I wonder if there's a way to tax the frivolous submissions. There could be a submission fee that would be fully reimbursed iff the submission is actually accepted for publication. If you're confident in your paper, you can think of it as a deposit. If you're spamming journals, you're just going to pay for the wasted time.

Maybe you get reimbursed for half as long as there are no obvious hallucinations.

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JBorrow an hour ago | parent | next [-]

The journal that I'm an editor for is 'diamond open access', which means we charge no submission fees and no publication fees, and publish open access. This model is really important in allowing legitimate submissions from a wide range of contributors (e.g. PhD students in countries with low levels of science funding). Publishing in a traditional journal usually costs around $3000.

	▲	NewsaHackO 43 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Those journals are really good for getting practice in writing and submitting research papers, but sometimes they are already seen as less impactful because of the quality of accepted papers. At least where I am at, I don't think the advent of AI writing is going to affect how they are seen.
	▲	methuselah_in an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Welcome to new world of fake stuff i guess

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s0rce 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That would be tricky, I often submitted to multiple high impact journals going down the list until someone accepted it. You try to ballpark where you can go but it can be worth aiming high. Maybe this isn't a problem and there should be payment for the efforts to screen the paper but then I would expect the reviewers to be paid for their time.

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noitpmeder an hour ago | parent [-]

I mean your methodology also sounds suspect. You're just going down a list until it sticks. You don't care where it ends up (I'm sure within reason) just as long as it is accepted and published somewhere (again, within reason).

	▲	niek_pas an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Scientists are incentivized to publish in as high-ranking a journal as possible. You’re always going to have at least a few journals where your paper is a good fit, so aiming for the most ambitious journal first just makes sense.
	▲	mathematicaster 7 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		This is effectively standard across the board.

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mathematicaster 8 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Pay to review is common in Econ and Finance.

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throwaway85825 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Pay to publish journals already exist.

	▲	bloppe 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		This is sorta the opposite of pay to publish. It's pay to be rejected.
	▲	olivia-banks 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I would think it would act more like a security deposit, and you'd get back 100%, no profit for the journal (at least in that respect).

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pixelready an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I’d worry about creating a perverse incentive to farm rejected submissions. Similar to those renter application fee scams.

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petcat an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> There could be a submission fee that would be fully reimbursed if the submission is actually accepted for publication.

While well-intentioned, I think this is just gate-keeping. There are mountains of research that result in nothing interesting whatsoever (aside from learning about what doesn't work). And all of that is still valuable knowledge!

	▲	ezst 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Sure, but now we can't even assume that such research is submitted in good faith anymore. There just seems to be no perfect solution. Maybe something like a "hierarchy/DAG? of trusted-peers", where groups like universities certify the relevance and correctness of papers by attaching their name and a global reputation score to it. When it's found that the paper is "undesirable" and doesn't pass a subsequent review, their reputation score deteriorates (with the penalty propagating along the whole review chain), in such a way that: - the overall review model is distributed, hence scalable (everybody may play the certification game and build a reputation score while doing so) - trusted/established institutions have an incentive to keep their global reputation score high and either put a very high level of scrutiny to the review, or delegate to very reputable peers - "bad actors" are immediately punished and universally recognized as such - "bad groups" (such as departments consistently spamming with low quality research) become clearly identified as such within the greater organisation (the university), which can encourage a mindset of quality above quantity - "good actors within a bad group" are not penalised either because they could circumvent their "bad group" on the global review market by having reputable institutions (or intermediaries) certify their good work There are loopholes to consider, like a black market of reputation trading (I'll pay you generously to sacrifice a bit of your reputation to get this bad science published), but even that cannot pay off long-term in an open system where all transactions are visible. Incidentally, I think this may be a rare case where a blockchain makes some sense?

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utilize1808 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Better yet, make a "polymarket" for papers where people can bet on which paper can make it, and rely on "expertise arbitrage" to punish spams.

	▲	ezst 37 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Doesn't stop the flood, i.e. the unfair asymmetry between the effort to produce vs. effort to review.