Full episode transcript (beware of typos!) below:
Nick Jikomes
Professor Michael Eisen, and how are you? Good, how are you? Good. Where are you calling in from? And can you tell people who you are and what you do?
Michael Eisen 2:31
I am calling from Berkeley, California. I am a professor at the University of California here in the department of molecular cell biology and the Department of Integrative Biology. I run a research lab there I study,
mostly study fly development and fly genetics and genomics to do a little bit of work on mind controlling parasites.
I also spend a lot of my time working on trying to fix the dysfunctional system of science publishing. I, you know, been doing this for about 25 years, I've been heavily involved in the open access publishing movement, and more recently in efforts to kind of change the way that peer review is organized and carried out by scientists.
So in academic science, the currency is really publications, you're trying to produce research so that you can produce publications so that you can get more funding to keep doing your research. And obviously, that involves sending in papers to journals, and the journals published the work. So even if you're a non scientist, you may have heard of the big journals, nature, science sell things like this, these are the the structures that contain all of the scientific work that's out there. Can you just explain at a very high level in very broad terms, what is a scientific journal? And what role are they meant to play in an idealized scientific process? Right, so
first of all, just to give people a sense of the world that we're operating in, there's something like 50,000 different scientific journals. The you know, the scientific journal in its purest form is a
Unknown Speaker 4:16
an organization of scientists really who come together to collectively assess the work submitted by their colleagues for their for their assessment, and to decide, you know, both whether they are, you know, scientifically valid to do that sort of classic version of peer review where you, you comment on the the actual science and your colleagues work, but also to decide whether or not they're interesting and important enough to, to to warrant the time of their, you know, the people in their community to read so, scientific journals are, you know, they're the mechanism by which scientists communicate with each other.
Unknown Speaker 4:56
And there they are. There they place where
Unknown Speaker 5:00
Kind of two parts of peer review take place the part where we, we decide whether Sciences is done right. And the part where we decide, you know who who's going to be interested in the work and how important we think it is to them.
Unknown Speaker 5:13
50,000 scientific journals, eventually I will come to how that whole sector works and how it is that journals start and what goes on there. But first, I think it'll be useful for people that haven't been a part of academic science to understand exactly how it works, and I want to start with scientific funding. So how does a typical academic research scientist at a major university get funding? Where does that money come from? And what is it generally used for in the lab? Okay. So it obviously, there's no single answer to that question. So but but in the US, the vast majority of scientists who work in academic
Unknown Speaker 5:57
research environments, you know, their salary is paid for by the university, at least in part, so I'm paid in part to teach, and I'm paid in part to run a research lab, but then the labs are, are almost always run by external grants that you have to apply for. So you know, in my my departments, the typical grants would come either from the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation, who are the major public funders of research in the US. And those, you know, they have
Unknown Speaker 6:30
too many programs to keep track of, but the basic idea of them is you submit a proposal to the organization, it's reviewed by your colleagues and by people at the at the funding agency. And they make some set of decisions about what what of the many different proposals that are sent to them, which ones are going to get funded, and to, you know, to what, you know, to what level of money and for how long, and those can vary from small grants that are in the 10s of 1000s of dollars that are meant for small research projects, to, you know, the biggest federal grants are millions of dollars and involve lots and lots of people. So it, it's a little hard to describe that world in any consistent way. There's also a, you know, a fairly decent number of private funders, you know, private nonprofit funders. So my lab, for example, is funded almost entirely by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, which is in a very big,
Unknown Speaker 7:29
private foundation that was set up by Howard Hughes with the large fraction of his wealth, and they fund 300 or So scientists across the country, kind of paying our salaries and funding our labs and fairly generous way to, to do work that is kind of broadly related to medical to medical research. And then there's, you know, there's dozens of other private funders that that have, you know, varying amounts of money to support to support research like that, then there's a smattering of private funding and, you know, company funding in an academic research labs, but that's a small minority of what goes on.
