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Why don't researchers request payment for refereeing?
One of the most criticized aspects of the current publishing scheme, is that academics do pretty much all the work for free and publishers get the money.
Why don't people just charge a fee when contacted by a publisher to referee an article?

I know why do academics write peer reviews?, that's not the question. The issue is why do it requesting no monetary compensation when the publisher is getting (for doing next to nothing) an extraordinary monetary compensation.

Related: Are there any journals that pay reviewers?

I think a better -- i.e., more reasonably attainable -- question would be "Why don't researchers get more academic credit for refereeing?"  If you don't get paid for the papers you write, it's weird to get paid for the papers you referee.  Writing a paper is certainly worth some academic currency, it just doesn't come out directly in dollars.  However, credit given for papers refereed is moderate to nebulous to non-existent.  That's what could be fixed, IMO.

I guess it's the same reason why the moderators of the site don't get paid.

I addressed this in this answer about why academics write peer reviews.

I just got my PhD and I have the same question. I've had a couple of requests to review things and each time I've asked around -- "what's in it for me?" People just say it's the done thing. So far, the only explanation of a significant benefit I've had is "you get to see the paper before anyone else does."

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.

What if 'refereeing' (peer reviewing) is already part of their job description, such as tenured professors who must stay abreast of new developments in their field. It is a natural part of their job description.

Academics aren't upset about not getting paid for refereeing/reviewing - they're upset because journals charge too much.
There's really four points in the statement "academics do pretty much all the work for free and publishers get the money"

Academics do most of the work
Publishers do a comparatively small amount of work
Publishers get the money
Academics don't get any money

Just because people might object to some of the four points, that doesn't mean they object to all of them.
Academics do most of the work - Most academics wouldn't object to this state of the affairs. Of course academics do most of the work in publishing (especially reviewing) - they're the ones who are qualified to do it. You can't have some bureaucrat take care of reviewing the work, you need someone who knows the field.
Publishers do a comparatively small amount of work - Academics might grumble at this, but there's a comparatively little that the publishers are qualified to do. Typesetting, printing, maintaining the journal website, administration in the reviewing process ... and that's about it. All the actual content decisions have to be done by knowledgeable people (academics). There's certainly some journals which try to offload things like typesetting onto the authors, but in part that's financially driven ...
Publishers get the money - This is the main point of upset. Publishers charge what is viewed as an excessive amount. ... but it's not that they're charging money per se, it's more that academics lose access to the content due to expense. Most academics were completely satisfied when they had access through (paid) library subscriptions. It's only when budget cuts (and publisher price increases) caused libraries to cut subscriptions that academics got upset. But again, it's less having to pay for things and more not being able to access everything they need.
Academics don't get any money - This is the point you're addressing. However, I'd say most academics don't have a problem with it. Refereeing for a journal is considered by most to be community service - it's something that needs to happen, and they're the only ones qualified to do it. It's quid-pro-quo: others review your articles, and you review other people's. Attempting to make it a paid-for enterprise makes the person asking for the money seem greedy.

So where does that leave you? Academics (mostly) don't have a problem doing most of the work - and doing it for free. The complaints are on the publisher's side: they're charging too much for what little they do. Demanding that publishers pay academics for reviewing isn't going to change that. If anything, it will make journal access more expensive, as they now need to pay for reviewers.
So charging a fee when reviewing isn't going to fix the problem, and as Mark Meckes mentions in his answer, asking for one is only going to make you look naive and greedy to the (academic) editor who you're in contact with. Note that there's a very big difference between "Decline to review based on principles" and "Decline to review ... unless you pay me".

It seems like the publishers are the smarts ones. The publishers get paid to do little while the PhD academic gets nothing for working a lot.

@darrinthomas Actually I do get something. I get a salary and reviewing papers is part of my job. So extra something for reviewing would feel a bit strange.

@NajibIdrissi Sure, but that’s a failure of employers to properly delineate research employees’ responsibilities on the job. Peer review, which is an integral part of taking part in scientific discourse, is a part of your job as scientist, regardless of whether your contract explicitly says that or not.

@NajibIdrissi Related: Is reviewing papers mandatory?

@DarrinThomas I think the academics are the smart ones, they get a steady curated stream of interesting ideas in their research interests to read and digest, whilst all the publishers get is boring admin and nothing but money for recompense.

@NajibIdrissi: we report to our administration at the end of the year how many reviews we did for which journals. Just like we report how many manuscripts we wrote in the time paid by the same employer. Both is clearly part of the job description under the heading of "publication activities". Note that in my country not only post-docs but also PhD students are paid wages (lower, but still). I know few post-docs and PhD students who would (do) go on publishing and reviewing after their academic job expires.

"There's certainly some journals which try to offload things like typesetting onto the authors, but in part that's financially driven" - in part, that's also author-driven, once they've made the experience that some publishers cannot be left typesetting unsupervised without messing up papers in one way or another.

I'm downvoting this answer for the simple and obvious reason that sustaining the expectation of doing referral work ad honorem hinders the entry of early-career academics into the publishing world. Doing this for free is a privilege reserved for individuals already employed by academic institutions allotting time for you to engage in such activities. The group most vulnerable to being left out here is graduate or post-graduate students who have to work outside of academia to make ends meet.

@starseed_trooper Please keep in mind that explanation isn't endorsement. From your comment it sounds like you don't necessarily have an issue with the accuracy of this answer in describing the current situation, but rather your issue is that the current situation is not the way you believe it should be. I don't know what to say to that, aside from that the question was primarily asking for an explanation of the current state, and that the StackExchange format isn't well suited for advocacy or for debating personal opinions.

@R.M. I felt my comment was justified given that the answer endorses the system via the comment that "asking for one is only going to make you look naive and greedy to the (academic) editor who you're in contact with." I do agree that StackExchange is not well-suited for dialectics nor it should be. However, the Academia StackExchange usually has more room for ethical remarks than other spaces do.

Leaving aside arguments for and against the current system, here's what will happen if you --- as an individual academic --- are contacted by a publisher and attempt to charge a fee:

You will most likely be contacted, not by a "publisher" per se, but by an editor, who is another hard-working academic getting little or no monetary compensation for their job.
You say something like, "This is my fee for refereeing an article."
The editor responds, "Sorry, we have no budget to pay for refereeing," and goes to look for another referee.
In the best case scenario, the editor --- who is most likely a well-regarded senior researcher in your field, the sort of person who may make or influence decisions over your hiring, promotion, grants, and the publication of your own papers --- now has the impression that you're deplorably ignorant about how the field operates.  In the worst case, the editor thinks you're a jerk who's actively seeking to make life harder for other people working in the field.

Well, that assumes my response to a contact asking for refereeing services would be "This is my fee". I could easily explain why I do this (i.e.: a matter of fairness) and even attempt a compromise: I'll do it for free only if it's an open access paper, else there's a fee due to the aforementioned reasons..

@Gabriel in that case, replace step 4 above with that senior researcher thinking of you as a pretentious jerk who doesn't really get it. Refereeing is part of "service to the profession". No, it's not directly compensated but it's part of the networking and improvement of the profession we do.

@Gabriel: Even with an explanation, you're still saying something like "This is my fee," and for non-open access papers, your proposed compromise will still run into the cold hard fact that, in most fields, the editor simply has no budget from which to pay a referee.

On the other hand, if you simply say "I only referee for open-access journals," you'll come across as making a statement about the system.  It's a statement that the editor may or may not sympathize with, but you won't come across as not even knowing what the system is.

@MarkMeckes There may be a misunderstanding here. Open-access journals are free for the readers. The authors however usually need to pay a considerable amount to the editors for the publication of their articles.

@RHertel: That depends on the field.  In mathematics (my field) and physics (the OP's field), author-pays open access journals are rare, and at least in mathematics there are now a number open access journals which are free to everyone (I'm not sure about physics).  But in any case, I'm only commenting on what the OP suggested he might say.

@MarkMeckes Thanks for your feedback. I didn't mean to criticize your comment, just to clarify an aspect. My field is Physics and I have quite some experience in the publication process. As far as physics is concerned I cannot confirm your statement. Granted, open-access journals are generally rare. But most if not all of them are "author-pays" journals with publication charges typically well above $1000. Unless one counts unreviewed publications such as arXiv.org.  I'm glad to hear that Mathematics has apparently evolved further.

...and the presence of considerable publication fees could make the reviewing process problematic. A possible conflict of interest of the editor cannot be ruled out categorically, since any paid-for publication increases the journal's revenues.... It's a complicated topic.

@MarkMeckes This makes even less sense though. Fees for open access journals are the most jaw dropping. It makes it sound like you REALLY support a system where authors get ripped off.

@spacetyper What did I say that sounds like that?  I didn't express support for anything, either in my answer or in the comments.

