant to cover general service to the profession). I just think it *doesn't work well*, and I'd rather optimize for functionality than for "fairness".
We definitely need to fix things, but I have some concerns about charging submission fees (especially "hefty" ones) and I don't think your response settles that concern. You suggest that a person can referee a few times and this should balance it out. But if we're talking about an independent or junior researcher, how is this supposed to work? Do they volunteer to review and then can't submit anything until they do so? What if the journal doesn't give them something to review? A student, even a graduate student, may not be an ideal choice for a reviewer even if it would make sense for them to submit papers.
Likewise, journals may be reluctant to have independent scholars serve as reviewers. So charging a hefty fee could serve to further gatekeep academic fields, and may increase publication rates for those who are wealthy or well-connected.
For grad students: I think their departments should subsidize them!
Independent scholars may just be stuck paying out of pocket, unless folks want to start a charity or something to subsidize them.
I think the downsides you point to are relatively trivial compared to the benefit of a better-functioning peer review system.
I agree the benefits could outweigh the downsides so it might be worth it. I do wonder though about a couple things:
(a) What kinds of profits are journals making as it is? If those profits are high, why do we need to charge people for submissions? I wonder if there are alternative means of paying people to do reviews that wouldn't put the burden on those submitting papers.
(b) I'm not convinced we need to maintain the present peer review form as it is, but that's a much bigger issue than I think we could address here. Not sure if you've seen Adam Mastroianni's take on peer review but, if anything, I hold an even more pessimistic stance towards current practices.
Could also consider some sort of virtual currency system. Would require a lot of thought for how to design it and might ultimately fail, but there are precedents in other settings.
The Feeding America food bank network uses some sort of virtual currency to allocate food across banks. Alessandra Casella has some cool work on "storable votes". Some schools have related stuff with course allocation (e.g. Wharton).
As an assistant prof at two different state schools and then as an adjunct at a variety of schools, I did a good bit of peer reviewing/refereeing both for journals and for book publishers for about 20 years. It's only been in the last few that I started responding to journal review requests by asking what compensation for my time they had in mind. The answer was always surprise from the editors, and saying that they didn't compensate reviewers, in which case I'd say more or less: "I've done enough of this, and my time is valuable, so without compensation, it's an imprudent use of my time". Responses from editors ranged from rueful understanding to indignation.
I will say that when it comes to reviewing academic book proposals, sample chapters, etc. for publishers, that's always been compensated in my experience. So clearly those publishers include paying reviewers as part of their business model. I'm willing to be most of the big academic journal publishers could do that as well. They'd make less profits, but they'd still be in the black.
The idea of high submission fees that would somehow be passed on to academic departments made me laugh. I've published a good bit in my career, and I've never worked in a place, whether in TT or as an adjunct, that would have contributed a dime to such fees. Even if they might consider doing that for TT people, they'd certainly not do so for adjuncts!