I understand you're also helping colleagues, but in the case of wanting peers to review your paper it's a simple matter to send emails with PDFs to those peers.

But I'm not sure how this world works anyway. I read about research in books that refer to it, Hacker News and Reddit that links to it, etc. but never in a magazine. Yet the magazines seems to be what everyone is aiming for to be published in, they are apparently some big deal. I suppose there is some reason why "peer reviews" are not between "peers".

The peer review is supposed to be anonymous. So what happens in practice is you upload your paper to a central website from which a set of reviewers can download a copy for review and give feedback with comments, anonymously. This is also why there is a login system: to ensure the comments are from actual peers which have their own papers up in the repository too.

I'm not saying this is the best way to do it, just how it is now.

Also, if you want someone to just read your paper, sure, email is fine. One does not exclude the other. The central system is there to ensure that should any doubt arise over the quality of the work, the feedback can be read and interpreted.

Again, there might be many other more high-tech solutions out there to solve this problem.

Ah, anonymity is the issue here. That explains it a bit. Thanks for replying.

The process, as I've experienced it, is:

1. Authors write paper.

2. Authors send paper to journal or conference address. (...using a web form)

3. The editor gives the paper a once-over and decides to send it out for review.

4. (Editor sends links to reviewers, who log in, read paper, and leave comments.)

5. Lather, rinse, repeat until accept/reject decision is made.

They used to send pdfs, but now use web systems for roughly the same reason HN isn't a mailing list.

Note: the last time anyone let me review a paper was a long time ago, when they sent paper forms to fill out. Parts in (...) are how I assume it works now.