In some fields, for some journals, they are paid a fee. [File this as yet another example of "academia varies more than you think"...] This approach seems to be most popular with economics journals - as they are heavily into studying the way people can be motivated by money, I suppose this makes sense!
An exceptional example is the Journal of Financial Economics - most articles have a single reviewer, who is paid $275 cash (and a ~$200 discount off their next submission), contingent on a timely review. Lower down the scale, the Journal of Banking and Finance talks about offering "tokens of appreciation" for reviewers; there's no cash value given but the phrasing suggests it's probably a good bit lower.
Now, why do these journals do it? Probably because they always have done, an explanation which applies to a lot of strange quirks of the academic system. But is it a good idea? The recent proposal by Scientific Reports to have a two-track paid- and unpaid-peer-review system was incredibly contentious, after all...
The Journal of Public Economics recently tested the system out - they took 1500 review requests for their papers, and divided them into four groups:

a six-week deadline, but no penalty for missing it
a four-week deadline, but no penalty for missing it
a four-week deadline, and a promise of $100 payment for meeting the deadline
a six-week deadline, but reviewers told turnaround times would be made public

All variants worked well. The group with a four-week deadline had an average turnaround time of twelve days less than the six-week deadline group. Payments took another eight days off the turnaround time, and "public credit" another 2.5 days. The money/credit groups wrote slightly shorter reports, presumably as they were more motivated to make a hard deadline, but the editors did not see them as of noticeably lower quality.
So... yes, payment can work. But it relies on the journal having the money (two reviewers is $200/paper), and - intriguingly - it's not quite as effective as the no-money-needed option of just giving a shorter deadline. And even when it does work, it only makes sense if done systematically by the journal. Individuals asking to negotiate their own review payments is unlikely to work in the same way.

Was there any study on whether money alters the content or biases of the reviews?

@nemo I believe they said they wereno more or less likely to recommend acceptance, which seems a decent first approximation for 'no more biased than usual' ;)

I wonder whether the reviewers get that money themselves if they do the review while they are formally working. May depend heavily on the jurisdiction, of course.

Because that's not how it works.
That may seem unsatisfying, but it's the answer.  It's part of scientific culture that peer reviewing is done without charging, just as it's part of business culture that you don't wear sagging shorts and torn t-shirts to work.
Is it something that might change? Sure; it's not a formal contract, it's a cultural thing, and cultures change. But most scientists feel that peer review is a good thing, and most scientists feel that it should be free, so it's unlikely that it will change soon.
Keep in mind that, while there's a lively on-line debate about the merits of peer review and open-access publication and so on, this is a debate among tiny and non-representative populations of scientists. Don't confuse the passion and attitudes that you see on-line with how most scientists actually feel.

I'd give 100 up-votes for your last paragraph if I could.

How do you perceive most scientists actually feel?

I don't experience much discrepancy between on-line debates and how scientists I know and work with feel.  Could you elaborate on the last paragraph?

I would be surprised if one in ten of the scientists I work with actually knows there's a debate about open access and peer review, and I would be astonished if more than one in a hundred gives a shit.  Online debates are heavily skewed toward younger, computer-oriented, new researchers.  If you spend most of your time talking on-line, or if your colleagues are mainly young, computer-oriented new researchers, you may think you are more representative than you actually are.  Older scientists are still common, and you're not speaking for them.

@iayork what is your field of study if I may ask?

Biology. I believe there are several of us in the world. Is this really your first exposure to the notion that you are not representative of all scientists?

Uh? Are you talking to me or somebody else? I've no idea what you are talking about.

@Gabriel: My guess is that iayork's last comment was meant to be directed to gerrit.

This is not a very satisfying answer. Essentially it states that things are the way they are because that's how they've always been, and concludes with a rather patronizing comment dismissing the debate. I'd argue that this type of answer is actually rather unacademic behavior, offering no insights and no real analysis.

"debate about the merits of peer review" - as opposed to...? "open access" - as opposed to those high-fee journals?

@mtall that's true, the answer lacks one point: that the system is the way it's always been because it works fine.

If you do this on an individual scale, as Mark Meckes says, it's basically the same as just declining to review the paper.  The journal is not going to pay you; they will find someone else.
You could ask "What if everyone started demanding money?"  That's essentially a proposal that researchers as a group should strike for higher wages.  Like any labor action, it'll only work if a large majority of the labor force participates and is well organized.   Anybody who's served as a department chair can tell you that organizing any significant number of academics to agree on anything is, well, challenging.  Here you are talking about organizing all the academics in the world.
If somehow a strike were to be effective, large commercial publishers might eventually knuckle under and start paying; small publishers might not have the resources, and might go out of business.  At least in the short term, it would be very disruptive to the academic community: initially, publishers would probably just look for referees who weren't on strike ("scabs") and the review process would be greatly delayed.  Some journals might suspend publication.  Ultimately, the people most harmed would probably be junior researchers who need to publish in a timely manner in order to maintain or advance their careers.  So you'd have to have a consensus that the long-term gain outweighs the short-term harm.
To use a physics analogy, we're in a potential well; there might be a lower-energy state (one in which reviewers get paid), but the activation energy to get from here to there is extremely high.

Yes, it's more of a large scale question that rather "Should I do it?". The conditions need not be the same for every publisher. E.g.: If it's a large publisher and a closed paper, there's a fee; if the paper is open access, there's no fee; if it's a small publisher, little to no fee, etc.

Because keeping money out of the publisher-reviewer relationship is a very good feature of the current dominant publishing model.
Some of the unwanted things that paying reviewers would result in:

unqualified or overbooked academics to accept all reviews resulting in a drop in review quality.
academics accepting to review papers that are not interesting to them, thus probably lowering the scrutiny threshold.
people maximizing the number of reviews they do in a year thus allocating less time to each. -> drop in quality.
people refraining from outright rejecting frivolous and junk papers on first screening to try to charge a full review
etc.

All very good points indeed, but money is definitely not out of the publisher-reviewer relationship. Publishers get money (a lot) from reviewers in the form of subscriptions, be it individual or academic.

@gabriel Your point seems more to be about the relationship between Publishers and Readers. I think CapeCode's answer is talking specifically about the social/professional transaction between publishers of a paper and reviewers of the paper. The fact that reviewers are also readers is relevant to wider issues but not, I think, to this particular answer

@YemonChoi if reviewers were not also readers then this issue would not exist, since no one would do this job for free getting absolutely nothing in return.

@Gabriel publishers charge for the publishing, not for the review nor the actual work resulting in the publication. Authors and reviewers *are" paid to write and review, that's what their stipend, salary, grants are for.

@CapeCode the "publishing" charge does include the actual work and the review, without either there would be nothing to publish (obviously) and thus nothing to charge. No, authors are not paid to review, that's the whole point. You could only include that task into their salaries if the Universities themselves were the ones publishing (and profiting), instead of some external company which has nothing to do with the process.

@Gabriel nope. Publishers charge for the publishing process as a service, not for the content. Same thing a telephone company charges for the time spent talking, not for how enjoyable the discussion is. Imagine how much would a paper cost if it that charge had to cover the time spent by the authors and reviewers creating the content.

@CapeCode nope. Publishers charge for the publishing service of the content. Imagine how much less would a paper cost if there was nothing in it? It would have to be a number very close to US$0.0. Perhaps a few cents for the blank page if they sent it to you?

@Gabriel I agree with what you wrote in your last comment but fail to see your point. Nobody would buy an empty paper. That's the virtue of subscription-based publishing model. It creates an incentive to curate for articles that people are more likely to read.

@CapeCode the only true incentive for curating articles is the advancement if science. Publishers could create an extra incentive by sharing the enormous wealth they amass for doing next to nothing, with the people who actually do the hard work. But they don't, now do they?

@Gabriel the only true incentive for curating articles is the advancement if science that clearly doesn't work since academics don't self sensor their stuff when they know it's irrelevant or redundant with existing literature. Off course publisher, especially for-profit ones, contribute to research funding either directly or indirectly via the taxes they generate.

@CapeCode Off course publisher, especially for-profit ones, contribute to research, now that's just silly. Of course they don't. Whatever amount they might give back is immensely outweighed by the amount they take via their shameless business model.

@Gabriel  What's silly is to ask a question when one is not interested to hear answers that diverge from one's political ideology. They don't "take" anything, nobody forces academics to use commercial publishers. As for "shameless business model" I trust you refer to the author-pay open access model that provides incentive to accept more papers than a journal should, right? These are indeed shameless.

@CapeCode not sure what you mean. I've heard great answers here with which I don't agree, yours just wasn't one of them. Academics are indeed forced through institutionalized requirements of where to publish. It would be silly to deny this. I refer exactly to what I referred. You obviously have a horse in this race, which is fine. Just don't expect me to agree with you on account of this.

