The recent surge in language-oriented AIs has created a significant problem for research journals: Increasing numbers of submissions with increasing lower quality. As a response, several journals have announced journal submission fees to dam(n) the flood. I’m a bit at a loss as to how this is going to help. Using money as a gatekeeper still reeks of colonialism to me.
So the hypothesis is that journal fees (independent variable, under control of a journal) leads to (correlates or even causes) better quality of submitted articles (dependent variable). We need to test this, obviously, but it is not very intuitive to me. People and institutions with money will just keep submitting, others with less money will do so less. Using wealth as a predictor for research article quality is, well, see above.
The most important predictor that I would hypothesize is time. How much time did a person truly invest in their contribution to an article? So the primary independent variable I would focus on is number of submissions and limit that: Simply don’t allow more than X submissions in a given year, and so my research hypothesis, the submission quality will go up.
Limiting by count rather than money may be harder to operationalize, but I don’t think we have much of a choice.
As a meta remark, to students from my research class, this seems like a typical example of jumping to solutions without understanding the problem first. Starting with a hypothesis is a poor research approach. Instead you should first develop a theory which creates hypotheses like “require fee” or “limit count” to see which experiment to choose.
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