# Academics, what comes after peer review? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [January 22, 2017, 10:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/academics-what-comes-after-peer-review/777888 "2017-01-22T22:47:25Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2019, 12:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/academics-what-comes-after-peer-review/777888/63 "2019-05-26T00:17:38Z")
You can also do things like including video or sound files in an online journal, if those happen to be relevant. And there’s no extra charge for color images. And you can append big data files, if you want. An epsilon is obviously a small thing (like, say, a toddler), but what’s the significance of “boss” vs. “slave”? ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2019, 12:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/academics-what-comes-after-peer-review/777888/64 "2019-05-26T00:38:38Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > An epsilon is obviously a small thing (like, say, a toddler), but what’s the significance of “boss” vs. “slave”? Having met that guy, I can tell you those are his… idiosyncratic, let’s say, terms concerning gender roles. Ps I’m all for online journals. Beats going to the library, assuming it even has what you are looking for. I’m also all for clear and concise writing, though I suppose nothing too incomprehensible made it past multiple referees. ---
**Author:** ![Voyager](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/voyager/32/133_2.png) [@Voyager](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Voyager)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2019, 6:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/academics-what-comes-after-peer-review/777888/65 "2019-05-26T06:04:02Z")
> [@Hari\_Seldon](#): > > All my published papers are freely available on my website as PDF files. Some I copied from the journal web sites (copyrights be damned, although it is complicated as to who actually owns them); a few I actually scanned; a couple I retyped (it’s really easy with TeX) and all since about 1995 I just posted my own PDFs. At least 90% were in “my” online journal (although they were all refereed in the usual way). Pretty much all the professors I know do the same thing, and I think IEEE allows it.But for those with licenses to the IEEE library, it is easier to go there and not chase a bunch of sites. Especially because in my field a lot of authors work in industry and we don’t have personal sites like university people do. However I won a poetry contest once with something I wrote with an IEEE copyright. I never told them. They’d probably want to share in the prize. ---
**Author:** ![ftg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ftg/32/2801_2.png) [@ftg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ftg)\ **Post date:** [May 26, 2019, 12:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/academics-what-comes-after-peer-review/777888/66 "2019-05-26T12:47:14Z")
> [@DPRK](#): > > As for putting dead persons’ names on your own article, how can you get their permission? Unless it’s something that you and your buddy started writing together before he or she died. > > RevTeX-type stuff: sure, it may save you the trouble of typing someone’s paper back in, but you’d be remiss as editor not to run the text through at least one cycle of professional proofreading and editing. Why assume the author knows the detailed rules of professional typesetting or even English spelling and grammar? I’ve discovered after the fact a paper was published with my name on it without my approval. And I’m alive. (My co-author wanted an old conference paper put in a journal. It needed a lot of re-work. He handed it off to a grad student who did a minimal amount of work and it was submitted and accepted. I found out about this afterwards and I am _not_ happy. The paper needed vastly more work.) The journals I submitted to always had a copyeditor who fixed quite a bit of stuff. I’d get proofs and have to go in and undo some fixes since the editor didn’t understand why things had to be said a certain way. Using journal TeX macro packages makes all this simpler. ---
**Author:** ![Melbourne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b5e925/32.png) [@Melbourne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Melbourne)\ **Post date:** [May 27, 2019, 8:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/academics-what-comes-after-peer-review/777888/67 "2019-05-27T08:05:48Z")
> [@Quartz](#): > > As I understand it, peer review simply means that the paper isn’t obviously hogwash and is of actual interest. Reviewers don’t try to replicate results etc. This may also be different in sciences like mathematics. So what are the next steps in the academic process? > > Fight my ignorance here! And FWIW, in the medical journals I used to read, after the paper was published, there would be a few letters about it, perhaps asking for clarification, or arguing that it was all tosh. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [May 27, 2019, 8:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/academics-what-comes-after-peer-review/777888/68 "2019-05-27T08:21:58Z")
Peer review does not equal publishing: in peer-reviewed journals, it is one of the steps prior to inclusion in the actual journal. Between peer review and publication, there is updating the article in accordance with the reviewers’ recommendations. They may ask to see more data, a better explanation of some point, a different graph… the paper won’t get published until it has been updated in this way. ---
**Author:** ![Banksiaman](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/banksiaman/32/3334_2.png) [@Banksiaman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Banksiaman)\ **Post date:** [May 28, 2019, 10:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/academics-what-comes-after-peer-review/777888/69 "2019-05-28T22:23:52Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > Peer review does not equal publishing: in peer-reviewed journals, it is one of the steps prior to inclusion in the actual journal. > > Between peer review and publication, there is updating the article in accordance with the reviewers’ recommendations. They may ask to see more data, a better explanation of some point, a different graph… the paper won’t get published until it has been updated in this way. And to continue the narrative, if you disagree with the peer reviewer comments you can always argue that your words were like little polished gems, and that only a hack would disagree or tinker with them. The editor overseeing all this has to make a call on each challenged point, and also on whether each correction you made did satisfactorily deal with a reviewer comment. They need to have enough command of the issue themselves to know when review comments are just personal preference or materially improve the paper and its argument. All this time, you are thinking that your evil Swedish competitors are going to publish ahead of you, and will get all the fame, chicks and money that go with being the first to identify Emerging Complexities in Compound Multi-factoral ,…zzzzzzzz Assuming you get past that and you successfully negotiate the checking of page-proofs and it is published, in the olden days you’d get pre-prints, which were printed copies of your article, maybe in a little natty cover that you could post out if their library didn’t carry that journal series. Now its all pdfs and an introduction to a whole other world of copyright and bush lawyering, where the publishing agreement you signed forever ago may or may not let you post the final version of your paper on your blog, Academia or ResearchGate or institutional page, or be embargoed for some time and so on. Companies like Springer which run big chunks of world academic publishing are rich for a reason. Their business model relies on academics generating their content for free, then signing over the perpetual rights to it, again at no cost to Springer, and publishing it in journals whose production and print costs are covered by the societies and subscriber bases anyway, and then being able to sell it as unique, non-substitutable obligatory knowledge in digital form to institutions for whatever it costs Springer to press CTRL+C. And then because you are an academic and therefore wiser than normal humans and knowing all this, you open a fresh document and start your next paper, wondering if this time you can get it into one of the really top-line journals instead of the Central Oceania Journal of Applied Stuff. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/academics-what-comes-after-peer-review/777888.md?page=3)