Summary:

most academics I know are paid for reviewing (via their employment contract)
thus it would be up to the employer (university/research institute) to charge for the service
I'll outline the burocratic and legal steps needed on the reviewer side (in my country: Germany) to be able to charge personally for a review. For many academics, this burocratic offset compared to what you can earn this way is not attractive.

First of all let me say that from my experience

academics do pretty much all the work for free

I think this is true at best for a very small minority of academics. My work contract says that (among other things) I'm paid for "publication activities" and that clearly includes reviews. Clearly as in administration asks me to report for yearly statistics number of reviews done for which journals just like they ask for manuscripts, oral presentations and posters.
So while I'm not paid by the publisher, I am paid by my employer for the reviews. And I know very few academics who go on publishing and reviewing after the academic job ends - few people put that much effort into a hobby.
(I'm thinking here more of graduates/post-docs without job than of retired professors because I think the out-of-job-academics are the better control group for this discussion)
For me this makes the question very similar to why does a car mechanic work who is employed by a workshop not charge the customer directly?  Answer: it's the employer who charges the customer (via their administration), the mechanic is paid by their wage.
We now may ask why doesn't the employer (research institute, university) charge the publisher for services received? IMHO this is a sensible question and one that actually should be asked. Edit: However, to me this is not the same as the question asked why a single researcher doesn't charge the publisher. The standing and the aims in these negotiations are IMHO totally different of a single researcher compared to a university/research institute.
[slightly off topic: one answer to this may be that for academic institutions of a certain size the number of reviews done by the staff comes close enough to the number of reviews needed for the publications of the same staff - so introducing payment for reviews (including the institution needs to pay for the reviews they receive) just means that more VAT needs to be paid, and thus generates a net loss.]
Edit: Why do I think that charging for review will lead to charges for having your paper reviewed? For one thing, of course commercial publishers won't like to diminish their profits if they can avoid it. But even then: assuming an open source source publication fee of, say, 1500 EUR/US$ leads to 500 EUR/US$ profit (that's 33 %) for the publisher means that 500 EUR/US$ could theoretically be spent for the review before the publisher will enter the loss zone. That pays (see below) for maybe 5 - 10 h of professional academic review time. I often spend considerably more on a single review (see e.g. https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/5799/725 where @JeffE cites a rule of thumb of about 1 h/manuscript page - we often have 15 - 25 manuscript pages). I don't know what the average number of reviews is per published paper, but I'd guess that it is somewhere near 10. But even a low guesstimate of 3 for the first round + 2 for the second (that doesn't even include that papers are declined!) means that 5 x 20 h = 100 h of review time per published paper. That's something like 5000 - 10000 EUR/US$, or 10 - 20x the huge profit of the publisher.
So, yes, the reviewing is a huge amount of work and it needs to be compensated, like writing the papers needs to be compensated. And yes, it is the researchers who do this. But even the most evil shark publishers with 40 % profit of a 1500 EUR fee for an open access publication would be able to pay for that.

How to charge a publisher for services received (i.e. the review) as the reviewer in person?
(this is for Germany, other legislations will differ)
On the other hand, well, yes: why not charge the publisher?
Scientific reviewieng is a classic professional service of freelancers (German: freiberufliche Tätigkeit). In order to do such freelancing, you first of all need  to make sure that there is no conflict with any employment. This is best done by exchanging a couple of letters with your professor/director/administration. Unless they actually have some deal with the publisher, they probably wish you good luck and are happy with that.
You then go to the tax office and ask for a freelancing tax number. If this is just for the few reviews you do, you'd also ask for exemption of VAT, otherwise you'd need to do VAT declarations (if dealing with a publisher in a EU foreign country, things are more complicated). But at the very least, the freelancing tax number means that your income tax declaration becomes mandatory, gets an additional set of forms for the freelancing and you have a shorter deadline to hand it in.
You'll need to put in this effort regardless of whether you are actually able to convince a publisher to pay you or not.
I guess most researchers I know think that compared to doing the review for the academic salary this extra money is not worth the extra burocracy. (I know of one colleague who told of his burocratic experience where an extra payment < 1000 EUR for a seminar was concerned)
Now, I anyways do freelancing, so the marginal effort for me is low (as it is for people who anyways do vocational tax declaration and do it early). However, so far I have to say that the market price of reviewing is rather unattractive. I've been offered 100 US$ to do a quick "review" within a couple of days (no full review was asked but rather something like an opinion on the manuscript and pointing out which points I'd recommend should be addressed before actual submission).
Some comparisons:
I estimate that I cost my employer about 75 - 100 US$ / h (of which 22 US$ / h actually arrive at my bank account after taxes + social insurance for me have been paid). Thus, the offered market price for the review service boils down to the cost of 1 - 1:10 h for my employer. Even though my freelancing doesn't have as much overhead (e.g. because small-scale freelancing on the side is covered by the social insurance of the employment contract), I'd need to finish that review within ca. 2 h to get the same hourly wage I get for my employment contract.  Also as it is very much on-demand of the journal, it cannot even be used too well for filling up time when I don't have a customer. So all in all, even though my marginal burocracy for doing this is low, it is not super-attractive. In fact, I'm better off if I can put the time onto my academic time sheet. You may decide differently, particularly if your employer does not accept a time sheet.
Another comparison: for me, the hourly wage for such a review is close to filing VG Wort claims - though the hourly wage there would be better if I had more papers to file, as there's quite an offset of remembering how to do things that need to be done just once per year.

"most academics I know are paid for reviewing (via their employment contract)" doesn't seem to be true based on what you say, but an assumption from "I'm paid for "publication activities" and that clearly includes reviews". In any case, you simply shifted the question to "why doesn't the employer (research institute, university) charge the publisher for services received?", which is basically the same issue. You say that in Germany you can charge, but to "convince a publisher to pay you" means that it is still up to the publisher, so it's pretty much the same deal as everywhere else.

The downvote is not mine BTW, I always leave a comment explaining why I downvoted whenever I do.

@Gabriel: the standing a single researcher has in negotiations with a publisher is so much different (worse) than that a whole university (or, as in Germany most universities are state owned and organized in library networks) has that I consider it a different question. The more so, as a PhD student or post-doc is professionally judged by the journals where they published and therefore doesn't have the freedom to decline working with the big publishers. Whereas a university does have the resources and standing, e.g. to run an open access journal (see e.g. www.jstatsoft.org, look for "Support")

... the more so, as the cost for reviews based on the hours spent is huge (see edit).

As for "most researchers are paid for doing reviews": this is standard duty for academic work in all countries where I've been working so far. Standard as in saying "I cannot do XXX because I have to do this review" and reviewing in the office during work hours. I know lots of people who stopped all academic activities (including publication) when their contracts ended, but very few (1, actually) who'd maybe consider keeping it up without being on a job that is connected to this publication activity. Reviewing is typically stopped pretty much immediately, even if they still publish.

"most researchers are paid for doing reviews", that's precisely the point: they are not. You think it is "standard duty for academic work" apparently because your University asks you to report your reviews. Would anything change if you stopped reviewing altogether and focused on publishing? For most researchers, nothing would change. They'd still receive the same salary as compensation for their work. You seem to believe that if you stopped reviewing your University would either fire you or reduce your salary?

I agree with Gabriel: I know of no university in which faculty are in any reasonable sense directly paid for their reviews.  Faculty are not directly paid for anything that isn't specific to the university, as reviews for a journal certainly are not.  For some kinds of academic work, the quality and quantity of it is evaluated in some way and this goes into hiring, promotion and salary decisions.  This does not apply to reviews, which are not even systematically reported and certainly never fact-checked (it is not even clear that they could be).

" Standard as in saying "I cannot do XXX because I have to do this review" and reviewing in the office during work hours." Perhaps there are cultural differences at work here: I have never heard anyone say that, ever.  If one of my colleagues cancelled their office hours for a week in order to write a review, it would look very bad.   May I ask whether @cbeleites is or has ever been a tenure track faculty member?  The profile suggests a slighly different job.

@PeteL.Clark: I cannot vanish for a week because of a review, but it is quite normal to tell my supervisor that I need to finish a review tomorrow and therefore the meeting about x or the half-day experiment z will/should if possible take place only the day after. As for the checking, it is quite common that a professor "assigns" reviews to their staff/PhD students. The official way is that they email to the editor the address of one of their students (the less official way is of course to hand over the manuscript and ask for the review). This is my experience also in institutes that did ...

... not ask for a count of reviews at the end of the year. As for how this enters decisions, I'm sure if I'd refuse to do a review my supervisor/professor/director asks for this would enter the decision to (not) renew work contract pretty much the same way refusing to do some measurement would. There's another possibility for checking: some journals in my field publish yearly acknowledgement lists of all reviewers. And of course, the professor as editor of a journal does see whether I refuse to review for that journal.

