Should journals pay peer reviewes?
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
Bring in a culture of paying peer reviewers, and suddenly authors (or the learned society) will be under more pressure to get more grant money to pay the new publication costs. Also, as someone who works in academia on an occasional basis, taking years off from funded positions at a time, I appreciate being able to write the occasional article on my own time and get it published without paying hundreds and hundreds of euro out of my own pocket -- fields with pay-to-publish traditions make it hard for non-permanent faculty to contribute.
The cost is borne one way or the other, the $500 is a matter of comp, not cost.
If someone is going to review your work, that's an act of very material labour. That they are not really compensated for it, at all, is inconsistent with the basic premise of labour and comp.
You would not be a researcher if you weren't comped in some way, so the absence and/or misalignment of comp is the issue.
It's not free to publish and have 2 reviewers (!!) there is a very material cost that you're just not paying.
Allocating at $1K cost for publication more accurately reflects the labour involved in checking it out (at least a little bit).
It'd seem to me a lot of folks might want to take up the $500/review as a job to earn some reasonable income, they might even get good at it.
It's entirely plausible that one of the 'dysfunctions' of science is 'not enough review' and it's simply because there is no incentive structure for it at all.
We pay people for literally every other function in life. Doctors are paid to 'save lives' even though there is a moral obligation. The notion that we don't pay people for academic work seems odd.
Perhaps journals could identify the papers with the most promise and offer payment for review, or something like that.
These sort of things may be more common in the humanities versus hard STEM, but in my own field peer review is not generally seen as drudgery or exploitation.
> It's not free to publish and have 2 reviewers (!!) there is a very material cost that you're just not paying.
Who is the "you"? The author I think? So you do know that article authors don't get paid, you're talking as if they are the "customer" that should be paying?
Generally, for non-open-source journals, which are still the majority in most fields, it is subscribers, the readers, who are the customers who pay the costs (plus enough for a healthy profit for the publisher). (Usually university libraries. The same universities who are paying most of the authors, who don't get paid by the journals, but produce the content that makes a journal valuable).
Elsevier is quite profitable, with a high margin on revenue.
You are painting an economic model of publishing that I'm not sure is connected to the actual real world economics of scientific/academic publishing, it seems to be very hypothetical.
Peer reviewers also usually hold full-time jobs, they are usually the same people that are authors on other articles.
Is peer review also the assumption or implication of their role?
If not, should it be, since it's just as essential to the production of research articles as authorship?
Economic incentives are never perfect either, but they might help.
Since we have a giant oversupply of PhDs looking for positions it'd seem maybe this wold be nice work for them, and frankly anyone applying for any kind of job should have a big list of articles they've reviewed as one of those resume checkmarks.
Literally not at all what i'm saying, but I am apparently failing to communicate today, so I'll give up.
But yes, I think changes in "broad, institutional practice" are required to fix the current severe problems in academic publishing, of which a lack of peer review labor is only a small part.
If not, should it be,"
This is what I was responding to assuming you were implying that in general should 'researchers also be paid to review, implied as part of their job description'.
As if to say 'reviewing should go hand in hand with publishing' as part of the normal paid activity of researchers.
That probably makes the most sense but would require a lot of institutions getting on board.
I don't think your idea that publication costs need to increase to pay reviewers is valid. Elsevier et al would just cut some of their obscene bloat.
They will, however, use their market dominance to punish people who rebel against their publishing machine. They've done it consistently every time there's the whiff of shakeup in the publishing industry, going back decades.
Fortunately there is https://arxiv.org/ and similar sites. And most researchers are happy to provide you their papers free of cost if you ask.
I surmise the amount is anywhere between small and tiny.
There are arguments against paying peer reviewers, but this is not a good one.
I think a better approach would be publicity. Academics care about reputation a lot. If good reviewers were acknowledged by the journal, that would be a big incentive, something you could put on your CV.
Faculty reviewers are not only overworked, they have accumulated biases, can be overconfident about their expertise and in the worst case have malicious incentive to prohibit publication of your results.
I’m certain that a team of specialists who review as their full time job would do a better job than at least half of the reviewers I encountered (especially those at high-profile AI conferences).
I enjoy reviewing too and am doing my best to be constructive, but I’m not sufficiently qualified for most of the offers I receive.
My point is, the only way to get the necessary skillset for reviewing is to actually do research. Hence it is peer-review. Once you are doing scientific research, there generally isn't anyone left who is 'better at it then you' so the best you can do is have it be reviewed by people who are 'roughly as good at it as you'.
To ensure the long-term accuracy, we need both attempts at reproduction, and critical reading by people post publication. Both of those should have the option to cause the article to be retracted.
