The $450 question: Should journals pay peer reviewers? - Science Magazine

For many busy working scientists, receiving yet another invitation from an academic journal to peer review yet another manuscript can trigger groans.

But last week, researchers at a scholarly publishing conference debated a provocative question: Should peer reviewers be paid.

The issue has drawn greater attention as peer reviewers have become harder to recruit.

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic began last year, producing a blizzard of submissions, journals were reporting “reviewer fatigue”: In 2013, journal editors had to invite an average of 1.9 reviewers to get one completed review; by 2017, the number had risen to 2.4, according to a report by Publons, a company that tracks peer reviewers’ work.

The pair contended that paying reviewers could ameliorate some widely noted flaws of peer review, including long delays in receiving reviews that too often lack depth and substance.

Heathers: Peer review is treated the same way as every other common resource before it’s regulated—air, water, land, etc.

A 2018 Publons survey found that only 17% of respondents selected cash or in-kind payment as something that would make them more likely to accept review requests.

Vines: There are efforts to reward peer review, and it goes on all the time.

A.M.: There is no practical way to pay reviewers without wrecking peer review?

There are some articles that are so intricate that perhaps only a handful of experts on Earth can review them.

Of course, an APC or article-processing charge [required by some journals to make articles free to read on publication] is only paid by the articles that get accepted for publication, and the cost of reviewing the rejected ones is loaded into the APC.

For a journal with a 25% acceptance rate, they have to review four articles in order to find the one that they accept.

A.M.: In an APC publishing model, where reviewers must be paid even if they reject an article, but the journal earns no revenue—as an editor, you would therefore want to find reviewers who will accept an article so that you can recoup your costs through an APC.

The prospect of a quick buck would also tempt some reviewers to comment on articles well outside their areas, or to tell editors what they think they want to hear so they get hired again.

J.H.: The idea that paid review is somehow inevitably gamed by dishonest reviewers … assumes that an editor will hire them sight unseen … in the absence of looking at the work they produced.

Before the debate, a straw poll of 64 audience members recorded 41% for paying peer reviewers and 59% against.

Whether journal editors across the board will remain equally pessimistic about payments remains to be seen.

At the Taylor & Francis Group, a small selection of journals focused on pharmaceutical development pay peer reviewers for accelerated reviews, says Jennifer McMillan, director of communications.