I decided that I do not want to get into tenure track (or habilitation: the moment you become group leader here you pretty much stop doing research because all you do is writing grant proposals, lead a group, and maybe write a bit at the papers and in the lower group leader levels do reviews. Higher levels/professors probably don't do much reviewing, they assign students to do it ;-)). But the review "customs" are the same with my direct supervisor/small boss who did his habilitation before he came to the research institute. In general, I'd say not doing reviews would influence my job outlook

... similarly to how not helping colleagues if they have questions or need a measurement done with "my" instrument. It may not be discovered, but I think people will realize that I skip this duty. And sure, a group leader may tell me that I should refuse doing reviews because my work time is needed for xyz. On the whole, however, I'm responsible for organizing myself, and I'm expected to find a viable compromise. One "discovery" is that actually spelling out that time is a limited resource (and I have no reputation of leaving early or not doing my share of work) is acceptable.

(This all applies as well to when I was working full-time for research and university institutes. The special situation now is that I reduced to part-time and pretty much completely remote work a couple of months ago in order to start a business, so I do keep a time sheet and have a far better overview of how much time I spend with which activity - which is something also full-time academics can do, and it may trigger interesting discoveries. It certainly does for me)

Thanks for a very detailed and informative response.  I didn't say that not doing reviews would have no consequences whatsoever, but rather that (i) universities do not pay faculty to write reviews and (ii) the amount of credit one gets for reviewing is vague and random, but never rises to the amount of time it takes to do a good job.  I am very sorry to hear that in your neck of the academic woods students must do work that is intended for their advisors or they get dropped....

....That sounds quite negative to me, but there are probably cultural differences at play.  As for me: I refereed exactly one paper as a student, and I don't think my advisor knew about it.  I've graduated three PhDs, and I have passed off one refereeing request to one of them: I thought it would be beneficial for him to read the paper and get the experience.  In my field, one cannot assume that a professor at any level has any students at all, let alone has students qualified to do his work.  But I will say that "forced by your advisor" does not sound like a good synonym for "getting paid".

@PeteL.Clark: "universities do not pay faculty to write reviews" - if renewal of a work contract is endangered if the employee refuses to conduct assigned reviews, this sounds pretty much like writing reviews is a part of the job in one way or another. And while what cbeleites has written fully matches my own experience, you are right in that "the amount of credit one gets or reviewing is vague and random" (in that there is no fixed mapping between, say, "words in a review per year to write" - luckily, in my opinion). I am not sure what is meant by "never rises to the amount of time it ...

... takes to do a good job", though. Indeed, the total effort for writing a single review is considerably lower than the effort required for authoring a single paper. But then, that applies to many of one's tasks as a (research-related) university employee, and merely producing good results in the most substantial of one's tasks while failing at all the smaller tasks can overall certainly not be called "a good job".

@O.R. Mapper: My point was that apparently only a student's continued employment could be jeopardized in this way.  For a faculty member, the review requests just don't come through the university in any way, so there would be no way for the university to distinguish between simply never getting review requests (which does happen to some of my colleagues) and refusing them.  Moreover, if reviewing is explicitly listed in the contracts of European professors, I would be interested to know.  It is certainly not listed in my contract....

Just because you can report something doesn't mean it is a part of your job.  (I could report review requests as well.  I don't because I know that they will not be evaluated in any way.)  Concerning the quoted passage, I meant what I said: one can spend hours or days working on a good review.  Or one could never do any reviews, or one could spent much less time and perhaps (perhaps!) get asked less often.  None of these things have any significant bearing on one's future career, IME.  I have never heard review work brought up in hiring / promotion / raise considerations.  Have you?

By the way, if you are a faculty member whose reviewing responsibilities are viewed in any significant way by your employer, so that you feel that "I get paid by my university for my reviewing" applies to you, it would be great if you could leave an answer to that effect, along with the corroborating details.

@PeteL.Clark: Bachelor/Master students never do reviews. Only members of the research and teaching staff of the universitiy (i.e. professors, postdocs, and doctoral candidates) do. Granted, review requests to professors are not registered anywhere, and it is merely my (possibly mistaken!) guess that actively refusing to accept review requests will, over time, lower the professor's reputation in their community and thus their chances for finding partners for collaboration - which in turn is an obstacle for conducting the work they are paid for. If, however, reviews can not only be ...

... reported to someone (I agree that in itself doesn't mean anything), but are actually considered in the decision for renewal of one's contract, in my opinion this pretty much makes reviews part of the job. I am not sure about how often review work is brought up in hiring considerations (or how often some practical experience in conducting reviews is - reasonably or not - taken for granted after a few years of conducting research). I can indeed say that I have frequently heard the aforementioned statement "I cannot do XXX because I have to do this review", though, so my hunch is that ...

... your experience of never having heard a particular statement is not necessarily representative across the cultural divide you alluded to above. For any specifics, however, I suggest opening a separate question along the lines of "Who learns about a researcher's reviewing activity?"

I appreciate your reply and I may ask a question, if I can think of a good one.  I didn't say or mean to imply that never doing any reviews ever would have zero repercussions.  There is quite a lot of room between that and the claim that it is part of what faculty are paid to do.  I mean, in some sense we are being paid for absolutely all of our academic activities....but this is a pretty weak sense.

In terms of reputation in the community: I have zero information about anyone's refereeing except mine, but if someone who came to me with a good idea for a collaboration and I happened to know that she categorically refused all referee requests...I would be happy to collaborate with her.  What is in it for either of us not to collaborate?

@PeteLClark: "What is in it for either of us not to collaborate?" - self-protection against ending up in a collaboration where all tasks that do not yield an immediate benefit to the other participants end up with you because they are generally unwilling to spend any effort on the not directly rewarding parts of a project?

Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat.

My personal view on the matter is that journal / refereed venue publication should be a collaborative non-pecuniary effort of scientific communities in different fields, in which nobody gets paid for doing specific tasks like reviewing a paper but it is acknowledged that as an academic, some of your time is spent doing that, and as a university, research institute or other entity which garners benefit from scientific research - you would be obliged (morally? socially? legally?) to "contribute reasonably" to this effort.
Of course, this leaves the open question of what would be fair for people who are not employed as researchers. It's not about whether they get compensated, but rather how they can spend time on non-affiliated research activity and not go bankrupt, or work "two jobs", their "day job" and unpaid research-related work. This problem is especially accute for people employed in precarious teaching-only positions in Academia, and for that I might agree some compensation-per-review might be in order - although it's a matter for the academic labor unions to struggle for.

I agree that reviewers provide a valuable and uncompensated service.
I believe most academics, however, are sadly misinformed about the work that goes into publishing an article after the reviewers approve it.
I am a former researcher turned manuscript editor. I have published a first author paper and a second author paper in a biological science. I have worked in medical and scientific publishing for 13 years as an editor and now as a consultant.
Top journals likely have no difficulty getting top reviewers. However, the lesser known journals (some of which I happen to consult for) do not have folks beating down their doors to review articles. They must approach those who may or may not be well-qualified to review an article.
I consider myself the last bastion of reason in the publication process. Just yesterday, I spend 9 hours as a paid consultant on an article that was so illogical, so full of errors, and so ill-referenced that I wondered how the reviewers could have possibly thought it was appropriate for publication. This journal hires me because they know I am capable of critically editing research. I have spoken to them on many occasions about the poor quality of the articles that are approved by reviewers.
My goal as an editor is to prevent embarrassment for the journal and to protect the scholarly literature from garbage. I take this responsibility very seriously.
The first editor spent likely 30 hours researching and rewriting to replace the garbage that was submitted and approved by 3 reviewers, conveying these to the author and then receiving and incorporating the comments from the author. Then the article came to me. I spent another 9 hours editing and pointing out serious errors in fact and consistency. The article needs another rewrite, which the editor will ask the author to do. This process is far from over. The designer will need to craft the illustrations and typeset the article. The production editor will need to manage the final proof process. The publishing process is far from the “nothing” that many scholars believe -- only those who have never seen it from the publishing side would say that.
The time pressure is enormous. The reviewers have approved the article and therefore it was placed in the publication queue. The editors MUST get the article into shape, poor as it is, for publication. We are not the experts, of course, so we have no recourse. I have been stuck on more than one occasion with the task of completely rewriting an illogical, inexpert, poorly referenced article because it was in the queue—the reviewers approved.
The journal pays through the nose for my services and the services of their in-house staff. I despair at the naivete of those who believe that the publisher gets paid for doing "next to nothing."
To force the publishers out of the process will dramatically reduce the quality of the medical and scientific literature. This I cannot abide.