Unknown Speaker 8:07
So a professor at a major university is running a lab, they also likely have some teaching responsibility, the university is paying you, in part for teaching and in part for creating new knowledge through your research efforts. And so let's say you're a PA running a lab, and you get a big NIH grant, that money then comes in and what happens to it? What's the first thing that happens to it? Is it all going right into the lab to do the research? Um, no, it's a very elaborate system that I think very few people fully understand. So if I get a grant for a million dollars from the NIH, the NIH actually cuts a check to the university for something like $1.6 million, obviously, spread out over over time, they don't give it all to them immediately. But and, you know, you know, say the million dollars goes to my lab, and, and a lot, you know, for paying salaries of people in my lab, and, you know, most of my expenses in the lab, our salaries and reagents, you know, things we need to do experiments, so, but the majority of that being salaries, and then and then the university takes some money on top of that, but I think, at my institution, it's something like 56% or something like that, on top of the money that I get in my lab as what they call overhead, and the overhead is, goes to support all the things that universities do that they don't directly bill me for. So I don't get a bill for you know, the people who maintain them the you know, my building, I don't get a bill for the for the library. I don't get a bill for you know, I mean, I get bills for all sorts of little things, but but some major infrastructure things at the university, just keeping the buildings up to shape and building new buildings and just running the place.
Unknown Speaker 10:00
That is that is covered by the the overhead. And it's a huge amount of money for the universities, a large fraction of the operating budget of universities comes from these kind of overhead on federal grants to the point where even a place like the University of California, I think I saw a stat recently where they get more money from the federal government than they do from the state of California. So it's, you know, it's a major, it's a kind of a major part of the operation of the university, especially a big research university, like University, California, that the faculty, you know, bring in research grants. And via those research grants, we got to fund operations to university.
Unknown Speaker 10:42
And so I used to be in academia, and now I'm in the private sector. I'm wondering if there's any analogies we can draw between compensation in your world versus the private sector. So let's say you've got two or three professors at a university, one of them brings in a half million dollar grant, one of them brings in a million dollar grant, one of them brings in a $10 million grant, if you were in the private sector, and you were doing sales, say your competition would be proportional to the money that you bring in, is there anything like that in your world, um, there's not supposed to be so are our
Unknown Speaker 11:18
and, and, you know, again, like, a lot of things, it's complicated, but, you know, our salaries at a public institution like University, California are not supposed to be tethered to the income we bring in for the university, it's not, not considered conducive to our educational mission. And so, you know, um,
Unknown Speaker 11:40
faculty salaries that you see are set on kind of a scale and, but, but there's always, there's a little bit of fudge factor. And, you know, the reality is our salaries are not explicitly tied to our, to the grants we bring in. However, you know, people get offers from other universities, especially private universities that have fewer constraints on what they can pay people, and they,
Unknown Speaker 12:06
they, you know, they can, if you bring in a lot of grants and incentives, University has an incentive to offer you,
Unknown Speaker 12:14
you know, various and sundry perks, both financial and non financial, to try to lure you to that university. So, I think it is definitely the case that, that, you know, on average, if not directly, and explicitly, faculty salaries are, are a function of how much money they bring in for the university. And that's, you know, why, for example, I think in, you know, well funded departments where the grants are big, the faculty salaries are generally higher than in, you know, like, our history department where they don't have that kind of,
Unknown Speaker 12:49
kind of, you know, Lou art faculty get offered tons of money. There are some circumstances where the feedback is more direct, I think, some places like medical schools don't actually often don't pay their faculty salaries at all out of the university's budget, they're entirely raised by grants. And they're, you know, depending on where the funding comes from, there's different constraints on what, what kind of, you're allowed to effectively pay yourself out of your own grant. So I think it is definitely, overall the case at universities that the more grant money you bring in, the more your salary will go up in a court, although I think by and large universities try to not make that calculation, quite that
Unknown Speaker 13:33
quite that explicit. I see. So
Unknown Speaker 13:37
there's a bunch of scientists with a bunch of labs across the country, at major universities, they're bringing in money, for research purposes, a large chunk of that goes to the university just to fund University stuff, building buildings, and so forth. a chunk of that then goes to your lab, which is primarily going to pay your graduate students in your postdocs, the scientists actually in the lab doing the work. And a good chunk of that is going to buying all of the stuff, the reagents and the equipment, you need to actually do the experiments. So you do the experiments, and you create a story. So you have to write a paper, can you talk to people a little bit about what goes into actually writing a paper set? Let's say it's a pretty good body of work that you're going to send to a high impact journal, or that one might send to a high impact journal, how long and I know, there's no a lot of my questions aren't gonna have one answer, but let's just kind of sketch the contours for people. How, how long is a normal research process, thinking in months, years, many years? I mean, I would say the typical, I can speak for myself and probably fairly representative, at least a certain,
Unknown Speaker 14:44
you know, portion of the scientific world.
