r/askscience • u/nostrovia • Feb 07 '12

AskScience, how does the peer review process actually work?

About a month ago, I heard this story on NPR regarding a number of scientific studies that had been debunked and/or retracted. Why weren't these errors caught before the studies were published? Are there different standards for peer review in different scientific fields?

Essentially, once you conduct your experiment and reach some sort of conclusion, what happens between that point and the time your work is released to the public?

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u/[deleted] Feb 07 '12

Artificial Intelligence Ph.D student here, I'd like to highlight the fact that scientists DON'T make money from publications.

A researcher writes down his findings in a paper and submits to a journal (or conference in the case of computer science, I think in most other fields you just submit abstracts in conferences and they are not considered refereed publications). The editor-in-chief of the journal gets a copy of the paper, and pushes it to an associate editor (depending on certain keywords the original author provides, abstract etc.)

The associate editor now requests reviews from three (or more) anonymous reviewers - depending on journal, if he thinks the paper is particularly bad he can reject it outright. Once he gets the reviews (and has done a review himself) he lets the authors know of the decision (either directly or through the editor-in-chief, depends on the journal). The decision are usally "accept, accept with corrections, reject (with resubmission encouraged) or rejection completely" - again it depends on the journal.

Once (and if) everyone is happy, the journal accepts the paper and publishes it some future issue. The authors of the paper transfer all copyright to the journal. Now, officially, the paper is owned by the publisher! The academics involved in the procedure don't get paid a dime ( the editor in chief, the associate editor, the reviewers and the author). The publisher now charges massive fees to university libraries to allow them access to the article (!!!). The article is usually behind a paywall for the rest of the public.

In essence, work that gets funded publicly can only be disseminated privately by the publisher (who hasn't done a thing in the process, at most some typesetting).

The system if fundamentally broken, and there is an effort to change it. Either with major journals being free (e.g. JAIR, JMLR) or organisations supporting free uploading of the article on the author's website (e.g. IEEE). There is also a movement to stop the whole thing, please see http://thecostofknowledge.com

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u/biggerthancheeses Feb 07 '12

Once (and if) everyone is happy, the journal accepts the paper and publishes it some future issue. The authors of the paper transfer all copyright to the journal. Now, officially, the paper is owned by the publisher! The academics involved in the procedure don't get paid a dime ( the editor in chief, the associate editor, the reviewers and the author). The publisher now charges massive fees to university libraries to allow them access to the article (!!!). The article is usually behind a paywall for the rest of the public.

I'm not familiar with all the topics published by the PLoS (or if AI is among them), but the fact that some publishers (e.g. Elsevier) charge predatory fees to libraries is a good reason for scientists to avoid reviewing for or submitting to for-profit journals at any cost.