Welcome to Academia SE. We have many questions which could benefit from your insight to the publishing process (e.g., this question of mine). Unfortunately, this question isn’t one of them, as it is asking about why the reviewers do not receive payment, not what the journal staff does and why this deserves payment. Please understand that we follow a strict question-and-answer format and answers that do not address the question will be deleted.

Ah. I felt that I was commenting on the premise of the question, which was "academics do pretty much all the work for free and publishers get the money." I believed the premise of the question to be flawed. My apologies if I spoke out of turn.

[Caveat: I agree that the publishing system is quite flawed. Meanwhile, let us have another look]
While cash has become the most common payment method, it is not the only one. Let us talk about barter:

[...] a system of exchange where goods or services are directly
  exchanged for other goods or services without using a medium of
  exchange, such as money.

In some countries, academia is not the best paid occupation, for instance young researchers. So the reward of researchers is not only money. Let us call the other reward: "knowledge". Knowledge is not a standard good. You cannot say:

I'd like to buy 3 pounds of algebraic skills
Sure! For here or to go?

You can learn by yourself, for yourself, but except for rare beautiful minds, one needs evaluation. As for many creative works, evaluation is difficult without peers, science is a cumulative progress of unassigned tasks. Evaluations are legion: peer-review, seminars, collaborations, teaching.
The first time I submitted a paper, I had almost no idea about peer-review. The first return was an shot in the head. Teached me a lot. I got reward from being peer-reviewed. I learned that the anonymous guys did that for free. So I reviewed. For free.
Wait, no really.

By reviewing, I almost got access to work in progress, to half-finished works, but anyway current trends, 6 months to 2 years before actual publications, quite sooner than other folks. Time is money
By reviewing, I had to sharpen my reading tool, to discover topics at the borders on my knowledge, to read at least cited works. Work is money
By reviewing, I had only once the opportunity to share reviews of a pool of papers with colleagues (ICIP 2003). We learned that one may be wrong, and two others could correct. Minority report is money
By reviewing, I learned conference and journnal habits, priceless for my publications. Efficiency is money
By reviewing, I compensate for others who review my stuff. Payback is money

For these several reasons, and some more, I do reviewing in a barter mind. What is troublesome is that somebody else draws actual money from that. We might be at the verge of a Ponzi pyramid of scientific publishing.

I agree but money is money and publishers get to keep it for doing pretty much nothing. That's not fair.

The short answer is that the publisher can't afford it (the Cost of Knowledge boycott notwithstanding). If reviewers demanded payment en masse either the system will break down or they'll be paid a pittance per review, and reviewers will complain that they're being made fun of (see this for what happened when the New England Journal of Medicine paid $5 per review).
We can get a sense of how much revenue a journal makes by using OA prices & the number of articles it publishes a year. (This has many potential problems, but I ignore them for simplicity). A moderately large journal might publish 100 articles a year. OA prices vary widely but I'll take $1500 as a baseline. Some publishers can go lower by cutting corners e.g. for copyediting and marketing, but that's clearly less than ideal. So the journal might have a revenue of ~$150,000 per year. Some of the revenue goes towards paying for the editorial management system, marketing, production, possibly the editor-in-chief's honorarium if applicable, and so on. Let's assume a net margin of 10%, i.e. a profit of $15,000 a year.
Next let's assume the journal has a rejection rate of 75% (for comparison the most selective journals have rejection rates of over 90%). Assume the journal requires two reviews per manuscript to make a decision. That means the journal needs a total of ~800 reviews a year. If it paid $10 for each of those reviews, that's over half the net margin gone! Viewed from this perspective, NEJM didn't pay $5 for each review because they were making fun of the reviewers. They did so because it was all they could afford to pay.
Finally let's not forget that this is a reasonably large journal - 100 papers / year. There're many smaller journals around, many of which are not indexed by SCI and therefore don't have an impact factor. These journals are almost always loss-making. They only stay afloat because the publisher subsidizes them using the profit margin from their larger journals. If these journals also had to pay for reviews, they would lose even more money. Publishers would be incentivized to shut them down, which hurts research since the papers published in these journals aren't necessarily bad, they just tend to be boring and low novelty. To top it off even this reasonably large journal is probably facing subscription cuts in the current market (see my answer to a different question).
Having said all this, this applies only to journal articles. The sheer volume of reviews required in journal publishing makes it hard to pay reviewers, but if you're reviewing book proposals, you can expect some compensation. You might not receive cash, but you should be able to e.g. get a free book from the publisher's collection.

Can't afford it? https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science

Yup, can't afford it. Elsevier might be a (slight) exception because of its exceptionally high profit margins; other publishers don't do nearly as well. But you can still do the calculations. That article quotes Elsevier as receiving 1.5 million submissions a year. At 2 reviewers per submission, how much can it afford to pay reviewers before its entire profit is wiped out? The fact that no publisher - including those started by people complaining about publishing - pays its reviewers is a giveaway as to that idea's feasibility.

Slight exception? Did you read the article? Did you see their annual revenue? Elsevier owns a quarter of the scientific journal market, and combined with two other similar companies they hold half the market. Their profit margins are obscene. It's ridiculous to say they can't afford it. Smaller journals are not the problem here. They don't have the power to hold entire universities hostage, these companies do.

You are incorrect. There are approximately 2.5 million articles published every year (http://www.stm-assoc.org/2015_02_20_STM_Report_2015.pdf; this is likely to be an underestimate since it only counts English articles). Elsevier publishes 400,000 of those, giving it a market share of 16%. Elsevier's profit margins are not entirely due to journals - the company also operates Scopus, ScienceDirect, etc. You can get a sense of what journal margins are like by looking at another publisher's annual reports, e.g. Wiley's.

Incorrect regarding what? Elsevier's annual revenue is over £6b. Market share and amount of journals owned by Elsevier are two different things.

Your market share statement is incorrect. If you're going by "number of journals" then their market share is even smaller. The linked report quotes 28100 journals, of which Elsevier has 2500. That's 8.9%.

Let us continue this discussion in chat.

This is the same question that I often think. From your point of view, yes, you are right in your place. Why should not we get money for review? However, main point is who will decide to give money? And how the amount would be fixed? Based on what? Who will judge? Editor-in-chief, or other person? Since we don't have the clear understanding and methodology for these, there is no money for reviewers.
And regarding publishers, apart from reviews, there are Publishing staffs who are responsible for handling the post acceptance process. Thus, money is required for publisher for the salary of these staffs, also for the journal advertising. Conference is another typical issue. Following this way, you can find where money goes.
Another important aspect, sometimes research can't be measured by money, however, research produces a huge amount of money.


text:
Is it acceptable to keep extending medical leave to prolong insurance coverage, when one has no intent of returning?
Two years ago I enrolled in a very high-ranked program in field X. Partway through the program, I developed severe health problems which affected my memory and cognitive function, and which made it difficult to learn the required material. In addition, I also found I was not that interested in the research itself (although the aforementioned memory/cognitive problems were far more damaging to my learning than the lack of interest).
Due to the combination of these two factors, I sought medical leave to deal with the health problems, which was granted in March. Around July/August, the problem was partially alleviated, and I have mostly been feeling better, and have decided to switch to another field of study Y. I talked with my adviser about my situation and explained the health problems, and he asked me if I was still planning on re-entering the program, and I told him that I felt that I might perform better working in field Y; we mutually agreed to terminate the leave, and I am currently applying to a second round of graduate schools.
This is where things get slightly more complicated. The health insurance I had under the medical leave was far better than my ordinary health insurance, and my mother has (since August) been trying to persuade me to extend my leave as long as legally possible, potentially up until Fall 2015 enrollment. According to doctors I talked to at the previous institution, it is not uncommon for students to take up to three years on medical leave, so this is AFAIK legally possible. In the interim time, she wants me to tell my adviser that I am still dealing with medical issues, and am not yet able to decide on re-entering the institute's program in field X, during which I can apply to other schools in field Y and enroll in one of them for Fall 2015. I have not yet told her that I have previously spoken with my adviser and agreed to end the leave.
My question is:

Under this set of circumstances, was I right in contacting my adviser and terminating leave, instead of extending it up until Fall 2015 enrollment at another institution?

Personally, my gut instinct towards my mother's proposal is that it is effectively financial blackmail, arguably dishonest, and would sour post-leave relations with my adviser. However, I am generally bad at gauging these sort of questions, and seek advice here as to what the correct course of action would have been. My mother has told me that the institute legally has to extend my medical leave as long as I am otherwise in good standing and still expressing desire to eventually re-enroll, and that by doing otherwise, I am potentially burning academic bridges behind me and making it more difficult for me to find a new graduate position. In any case, I hope that this question is sufficiently generalizable that it can help people who find themselves in similar circumstances regarding the handling of academic medical leave.
Edit
To clarify, I was not paid a stipend during leave, and the insurance premium was paid for by the institution.