Unknown Speaker 14:48
You know, a prototypical paper that comes out of a prototypical research lab is probably, you know, several years of time to
Unknown Speaker 15:00
Three years of time of the primary scientists who carried out the work, usually there's a single point person who is then has worked with others in, in varying degrees on a project like like that. So,
Unknown Speaker 15:16
you know, I've never done a full accounting of this, but I would suspect that the typical paper from my lab is probably, you know, four, four ish years of time from the people who were carrying that workout. And, you know, it varies, we've had some that came, you know, where, from idea to paper was extremely quick and didn't didn't have that duration. And I have others that were the fuse is even slower burning than that, that take years, they take decades to kind of fully mature, but in terms of the total amount of labor and effort and time that was spent on a paper, it's probably, you know, on that order four or five person years worth of time, and you know, some of that time
Unknown Speaker 16:03
is not directly reflected in the data that's in the paper, since every every project is in, you know, has a long period where you're kind of figuring out what works, what doesn't work, what's interesting, what's not interesting. And then, you know, once your thinking has crystallized around what the right experiments to do are and how to carry them out and analyze them, then there is a much more intense period during which you're collecting data that you are actually now thinking about publishing. I think oftentimes, at the beginning, you're doing experiments that are really for yourself, and for learning your way around the subject, at least, at least for us. And then once you've done that, you kind of put it put two and two together, and you're like, Okay, this is, this is the topic, this is what's interesting. And now I know what to do, I know how to do the experiments, right, and you do them. And probably the period of time between, you know, when that happens is like, you know, that can happen quickly, once you've got everything in place. And then, you know, we collect the data over the course of several months, and then several months of analyzing it and putting it together. And then the process of writing a paper this is, you know, I would say, I don't know what your experience was. But But, but that is probably the most difficult thing for everybody in science in the sense that, you know, you are trained and directly and indirectly, in doing research, like you learn how to carry out experiments in the lab, that someone shows you how to do it, and you learn how to analyze data and think about science by reading papers and talking to but but we actually have very little, it's a very hard thing to teach in the sense because it's very, it's just one of those, you kind of have to do it learn by doing Yeah, right. And, and so, you know, everybody has a different style, I mean, I, I try to encourage, like, Alright, figure out what your story is, in your head, write it down, but this isn't gonna be in the paper, this is for your own, your own metrics, and then make figures, you know, the unit, the unit of currency, in a paper, if the paper is the unit of currency and science, by and large, the unit of currency in a paper is the figures, they let they capture your story, they tell the story, they, they display the results in the way you want them to be absorbed by the readers, they're kind of instrumental in, in setting out what you're up to. And I think the two, the two things that are, you know, they're also kind of the easiest things to make materially because, you know, people have writer's block, but they don't really have figure block, right? Like, because you can play around with it, either. It's good thing that people don't seem to have a, you know, you you make graphs and whatever, you know, we don't do it in Excel anymore, but we only make we write code to make pictures and, and you can play around with those quite easily until you come up with something that makes some sense. And you make you make, I mean, I literally been doing this the last week, I make the first figure and I then I go and make the second one. And the second one makes me realize that the first one needs some tweaking, and then I make the second one in concert with the first one, then I'll make the third one. And I do the same thing over again. And so it's a it's a bit you know, then you've once you've got kind of the figures laid out, you've got a story and then you start to wrap text around it to explain what the figures telling you why you did it this way. And not everybody works that way. You know, there's there's as many ways of constructing a paper as there are, you know, you know, different, you know, ways of thinking about them, but it's, you know, it's a very, it can be a very long drawn out process to do that to do that. Well because, you know, this is the
Unknown Speaker 20:00
You know, just forget about all the infrastructure of publishing and the way it actually happens with this is what you're in science for, its to tell its to its, you know, to me, like the distinction between science as a way of asking questions. And science as an endeavor is sharing your information, right? Like, I can be a scientist, if I'm locked in a cave, and no one ever knows what I'm doing. And I'm applying the scientific method, I have a hypothesis, I test my hypothesis, I, I learned something, and I do it again, and again, and again, that, that science, but it's not science, unless I, you know, describe it in a way that other people can learn from it, they can build on it, they can benefit from, from what I've done, they can tell me where they think I've made mistakes, that we can learn together how to do science better. And so, you know, you can conceive of mine, you know, we could make YouTube videos about our experiments or something. So it's not, it's not like science has to have papers, it's just that that is the
