What follows is an extended comment on the proposal of pre-print peer review by Sabine Hossenfelder.
She suggests, inter alia, that the authors pay a submission fee for each paper and the referees get awards for their reports. But is the fees-related part of the proposal necessary at all? Perhaps the universities could donate some funds (as they already do for the arXiv) to get the thing going, and major professional societies (APS, AMS, etc.) could chime in too (and the authors can donate on a purely voluntary basis). To replace the awards for refereeing and the author fees one could use some kind of “points” (pretty much like the reputation points on the stackexchange sites): submission of the first paper is free, and the next ones are “paid” by the points obtained from refereeing. There could be some points gained for any report and extra points if the author(s) like the report (and express this by marking it as “favorite”).
UPDATE: another interesting and very detailed proposal on an alternative peer review model is Open Peer Review by a Selected-Papers Network by Chris Lee.
Hi Researcher,
The fees-related part is not strictly speaking necessary if the funds come from elsewhere. However, one of the central ingredients of PPPR is that anybody can submit a paper. And for this you’d want to prevent that people submit anything mindlessly, which is why a fee seems useful. As I mentioned in my longer writeup, one could have flatrates for institutions, so that if you submit from within a signed-up network, the fee is automatically covered by institutional funds.
Thanks for the feedback,
B.
Thanks for your comment. The institutional funding (be it your way or my way) seems much more reasonable than making the individuals to pay. Another possibility that has occurred to me is (again in analogy to the stackexchange sites) to allow people to submit not only reviews but also comments on papers, and again if the authors like the comment, they make it “favorite”, the comment’s author gets some reputation points which then can be used to “pay” for the publication. Or one could just keep (perhaps with some variations) the arXiv endorsement system.