To clarify: were you receiving a stipend or any kind of pay while on leave?  Were you paying your own insurance premiums, or were they paid by the institution?

I added the United States tag, since I think that you are there and this is an issue that is extremely country-specific.  If I am correct, please re-tag with the right country.

In your situation, I would have been honest with your advisor about leaving, but not signed any paperwork to terminate the leave.

@NateEldredge: I was not receiving a stipend. The insurance coverage was paid for by the institution.

@PeteL.Clark: Edited the question title to address your question.

Assuming that you are in the United States, the ethics of the situation are not clear-cut, because the health care system is such a mess.  It may not be clear to either you or your former advisor who is actually paying for the health care. For example, the school may have outsourced responsibility to a third-party insurance solution, or it might be covered by some unusual provision of the new health law, or the FMLA, or who knows what.  Honestly, I have no idea, and probably you can't find out without detailed interactions with HR, and even they might not be in compliance with laws and regulations and might not even know it.
It's also the case that, while there is a clear conservative ethical solution of "better safe than sorry," it's not actually clear that it is the right thing to do, given the amount of financial and/or medical problems that can be caused by a short period uncovered in the US.  A colleague of mine, for example, who was actually continually covered with a good plan, had problems getting critical medical care for a child because her plan was late in handling paperwork on a year-to-year transition.  On the flip side, I kept using some of my university's medical services for years after I had left, because I asked about it and was told that my alumni status meant it was still OK: it turned out that I wasn't supposed to, but nobody including me knew that.
So it's a pretty mess to sort through.  How should you deal with it?
Let's lay out some principles:

You really don't want to burn bridges.  This means that if you decide that it is important to try to stay on the same plan, then you should make sure that your advisor is OK with it.  Some professors I know would tell you to do it, and some would be uncomfortable.  What you don't want to do is have the professor be uncomfortable and only find out later.
Second, how critical is the difference between the plans?  Are you potentially facing many thousands of dollars in extra cost or being forced to go untreated for your medical conditions?  If the difference is relatively small, then let it go.  If the difference could destroy your health or life, then it's appropriate to try to use the options that are available.

None of this is ethically squeaky clean, unfortunately, and I wish that it were so.  Unfortunately, because health care coverage is so tightly linked to employment in the United States, we have a system that sometimes forces people to choose between problematic options.
In sum: if you can afford to drop down a grade in health care, that's the ethically best choice.  If you can't, make sure your professor is OK with you taking advantage of something that is permissible under the system but ethically questionable.

Thank you for your answer. For principle 1, I did not ask my adviser about the prospect of extending leave with an unofficial intent to not return, so in retrospect I probably should have considered that option. For principle 2, I am facing some moderately large healthcare costs, but not to the scale that it could destroy my health or life.

@DumpsterDoofus Right in the middle range where it's least clear, it sounds like.  If the paperwork has already been processed then that's probably that.  If not, you might still consider talking with your advisor.

You made the correct decision, and the only ethical decision.  Your leave was granted on the premise that you would return.  When that ceased to be true, you correctly terminated your relationship with the program, ending your medical leave benefit.
As far as burning academic bridges, you'd do a far more effective job of bridge-burning if you flim-flammed your old program into paying for more leave, then told them you wouldn't be returning.  Although that sort of information should be confidential, I guarantee you it'd get around unofficially, perhaps not as a statement of the facts, but as, "this is someone you do not need and do not want."

I had this situation when I was in grad school: I went on leave for one quarter, didn't receive any stipend, and had to write a check for my health insurance premium for that term.  This was about 6 years ago, and it's possible that ACA changed something, but I haven't heard of anything like that.

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text:
Do Machine Learning and Vision Labs outside the USA hire non-student,non-postdoc Research Assistants?
I am currently on a visiting research assistant position at a US university for a year. My visa will not allow me to start a similar position in the US after this stint is over, and I am looking for another yearlong research position before I start a Masters/PhD program from Fall 2015.
My current research involves Vision with Graphical Models. I am interested in pursuing research in Vision, or Computational Biology involving Graphical Models and Machine Learning methods.
So is it possible to work as a Research Assistant in this field, outside the USA, without a doctorate, and without being a student?

This question asks for a list of resources, and is therefore not suitable for the Stack Exchange format.

With the new edits this seems like a perfectly good question. It should re-opened

Don't you find industry more lucrative than academia?

@user10694 lucrative in the sense of money or contribution to the human kind?

Short answer to the question "is it possible?": yes, it is. E.g. in Germany, we can employ a person having some academic degree. The more important question is: What would you be willing to earn because at least in Germany, academic position usually are not the best paid ones.
If you just want to earn money and get experience, I would recommend a job in industry. If you really want to learn and develop yourself, and you don't have to earn much, look around in Europe. If you bring your own money (e.g. DAAD scholarship), you could start in my lab ;o).

Ah thanks a lot! I heard from a friend that in the UK you can work in paid research positions only if you're at least pursuing a PhD. I am interested in "learning and development" rather than making money right now, because I'm planning to start a PhD program late next year, and it would make sense to stay in touch with research in the meantime. "Enough money" would be fine for me. So if I apply to a lab/professor, will that person help with the DAAD stuff, or do I have to apply on my own? (BTW, I'm an Indian citizen, not a US one)

I had a PhD candidate from Egypt in my lab and I helped preparing the DAAD stuff, but still he had to do most of the work. You can check out their website regarding India at http://www.daaddelhi.org/en/

Thanks for the link. I took a look at the available funding schemes for Indian nationals, and it looks like there is no suitable scheme for someone in my position. The only funding I could get would be if I went for a short term internship (2-3 months), or for a Masters programme. So looks like DAAD is no good here. Thanks again for your time.

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text:
What is the differences between purchasing Harvard Business Review PDF and reading the article?
I was reading this Harvard Business Review article, The Making of an Expert and they were offering a PDF purchase.
Are there major differences between the content of the PDF and the free article?

Many publisher offer a teaser - an excerpt of an article - as an advert for the full article. The teaser may contain the abstract, some graphics, maybe a lay summary or press release about the article, and so on.
In the case of your Harvard Business Review article, they let you read the first eight paragraphs, which gives you an idea of the article's content and style. The full article is about five times longer than that excerpt.
If you buy the pdf, you get the full article, together with its references, and any supplementary information. (though in this particular case, there are neither references nor supplementary information).
Note that five pages of text can get turned into nine pages within a journal, thanks to graphics and other materials that appear in the PDF, but don't appear in a text-only version: for example, in the PDF of the article in question, the first page consists of a single image.  The text-only version may or may not contain the side-bars that appear in the PDF ("Things to Look Out for When Judging Expertise").

Thank you for your answer. But, I can somehow see 5 pages of the article (rather than 8 paragraphs). Though in the book purchase page, it mentions there are 9 pages. What is going on?

Oh, I understand, I have a "limited access" account which grants me 4 free articles every month (including the one above). It still doesn't explain the differences in the number of pages (5 pages vs. 9 pages)

@user256021 I've updated the answer with a new final paragraph that addresses the difference in page length.

EnergyNumbers' answer is quite complete. In this particular case of the HBR article, the link you provide leads to the first paragraphs of the article and not to the complete article. Notice that, after the first eight paragraphs (as well as at the beginning), the image of a key appears. This signifies that the rest (and likely most) of the article is "locked". Should you be interested to read the whole article, you are instructed to buy it - or, in the event that you are a HBR subscriber, to simply login.


text:
What steps should I follow in order to be able to start conducting research if there's no sign of support within my department?
My understanding of research is that it's a way to find solutions/answers to questions/problems in a certain subfield of a bigger discipline, which in my case would be Computer Science (honestly, it'd be more like Computer Engineering).
I think I know, however, that if these problems and solutions are too simple or banal, the whole process of doing research is irrelevant because

surely somebody else has already worked in that, and
there's no sense in working in something that won't contribute a significant amount of knowledge to the discipline.

This means that in order to get worthy (or at least relevant) problems to research, you must be at the cutting edge of the field so that you have an idea of what's not yet known and you can start working on it. Am I right?
If I am, that sounds kind of complicated. I have heard that I should read lots of papers in an area of my interest and work from there, but I'm sincerely not sure about how to start doing even this. I have access to the ACM Digital Library, for example, but I don't know what to search for, what to read, or in what order to do so.
I am alone in this, for my university is weak in research and no professors seem to be interested in it. Do you have any tips, or any specific set of steps that you followed to get into research?

You said "no professors seem to be interested in it". Have you approached them and asked your question yet? The standard answer to this question is to ask your advisor to help.

I once asked one, and he said that I should already have a problem for which I wanted to research a solution. I haven't tried with others though.

my university is weak in research — Move.