Michael Eisen 21:04
you know, by and large, still the, the way that we record the things that we think matter about what we've done, what our ideas were, how we did our experiments, what we found and what we think it means, and so those are the elements of science, right? methods, data, ideas, results, conclusions, those are the basic elements of science, and, you know, we share them in papers. And so they are, you know, you know, forgetting us for a second the, the whole career infrastructure that's, that's, that's attached to them. And that it, you know, it really is true that like, the scientific literature, which is the collective body of papers that have been published by scientists, since they started writing papers, you know, the scientific journal is, was born in the 17th century, it's been around for a long time. And, you know, collectively, there's probably been, you know, on the order of 100 million papers written maybe slightly less than that, but, but something like that science papers that many science papers have been produced, at that collective body of information is just, it's like one of humanity's greatest, greatest creations. And so it's, it's, you know, it's an, it's an amazing thing. I mean, it's so many problems and how we do it, that you can sometimes get lost in the details. But in the, in its collective value, it's, you know, so much of our lives are improved, and, and our intellectual life well, as well as our material lives by things that are in the scientific literature that, you know, all these COVID vaccines, for example, right. They're born from the scientific literature, and many, many, you know, direct ways. And so, I think it is useful to sort of step back and appreciate that, you know, that thing that scientists have created over time, as is a pretty, it's, it's pretty cool, amazing. Yeah, it is really, it is really amazing. You've got this giant corpus of information, each one of these things is taking, on average, some number of years to do. And for those that are not have never done this, it's not a casual few years, it's a very involved and dedicated few years for each one of these things. Yeah, I mean, I don't, you know, I don't, again, I can't speak for everybody, and I don't even sure this is the best, the best way to function and as a human, but like, you know, the site that most that the papers that I have done the work on, like, you know, obviously, as a faculty member, now, I do less than less work on individual papers, compared to the students and postdocs that guide them out. But back when I was in grad school, and a postdoc, you know, that the, though the year, the year is, the year is that went into making those papers that I published, where we're, you know, those were years of a lot of work and effort, toil. So that this is this is, you know, it's it's, yeah, it's it's an immense amount of human
physical time, labor time, and mental energy that goes into each of those. Each of those works. So. So you've got some number of people that have put in that time and that effort, they've got a story that they think is really good, they've got results that they think are really exciting, so exciting that they want to send it to a top tier journal. What is that process? Like when you're submitting a paper? Let's caricature that for people. So I think it's probably worth before doing that. Just describe what when you say talk to your journal, I think yeah, it's worth understanding the structure. And in a little bit of the history of this, I mean, back when, you know, back at the beginning of when there were science journals, there was just science. They weren't differentiated, right? There was the Royal Society in the UK. That was scientists, every scientist, whether you were a botanist, or, you know, or, you know, microscopist or, you know, I don't know what other scientists
You want to think about back then. But like, every, you were a scientist, and you went to the Royal Society, and you shared your results. And so, you know, you might hear a talk by somebody, you know, attaching electrodes to a frog's leg. And then the next day, you'd hear someone, you know, looking at the layers of, of, of rockin mountain, they were exploring, right, like it was science was a single thing. Over time, as the, it became a profession where people, you know, specialized, as more and more scientists got involved, there started to be more and more specialized venues for sharing your work, it started to be true that, like, if you were describing a new species of plant, and your travels to South America, you're your audience, like the people who were, you know, looking at, at the layers of dirt and coal mines in, in Finland, born can be interested in the plant you're describing from Brazil. And so there, it started to be a differentiation of, of, of, you know, science into little pods of people who had like interests. And, you know, back in the day, when the means of conveying your ideas show, again, the Royal Society, you should just have meetings, you just show up on Thursday night, or whatever it was, and like, someone would read it, like, read their results, and there wasn't a journal, because you were all there, and you made her talk, right? Like zoom. And, and, but of course, you know, people couldn't come some week and or they lived in far north of Scotland, or whatever. And so they started as printing became cheap enough to do they started to print,
Unknown Speaker 26:43
you know, reports and send them around. And so that was, you know, for most of the history of science, that was an expensive thing to do, right? It costs money to
Unknown Speaker 26:53
typeset, print mail.
