No to paid peer review
Khaled Moustafa
Abstract
Peer review can last months or years in some cases. Paying peer reviewers can speed up the process and motivate reviewers to evaluate manuscripts more efficiently.1Cheah PY Piasecki J Should peer reviewers be paid to review academic papers?.The Lancet. 2022; 3991601Summary Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (5) Google Scholar However, using money to lure reviewers in a publishing system that is already fraught with inherent and structural biases will exacerbate these shortcomings and create new challenges.First, paying peer reviewers would imply increases in subscription fees and article processing charges that many authors and institutions might not be able to afford under restrictive budgeting.Second, a paid peer review would create a new dilemma in manuscript acceptance and rejection policies and whether the payment would be applicable on rejection or acceptance only. In either case, the publishing process will be skewed by bold financial and non-financial interests. Paying for rejections will incur additional publishing costs and paying solely for acceptance will benefit only reviewers whose comments are always positive.Finally, a paid peer review would distort the selection criteria of peer reviewers, contributing to the emergence of new commercial peer review agencies, cronyism or nepotism reviewing activities, or specialised agencies to provide reviews on demand, similar to paper mills or agencies that write and fabricate data from scratch.I declare no competing interests. Peer review can last months or years in some cases. Paying peer reviewers can speed up the process and motivate reviewers to evaluate manuscripts more efficiently.1Cheah PY Piasecki J Should peer reviewers be paid to review academic papers?.The Lancet. 2022; 3991601Summary Full Text Full Text PDF PubMed Scopus (5) Google Scholar However, using money to lure reviewers in a publishing system that is already fraught with inherent and structural biases will exacerbate these shortcomings and create new challenges. First, paying peer reviewers would imply increases in subscription fees and article processing charges that many authors and institutions might not be able to afford under restrictive budgeting. Second, a paid peer review would create a new dilemma in manuscript acceptance and rejection policies and whether the payment would be applicable on rejection or acceptance only. In either case, the publishing process will be skewed by bold financial and non-financial interests. Paying for rejections will incur additional publishing costs and paying solely for acceptance will benefit only reviewers whose comments are always positive. Finally, a paid peer review would distort the selection criteria of peer reviewers, contributing to the emergence of new commercial peer review agencies, cronyism or nepotism reviewing activities, or specialised agencies to provide reviews on demand, similar to paper mills or agencies that write and fabricate data from scratch. I declare no competing interests. Should peer reviewers be paid to review academic papers?Aczel and colleagues estimated that the total time that reviewers worked on peer reviews globally was over 100 million hours in 2020.1 The peer review system in academic publishing is not only time consuming and costly but has many other flaws, including biased reviews, inconsistency, absence of reward, difficulty in finding reviewers, and slowness.2,3 These flaws hamper scientific progress, career progress, and might even cost lives. Another problem, which is rarely addressed, is that evidence suggests that the number of reviews contributed by high-income countries is higher than the number contributed by low-income countries per published paper, although there are no extensive empirical data available. Full-Text PDF