It'll certainly be easier if you can find a professor willing to supervise you, so I strongly suggest that you keep trying on that front. But even if you can't, all is not lost! Here are the steps I recommend. Note that this may not be the only way to get started, but it's a way that works for many of my students:
Step 1: Start by identifying an area of interest
A good way to start is to identify a topic in class that interests you. Approach the professor for that class and ask him/her to suggest some related papers for further reading.
Step 2: Get a better view of this area
Thoroughly reading those papers may take a while, since this is new to you. Don't be discouraged by this! After you have a reasonable understanding of the papers suggested by your professor, start to branch out: look up the papers cited by/citing those papers to get a broader view.
Step 3: Reproduce some existing results
Somewhere in all this reading, you'll come across something that really interests you: a proof, a design of a system, a software implementation of an idea. See if you can reproduce this result (by going through the steps of the proof, writing your own software, running a simulation, etc.) Again, this may be more difficult than you expect; don't get discouraged.
Step 4: Do something new
Now that you've reproduced someone else's results, can you extend them? Is there a small variation on the system design that could improve the results, an interesting application in another domain, a stronger result you can prove? Get to work.
Step 5: Communicate your results
Congrats, you are now almost a bona fide researcher! Go show the professor who recommended the papers what you've been working on. A big part of doing research is communicating the results, once you have something to show. (And to get into a good grad school, you'll need to impress some potential letter writers.)
You should also consider writing a draft of a paper and soliciting feedback on it.

If the main goal here is to learn to "think like a researcher", then you only need to work on a problem that's new to you; it doesn't necessarily need to be at the cutting edge of the field. Indeed, there may be pedagogical value in having the ability to compare your solutions with those found by more experienced researchers. Of course, your results may not be publishable, unless you find something interesting - but at your career stage, that doesn't necessarily matter. You still will have something to discuss/write about in applications for grad school, and you will have learnt a lot!

How to get to know what to research, possible approaches:

Find supervisors that do things you consider interesting, ask them
what could you do for them.
Find research groups that do things you consider interesting, ask
    them what could you do for them.
Find a research project that is interesting, work in that project.
Find a problem that is interesting and not solved yet, work on that
    problem. Generally problems are either new or hard, sometimes both.
    Sometimes (often? always?) solving an easy problem in a proper way
    turns to be very hard. Proving it's the right way to solve that
    problem is very often much harder.
Find what is interesting for you, then find problems in that area
    and find funding to solve those problems.
Find a business model, if you are not certain about what is interesting for you, then consider what is interesting for everybody else, so interesting that they would be willing to pay for it.
Find what are you good at and it may become your passion.
Find current trends in research, hot topics, there should be problems, money and success there.

In the end it doesn't really matter what you find first, you have to find everything else (a supervisor, funding, etc.) however the order in which you find some things will probably determine what you find later, i.e. the information you get and the decisions you make direct your search throughout the process.
How to find things? Searching. It's hard and tedious, there are no shortcuts, AFAIK.
The only advice I can give is: "Don't make the problem, find it", problems should not be "created" or "invented" to do research, some situation may not have been perceived as a problem before, that's fine, you check that situation and change it, hopefully for the better. Research in computer engineering consists in using (sometimes making) computers and/or software to go from point A to point B (as a very naïve description), hopefully point B will be better under some perspective than point A, but what I would like to stress is that point A should be real. It may not be common (that's fine) but it has to be real.
Point A is in the world, not in any book, there may be books (papers, etc.) that describe point A, that reach to point A (from a previous one), etc. but point A is in the real world and this should be never forgotten. The most theoretical part of computer science doesn't care whether A is real or not, that work is important by setting the foundations of things that will be used in the future, when we reach to a point A where that is relevant (if that ever happens), it's a very hard and uncertain type of research, that I don't personally like (for me) and that you don't seem to pursue. Therefore, for us, point A is in the real world, out there.
This is important because that means that we can access point A from the world and from the way it relates with other things. There may be people interested on that, research groups, research projects, papers describing it, business to do in solving it, skills that are relevant for it, trends that involve it, etc. Those are paths to find it, to get to it.
So this is your first research topic, you are in ignorance, point A, you want to find a research topic, point B (that will later become A). How do you do it? I offer you this "relational approach", try to find a better one. After all, we are only talking about information, searching, maybe it's too soon to make a search engine for this, but maybe someone can make a search methodology that will probably involve using conventional search engines.

I would start by seeing if your university has an undergraduate research program or runs summer projects with researchers in any formalised way. If they do this is an excellent way to get started in research as you have an experienced researcher to help guide you and it helps create useful contacts if you are interested in a future in academia.
If your university has no formal program you can email professors in a field you are interested in to see if they any projects you could do over the summer. Keep preserving if the first people you contact have nothing, they are probably busy and if they do not expect a summer student they are unlikely to have a project prepared.
It is probably helpful if you have a vague idea of what you want to research into. Not necessarily a specific project but at least a field or sub-topic. This not only helps you identify academics with similar interests but shows you are keen and helps them formulate a project for you.
If your university is very weak at research one option may be to look at doing a summer project at another university which is more research focused. This is not ideal as knowing how to contact will be harder and there may be extra costs such as accommodation, but it is a possibility.

Not sure about CS, but at least in mathematics in the US, there is a large network of summer research programs for undergrads called REUs. They are usually well funded and pay the expenses of the students, and a modest stipend. US students usually have priority (most programs are funded by the government). The support of your professors would be essential to get accepted.


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How do mathematicians rank other mathematicians?
This is something I've never been satisfied with. If two people are playing chess, and one person consistently beats the other person, then it makes sense to say that one is better than the other at chess. But in math, you have people who are working on different problems, so what metrics are used to rank mathematicians and say, "This mathematician is stronger than that one"?
I can think of a few:

Mathematician A published more papers.
Mathematician A published papers in more prestigious journals.
Mathematician A proved more results that are of interest to other mathematicians
Mathematician A solved a problem that other mathematicians have tried to solve.
Mathematician A is a better collaborator -- perhaps works more quickly or gets along well with other people.

For the last two, the issue seems to be that "quality" of mathematics depends on working on what others are interested in. The whole thing doesn't really make much sense to me. If you come up with a problem that interests you, solve it, and write it up, isn't that a success? The reason I ask is because mathematicians seem to care a lot about the rankings. I grew up with the idea that mathematicians at higher-ranked universities are "better" than mathematicians at lower-ranked universities. The only way I can think of that makes sense is if two mathematicians are working on the same problem and one mathematician comes up with the answer first.

Does it make sense to rank mathematicians at all? Just because someone decides to care about it doesn't mean it makes sense. Might be worth thinking as well about the models used by, say, US News to rank institutions; recently it's been revealed that the models are specifically designed to place certain institutions at the top, so they're entirely tautological.

Math departments have to pick job candidates from literally hundreds of applicants. Also, people have to decide who gets grants, tenure, etc.

@cgb5436, yes, "ranking" has some coerced-practical uses... but that doesn't mean that any of your choices is really definitive. Just that people "need to justify" decisions by citing some numbers. Sure, we can have pseudo-precise "rubrics", but it's not really possible to completely-dispassionately compare very different things/people.

@cgb5436 Hiring isn't the same as ranking. Tenure evaluates an individual, no need to rank. Grants are based on the content of the grant which includes the ability of the applicant to do what they say they'll do, but doesn't require you to rank people.

"The reason I ask is because mathematicians seem to care a lot about the rankings." Really? That hasn't been my experience at all. Certainly there may be some consensus about who the outstanding researchers are in a given subfield, but that doesn't mean that mathematicians generally go around ranking their colleagues on some imaginary leaderboard. I'm sorry, but this seems to be yet another variation of your persistently held idea (across many questions) that there is some sort of secret ranking/method/procedure that hiring committees use and being privy to it is key to success in academia.

@BryanKrause, actually, in my direct observation, the "rubrics" (attempts at unbiased objectivity) do lead to "ranking" by at most a few numbers. For tenure, it's just the person themself... oooooops, except for comparisons to other recently-tenured or not-tenured people. I agree, and I promote what you say, but it does not quite fly. People don't want to have to read the papers of their candidates, but, rather rely on opinions of far-away big shots.

I'm not saying that mathematicians are obsessed over ranking others. But it definitely seems to matter. For example, at my previous institution, one faculty member was talking about how hard it was to recruit someone from a lower-ranked department. Basically, it's a lot harder to move "up" to a higher-ranked department, because high-ranked departments can hire from other high-ranked departments.

"I grew up with the idea that mathematicians at higher-ranked universities are "better" than mathematicians at lower-ranked universities." In contrast to that, I grew up and studied maths without the idea that something like a higher-ranked university does even exist. (Obviously, I didn't know anything about the academic culture outside my home country back then.)