Unknown Speaker 26:58
issue. And so journals, really, in their current form, were born in the 19th century, as as to try to
Unknown Speaker 27:10
define audiences of scientists, and in some cases, non scientists who are interested in the same type of stuff. So you would have a, you know, there were some general science journals, the same ones that exist today, came into existence in the 19th century science and nature, they were meant to be, you know, for the most interesting stuff that like, the kind of geology that you should care about, if you're a botanist, or that, right, like a species that's discovered that's so interesting that even somebody who's you know, you know, just, you know, inventing, you know, new ways of, of manufacturing metals in the lab, right, there were these general science journals that were meant to capture the most exciting stuff. And then there were a growing number of specialty journals that were the Journal of botany, the Journal of mal ecology, all these things, right. And they were partly in response to the just the growing scale of science and partly to the fact that the economics only makes sense if you print and mail things to people who are willing to pay for that person piece of information, and a botanist isn't going to subscribe to a Malakal journal. And so the the there is, you know, what was born out of a kind of natural, you know, it was born out of a natural kind of segmentation of the industry, it became over the course of the 20th century, especially in the latter half of the 20th century,
Unknown Speaker 28:36
a way of measuring your success as a scientist, it became it became a particular feather in your cap if the botany work you were doing didn't just get into the botany journals, it got into the general science journals, because that meant that what you did was of sufficient import that everybody was interested in it. And, and so that system became hardened over time. And, and it particularly in the, from the 1960s onwards, when science funding exploded, science grew as an endeavor. And it it stopped being true that, that the people who were kind of deciding who should get funded or hired in departments were experts in every area of science they were covering and so there was a little bit of like, well, if the you know, if nature says this work is interesting, we're going to believe it's interesting because the people that nature know what they're doing, that was the assumption at least and and then that So, that notion, that that there is a kind of relationship between the size of the audience of a of a journal and how important the work it publishes, has become kind of systematized in science. So it's not an accident that the top tier journals, the ones that people aspire the most
Unknown Speaker 30:00
To get into where most people aspire to get into, are the ones that have the least specific names, science nature cell, those are about as, as generic statements about, about things that they contain, as you might imagine, right? Science is probably the most generic right? nature, maybe it's a subset of science, but it's, it's still like very big and sell. You know, everything has cells, all life has cells, so it's
Unknown Speaker 30:30
alright, I'm not gonna, I'm gonna piss off the people who who think viruses are alive, but
Unknown Speaker 30:36
right, so there is this hierarchy that exists in people's minds, where, where the more the more generic the journal, the more, the more difficult it is to get into. And therefore, the journal started to behave that way. So science nature cell made them sell, because they were attractive, they, they became very difficult to get into, right, they're like, you know, the Harvard of, of publishing, right? They become appealing because of their name. So everybody wants to get into them, and now they can become really exclusive. And, and so,
Unknown Speaker 31:16
you know, I want to be clear, I think this system is terrible. I think it's broke a broken system, it's bad for science, but it is the way that people operate. So, it is useful to understand it that that the the, the ability to get your work into those journals is taken it you know, in some it figuratively and in some parts of the world literally as a measure of your worth as a scientist, because if it is sort of equating equating the assessment that the journals do have what is going to be of interest to a very wide audience with, with science that is important. And you know, you can pick apart that, that notion, quite effectively, I think, but that is the pervasive idea in science. So, so when you ask the question, what happens, what happens is, if I have a paper that I think, you know, even potentially belongs, you know, I will say, I don't do this. So like this, I'm not describing this for my lab, this is we shun the system, in many ways. So I did to describe this generically. But, um, you know, the way it works is you pick a journal that, you know, you think your paper belongs, and then usually, there's a little bit of aspiration involved, right? Because you're rewarded, you know, that like, just like with college admissions, there's like, people have safe schools, you don't, you don't submit your paper to the safe journal, you try. Most people try to, you know, go higher than they think the paper might be if they were betting where it would end up. And so, you know, a lot of people send papers to nature science, so they reject, I don't know where the exact numbers is, but they reject probably 98%, or something like the papers that gets submitted to them. Most of them, they reject, just at first blush, some editor there, reads them and says, You know, I just don't think this is going to MIT gonna, gonna make it, and they just say thank you politely declined to push,
Unknown Speaker 33:14
