> I have heard very few argue that referee compensation would improve the situation.
Referee compensation alone? No, not at all. I think compensation would help to some degree, but it wouldn't bring an end to these problems.
What I argue is simply the point that managing editors is a very complex matter that is extremely expensive and somehow justifies what publishers are charging for it. It's certainly not as trivial as just sending e-mails (because of the, uh, human factors), but obviously the bulk of it is done by the reviewers -- and they basically do it for free. If this money, or at least part of it, were to go to the reviewers, the claim would at least be credible. As it stands now, it's simply not.
It's as if I were running a paint shop, charged clients a thousand times the sum of the paint (claiming that I do more than just splat paint on cars -- which would be arguably true), but then paid zero wages to all employees except for a few supervisors (not to mention magically reusing every bucket of paint I ever bought, just to keep the analogy correct). Sure, I'd be doing more than just splattering paint on cars -- but a-thousand-times-the-price-of-the-paint-more, when I'd basically have an endless supply of paint that I'm given more or less for free, and only have to pay like 10% of my employees?
Maybe the scientific publishing business isn't profitable enough to allow for proper remuneration (and defining "proper" is also difficult). But, leaving aside the - possibly idealistic - observation that it's probably important enough that maybe it could be worth doing it for no profit at all (or at least for something somewhat more modest that 2 billion dollars!), that's certainly not an argument for keeping it unfair, too. Surely, some payment, even if meager, would at least provide some peace of mind for some of the reviewers, and is arguably better than no payment at all
> Your industry may well be different; perhaps it doesn't have a large research component?
Hm. I guess my claim about industry isn't entirely fair, seeing how the field in which I did academic work (briefly and at a very basic level) is not quite the same as the one I'm active in (tl;dr a niche in microelectronics back then vs. computer engineering now). In any case, indeed, I think neither of these fields have as large a research component as pharmaceutical chemistry (microelectronics as a whole probably does, but what I was doing wasn't as fancy as the name of the field would imply).
> but obviously the bulk of it is done by the reviewers -- and they basically do it for free
Agreed. 6 hours @ $200/hour for my consulting rates gives $1,200. I give that away for free. What remains is the non-bulk. That's still expensive. Who will do the typesetting and proof reading? In physics and math, this is often pushed into the TeX stylesheet. Not so for most other field.
One of the journals I've reviewed for has a box for "does this paper need to be reviewed by a professional statistician?" That costs money.
http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1883 recently outlined the costs for PLOS One, an open access biology journal. It costs about $2,000 for them to publish a paper. By comparison, the for-profit journals make about $6,000 per paper. Hence the 40% profit for Elsevier and others. The physics preprint site arXiv costs about $10 per paper, so there's plenty of room, certainly. (There's an increasing growth in "overlay" journals, which build on top of preprint systems.)
If you start to pay reviewers actual money, then accountants get involved. Any idea of what it would cost to manage all that overhead, for residents in countries across the world?
Referee compensation alone? No, not at all. I think compensation would help to some degree, but it wouldn't bring an end to these problems.
What I argue is simply the point that managing editors is a very complex matter that is extremely expensive and somehow justifies what publishers are charging for it. It's certainly not as trivial as just sending e-mails (because of the, uh, human factors), but obviously the bulk of it is done by the reviewers -- and they basically do it for free. If this money, or at least part of it, were to go to the reviewers, the claim would at least be credible. As it stands now, it's simply not.
It's as if I were running a paint shop, charged clients a thousand times the sum of the paint (claiming that I do more than just splat paint on cars -- which would be arguably true), but then paid zero wages to all employees except for a few supervisors (not to mention magically reusing every bucket of paint I ever bought, just to keep the analogy correct). Sure, I'd be doing more than just splattering paint on cars -- but a-thousand-times-the-price-of-the-paint-more, when I'd basically have an endless supply of paint that I'm given more or less for free, and only have to pay like 10% of my employees?
Maybe the scientific publishing business isn't profitable enough to allow for proper remuneration (and defining "proper" is also difficult). But, leaving aside the - possibly idealistic - observation that it's probably important enough that maybe it could be worth doing it for no profit at all (or at least for something somewhat more modest that 2 billion dollars!), that's certainly not an argument for keeping it unfair, too. Surely, some payment, even if meager, would at least provide some peace of mind for some of the reviewers, and is arguably better than no payment at all
> Your industry may well be different; perhaps it doesn't have a large research component?
Hm. I guess my claim about industry isn't entirely fair, seeing how the field in which I did academic work (briefly and at a very basic level) is not quite the same as the one I'm active in (tl;dr a niche in microelectronics back then vs. computer engineering now). In any case, indeed, I think neither of these fields have as large a research component as pharmaceutical chemistry (microelectronics as a whole probably does, but what I was doing wasn't as fancy as the name of the field would imply).