I was under the impression from the post you were talking about individual rankings; but the comments seem about department rankings. Which do you want answers about?

@Dawn like in hiring committees, how do they decide who gets A, B, or C? http://theprodigalacademic.blogspot.com/2010/05/search-committee-math-or-what-does-it.html I guess the key difference is publication record.

@cgb5436 - the hiring example is not a strict ranking problem - there's no need for certainty in a strict linear order.  Instead, it's a rough evaluation problem - you're just trying to give everyone a confidence interval on a line, a much easier problem because you have error tolerance built in.

@cgb5436 - Also, for hiring purposes, a department is not looking to hire "an excellent mathematician" in some vague generalized sense - rather they're trying to hire a person that would make a high net contribution to their department, and that's an evaluation that has more specific (and local) criteria.

@AlexanderWoo The departments are so unclear about what they are looking for. How can I know what they are looking for so I can show them that I have what they are looking for?

@paulgarrett Sure, I suppose I initially took the idea of "ranking" too literally, as in assigning someone a rank number that would tell you how many spots above or below some other person is, rather than roughly grouping people as "you're below average/about average/above average compared to faculty obtaining tenure at peer institutions in the last unit time".

@cgb5436 Questions usually work best when you ask about your actual problem, rather than your perceived solution. So, if your actual problem is "how can I know what a hiring department is looking for so that I can show them", asking instead "how do mathematicians rank other mathematicians" appears to be a case of the XY problem, and so far you've gotten a bunch of comments and at least one answer, but I don't think that answer will actually help you with your real question.

@cgb5436 - You can't.  Different departments are looking for different things in ways that are hard to communicate.  You apply to lots of jobs and hope that one of them is looking for what you have.

@paulgarrett That means I have to impress the bigshots...

Downvoting questions without providing any explanation whatsoever should be a forbidden practice, in my opinion.

@cgb5436 The downvote tooltip says "This question does not show any research effort; it is unclear or not useful" - I suspect downvotes for this question mostly follow into the "it is unclear" category. The comment thread covers this pretty well. Overall, people who do try to explain their downvotes often receive a lot of abuse. We get a lot of flags of comments as "rude/abusive" when they've only politely explained their downvote; we have to delete a lot of rude and abusive comments in response to polite explanations of downvotes when askers take it personally.

@paulgarrett for instance, isn't ranking/judging being done when deciding whether someone should get a teaching reduction?

@cgb5436, in my experience, permanent teaching reductions are unusual, but, yes, to get such a thing requires having leverage of some sort. At the same time, many very good mathematicians positively enjoy (advanced?) teaching, and would not want a reduction of the amount of (interesting) teaching they do.

Badly.  Ranking people on producing useful things does not work with any kind of accuracy.  It only works for games and sports because they are specifically designed to rank people.  Even then, the rankings have poor predictive power in many cases.

:) Thinking of "moneyball" in baseball, for example? :)

Ranking by height can be done accurately. It just isn't useful by and large.

I have a feeling that the question was misunderstood. It is not uncommon for mathematicians to rank other mathematicians. In fact, almost anything in mathematics, whether it is universities, journals or people, are often being ranked for multiple purposes. For instance, most mathematicians will agree that the annals of mathematics, JAMS or inventiones are ranked higher than most other journals in pure mathematics, there are official rankings for universities (e.g. shanghai ranking), and, while ranking mathematicians is harder than ranking journals and universities, it is happening all the time (e.g. in hiring committees, prize committees, grants selections etc.).
It is not obvious how to rank one mathematician over another, and from my experience everyone has a different way of measuring the contribution of someone's work to mathematics. I think all of the metrics that you mentioned are evaluated and the preference of one over another depends completely on the individual (note that they may also depend on your field, for instance people who work in certain areas of combinatorics are often expected to publish more than people who work in, say, algebraic topology).
At the end of the day people look at your papers and where you published them, your grants and prizes, your university and often they also ask for opinions of other mathematicians in the field or the opinion of other mathematicians they trust. Therefore, anything you do to increase the quality of one of those aspect will be in your favor. Other than that you just need luck, you can never guarantee being the top choice of any committee.

Let me begin by saying that in the phrase "rank other mathematicians" there are already two misconceptions. First, I don't think anyone tries to "rank", in terms of putting in an absolute order, except in the context of ranking candidates for a position, which is quite different and involves consideration of many factors, most of which are irrelevant to your question. But do we (informally and privately) evaluate? Yes, I imagine most people do.
Secondly, one can't really evaluate mathematicians, only their output. There are many reasons why someone who is (insofar as we can really make the comparison) a "better" mathematician than someone else might still achieve less, either in total or per unit time.

Having said all that, how do we evaluate other mathematicians' output? Any such evaluation is necessarily somewhat subjective - much more like comparing artists than comparing chess players.
As you suggest, it is about what they have published, and often where their papers appear, who else has worked on the same problems, etc. There are fairly good reasons for this.
It is much easier to make these evaluations for research that is close to your own area of expertise. Here you can read the papers and get a clear sense of how impressive they are, both in terms of significance of results and in terms of how difficult or brilliant the proofs are. Of course, there is still the difficulty with collaborative papers that you cannot tell who contributed what. But you can perhaps get a sense from the overall output, e.g. if it is almost all collaboration with one or two more senior people that it may not actually be as impressive as it appears.
Now if you are looking at someone further from your own area, you are probably reliant on quality of journals as a proxy for this. This is much better than trying to evaluate the papers yourself. The journal they end up in depends on the (subjective, somewhat unreliable, but informed) opinion of experts in the area, and this is normally a better guide than your own (subjective, somewhat unreliable and uninformed) opinion. There is the disadvantage, however, that it is much easier to get into top journals in some areas of math than in others.
Whether someone else has worked on the problem before, or is interested in the results, and who that someone else is, is very relevant. This is because the purpose of writing a paper is to advance mathematical knowledge, not to prove you can do mathematics. If other people are interested, then you are doing good mathematics, and if other (good) people have worked on the problem in the past without solving it, then you must be doing impressive mathematics. If you come up with your own problem and solve it - an "answer to a question no-one asked", to quote Ned Flanders - then that probably doesn't really advance mathematical knowledge, and gives no idea of how difficult it was. If you come up with enough problems, eventually one will turn out to be relatively easy, and if no-one else is interested there is no competition with anyone else trying to solve it first. It is the problems already known to be difficult and believed to be interesting (to paraphrase William Morris) that are worth solving.

" If you come up with your own problem and solve it - an "answer to a question no-one asked", to quote Ned Flanders - then that probably doesn't really advance mathematical knowledge" That is very much a matter of mathematical taste. Certainly coming up with a good question that no-one has thought of asking before can be a non-trivial contribution that advances mathematical knowledge. You're mainly taking the perspective of a problem-solver, which, while valid, is certainly not the only perspective one can take. (ctd)

You talk about "advancing mathematical knowledge", which I agree is the main goal here, but then you measure that by the difficulty of the problem being solved. These are two very different things. Certainly, if you solve a difficult problem that many people have tried to solve before, then you advance mathematical knowledge. But the converse is not true: you can equally well achieve this by doing something simple or by asking a new question, even if it turns out not to be difficult to answer. The idea that progress in mathematics is measured by the difficulty of proofs is very much false imo.

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What to mention as funding source as a graduate student funded by the school?
I am a PhD student in mathematics, and I will be submitting my first paper soon. Part of the guideline is to denote whether I’m being funded (“supported”) and by whom. I know that papers acknowledge NSF grants and fellowships and such, but in my case I do not personally have a grant or fellowship. I’m simply being funded by the school, and I guess that money comes from my advisor’s research grant. In this case, do I acknowledge the support from my advisor’s grant, or do I not need to mention it since I am not the primary recipient of the grant?

Congrats on your first submission! Make sure to acknowledge correctly your institution, also: sometimes you have to type the name of your institution in a very particular format, to make sure it will be correctly referenced by various indexed on-line collection. Again, your advisor should be able to help you with that, but you can also look how your colleagues write it in their papers.

You should ask your advisor.  They will be able to tell you if your funding comes from a grant, and if so, they can give you the details you need to report (e.g. oftentimes a grant ID number is required).
If indeed your funding is coming from a research grant, then it may very well be important to disclose this.  Not only for the journal, but it may also be required under the terms of the grant, and failing to do so may in principle jeopardize your advisor's funding.
In general, the obligation to acknowledge grant funding extends to everyone who receives support from the grant, not just the PI or "primary recipient".  Ideally your advisor would have told you about this when you first started to receive funding from the grant, but this often gets overlooked.

It might also be that if you are unfunded, that the page charges will be waived (or maybe reduced).

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