the ones that they think are have potential, they then send out to peer review. And, and, you know, different journals operate differently, they all have editors who do that first level of screening. Some of those editors are professionals, usually PhDs, who decided that they were more interested in science communication than in doing bench science. And, you know, usually, usually, these are pretty, very broad minded people who can cover large areas of science and sort of just enjoy the process of reading about the latest discoveries more than they did, making them themselves. And so they, you know, there's either professionals who do that, or active scientists who do that a lot of debate in the world are, which of these is better? I think they're both, they both have their pluses and minuses. So, but in either case, an editor looks at the paper and just make some initial decision about whether it potentially could fly at the journal. And then And then, if they think it can, they send it out to people who they consider to be experts in the field to assess the actual science in the paper. So gotcha. So the editors Oh is a scientifically trained person and may or may not be a practicing scientist today. That's right. So it depends on the journal and some journals, there's a mixture and whatever but you know, these are people who, who have been active scientists in their in their lives. And I'd say the vast majority of them have written papers, often many papers, so they have some experience on the author side, as well as on the consumer side of, of science. And they're, you know, they're not, depending on the journal, they usually don't act as directly as a peer reviewer. They're kind of overseeing the process. But they then you know, they they use either
Unknown Speaker 35:00
Their own knowledge of the field or some
Unknown Speaker 35:03
database of reviewers to pick reviewers who they think are appropriate for the, you know, to assess the science and not usually mean somebody who is in the field, you know, does does research, like the research that's described in the paper, so that they can assess the, you know, the methods and the details in a way that that usually requires having some specialized knowledge of the of the field and the context of the work? And then, you know, they are, they're asked to do that in a couple of weeks, it usually takes them longer. And then they write a report that is partly a communication to the,
Unknown Speaker 35:46
to the authors describing what they think about the work and partly a communication to the journal describing whether or not they think it, you know, belongs in the journal using their knowledge of other papers that have typically been published in the journal. And then, and, and often some,
Unknown Speaker 36:06
some description of what if it doesn't already belong in that journal, what it would need in order to get there. And so that's the typical components of a peer review are direct comments on the science for the author's editorial comments on the work for the journal and kind of a roadmap in their own minds for for, for how to bridge the gap if there is, and what's a typical number of peer reviewers that would look at one paper, you know, that the typical number is three? For no reason other than you need someone to break a tie? I think it's the right, why three? I mean, you know,
Unknown Speaker 36:49
I think generally, we feel like one isn't enough, because, you know, there's often different views. And, you know, two or three are probably equally useful in some sense. But, you know, it's good to have a third person in the room to write anyway, it doesn't always happen. I mean, the journal I run,
Unknown Speaker 37:07
sometimes it's two, sometimes it's four, you know, we often ask more people than we need, just because the, the median answer is no. And so because people are busy, and there's 2 million papers published every year, which means 6 million reviews have to be written. And it's actually more than that, since
Unknown Speaker 37:26
papers get rejected from one journal, and then go to another one. And so it's probably 10 million, tried to estimate it, somewhere between five and 10 million reviews are written every year of papers. So if you're in a field that publishes a lot of papers, and you're generally regarded as a good person in the field, whose judgment is valued by the journals, you know, I get review request, many review requests every day, just to give some perspective on this problem. So, so, yeah, so that that three is aspirational. It doesn't always happen. But I'd say by and large, it's, that's what you get. And so, you know, there's this incredible number of papers being submitted and reviewed every year, you just said that, you know, you're getting requests to review these every single day. Can you give people a sense for how much of your professional time you spend reviewing papers as a peer reviewer? And who is that is? Are you getting paid to do that by your university? And or is the journal actually paying you? Because you're doing it on their behalf? Yeah. So um, the?
Unknown Speaker 38:34
That's a tricky question. So the, the answer I, again, right now, because I'm running a journal, I don't actually do a lot of time peer reviewing, because anyway,
Unknown Speaker 38:47
because I have other things to do. But I'm the,
Unknown Speaker 38:52
I would say, back when I wasn't doing that, I would probably peer review,
Unknown Speaker 38:59
I'll probably on average of paper a week, maybe a paper every week and a half or something like that. So so something between 30 and 60 papers a year would be typical. For the number of papers, I would peer review.
Unknown Speaker 39:13
In a part of that, that's probably more than typical, but not by much and, and, you know, each of those papers probably takes, you know, even if everything's smooth, it's hours of work to review a paper to read it carefully, to construct, you know, to write a review, that's thoughtful and warrant, you know, like, you don't want to send someone just a cursory you know, review of their work, or you want to show that you've read it and you want to do them, right. And so, yeah, yeah. So the question of who's paying for that? So, in very few cases, journals, the journals pay for that directly. So like, there are some fields where this happens like economics, I think they pay reviewers nominal fee, but even if they paid a
Unknown Speaker 40:00
nominal fee would be less than, you know, then what? I'm being paid for my time by the university. Right. So, it, you know, it is considered a professional responsibility in the sense that I included on my CV that I review journals as part of my assessment by the university. And so, um, yeah, like, in some sense, I'm being paid by the university. To do this as part of by role as a scientist. It's not really explicit, though. And this is something that,