alt Hacker News> All reviewers, Action Editors and Editors-in-Chief for TMLR are unpaid volunteers.
He is not an unpaid volunteer.
He's an associate professor at the prestigious Carnegie Mellon University. He is not paid by the journal, but he is paid a salary by the university, and the university expects that a small part of his academic work is to serve as an editor in academic journals.
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> and the university expects that a small part of his academic work is to serve as an editor in academic journals.
Some do it for the CV, some do it for science, but I don't know any Uni that expects them to be editor more than they expect them to edit the Wikipedia or write popular science. Cool if you do it, but not expected.
Elsevier, springer and mdpi have literally billions dollars in profit thanks to this free labor. Why would university pay for performing labor for for-profit companies? The system is broken and we should name things as they are - it’s free labor.
There are much easier and more prestigious ways of fulfilling university service requirements than reviewing and editing for TMLR, so I think it is correct in spirit to label it as volunteering.