How would each of those specialists retain currency in the field by just doing reviews?
Isn't that what the editor panels do more effectively today (of course farming out the detailed/specialist aspects to actual peer reviewers)?
„Currency“: Broad expertise, knowledge about methods and ideas are gathered by reading literature in-depth, which most scientists have little time for in modern science (hence the reluctance to engage in a long peer review process). Working as a paid reviewer for a few years can lead to a scientist who is informed very well about the state of the broader field and its various fallacies, and could move on from there. We have very few of those.
Editors: We wouldn’t have various discussions around peer review if the current system would be working satisfactorily well and nothing needs to change.
Perhaps a recognition by institution or university model would work, or softening the dollars (they are credits against APCs or something) might work.
I'm not sure what to think about this. Peer review is an important way of contributing to the community, and every academic is expected to participate in it. Commercial publishers that make profits from free academic labor are parasites, and they should pay for the services they use. Yet immigration rules often make it difficult to earn any side income, so paying for reviews would exclude many (often less established) academics.
Peer review isn't a single-goal process. It exists to introduce citations of existing work if they aren't already referenced, to question assumptions, and to find obvious errors. (Among others.)
All of these could be done in peer debate.
It's not as if the process is genuinely anonymous anyway. Of course it pretends to be, but it isn't.
Peer review dates from the days when information travelled as fast as a horse, and it made sense to include a review stage for basic quality control.
I'm not convinced it's a good model now, when information exchange is rather quicker.
The real problem is that journal publication is about career status, not about quality of work. Peer review is almost a side issue.
The scientific publishing industry is not just financially parasitic, it also introduces unnecessary delays in idea exchange. Public peer debate would eliminate some of that friction, but it would also have public consequences for reputation - and that might well be more effective for quality control than pseudo-anonymity.
1. Read everything I can find that is published and try to sort through it all myself to sort out what is good quality. I think in aggregate, this is likely to take more of researchers' time than contributing to the peer review process.
2. Focus only on publications from top quality institutions or researchers whose work I am already familiar with. This has the advantage of saving me time. But it also has the massive disadvantage that I am likely to miss quality work which comes from lesser known institutions or authors.
I don't think either of those two options is attractive. In my field, the delay of idea exchange is not really a problem. If people want to share their ideas, they can often publish a preprint in parallel with submission to a peer-reviewed journal. (Although some journals effectively prohibit this since it has the potential to break the anonymity of the review process.)
Yes, some of the purposes of peer review could be accomplished in the method of "peer debate" you mention. But I think such a process would be much less effective. Of course, that's not to say I don't think there are things broken about peer review that could use fixing :)
I also imagine there would be people out there who would become serial reviewers with the goal of making as much money as possible. I imagine the quality of their reviews wouldn't be great either.
I do think a monetary incentive would speed up the peer review process if the pay rate was cut for late review submissions.
Article authors are generally not paid! Yet there is no lack of motivation to write articles.
How to motivate to do peer-review well instead of perfunctorily is another question.
Authors write because this is how you justify that you are really working, be it for your university, department or your grant agency. Also you want others to build upon your work, but academics would publish a lot less if it was not for the huge pressure from funders and employers (increasing numbers is all that count for many of them).
Peer review is also essential to the production of research articles. And is done largely by the same people who are writing articles; but they are incentivized non-monetarily to write articles, but not as much to review.
To restate my point perhaps more clearly: If reviewing were rewarded/expected as part of one's role at a university, department, or grant agency similarly to authorship, that would do far more to incentivize it than paying a relatively modest amount for a review.
Similarly, universities should value good reviewers more. Which probably means reviewers need to get more prestige, so universities get prestige for having good reviewers.
Also the motivations are different when pay is involved. I will donate time to peer review, but $450 is not enough to pay me. So I would be more likely to review as a volunteer than an employee.
And while I like money, I fee a duty to review a few papers a year, even if they are not good, or boring, or whatever. If I was being paid, I would be more likely to skip those papers because I no longer feel a duty.
This may be a similar motivation described in an experiment that showed how late pickups went up when the daycare introduced late fees. [0]
I think that many in academia are underpaid and should have more money. I just think that adding review fees are not the way.
[0] https://freakonomics.com/2013/10/23/what-makes-people-do-wha...
Notorious XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2085/
- pay for read, free to publish: most journals from the big publishers. Cost is between $5 to $20 a page.
- pay to publish, free to read: the model of most Open Access journals. Some big publishers are proposing that as an option as well. Cost of that option is usually $3000 to $5000 per article.