I hate to see academics being viewed through a business lens. I would hope that people contribute to their fields in various ways (including the peer review process) not to earn money nor for personal gain, but rather to forward knowledge and serve their community.

I write reviews, and when I do, I try to be careful, thorough, and helpful. Why? Because when I submit a paper, I would like it to be reviewed carefully, thoroughly and helpfully.

Like many (all?) of you, I see myself as a member of a community of scholars who are trying to make the world a better place. The system only works when most members agree to enter into a social contract that promotes the advancement of knowledge through direct or indirect sharing of ideas.

Monetary compensation might be appropriate at times, but I don't believe that money should be a primary motivation.

I think the reviewers should be paid , since they do a real experimental work for the same

Journals which accepts Publication charges under different names should pay the reviewers.

In our experience, when we started paying our reviewers for Pertanika journals, the review process became much faster but I was glad to note that the quality of the reviews remained high.

A token appreciation is very important in any kind of situation, does not necessary in monetary form. But as money is considered the most practical way of appreciation, giving some token for reviewers could speed up the review process. I believe most reviewers did not expect to be paid because they do it to contribute to education.

I hate to see academics being viewed through a business lens. I would hope that people contribute to their fields in various ways (including the peer review process) not to earn money nor for personal gain, but rather to forward knowledge and serve their community.

I write reviews, and when I do, I try to be careful, thorough, and helpful. Why? Because when I submit a paper, I would like it to be reviewed carefully, thoroughly and helpfully.

Like many (all?) of you, I see myself as a member of a community of scholars who are trying to make the world a better place. The system only works when most members agree to enter into a social contract that promotes the advancement of knowledge through direct or indirect sharing of ideas.

Monetary compensation might be appropriate at times, but I don't believe that money should be a primary motivation.

Dear sirs, it's all about honor, respect, knowledge, ego and contribution to science, I believe. Scientists already contributing through their writing, articles for the sake of better world. But when reviewing, they give much time and effort beside their regular activities. They also require money for their projects, own research works, seminars or workshops. Even sometimes, scientists have to pay for pushing their own research work.

Why then the scientists or academicians have to sacrifice? They will work for free and the publishing companies will make money selling the scientists' voluntary works. What type of justice is this? Why not give a share of the publishers' profit to the reviewers who in turn will use the money to serve the society.

I do not believe there is any way to view the academics in the business lens if they are paid for their work. Academics/ scientists are sharing their ideas, views, experience, knowledge for free in many seminar, workshops, conferences, journal articles and even in ResearchGate. Can you imagine any legal advice or technical advice free from any professionals in those sectors? Then why we are just branding the scientists' work as serving the society and contributing to science and depriving them?

Can we judge the contribution the academics/scientists in the monetary scale? I believe it is never possible. Sir, then why not give reviewers both a greeting card and a monetary cheque? Yes, quality of reviews always remain high regardless the monetary compensation but that is the generosity of those people. We should not take the chance of their generosity. And also some of the respected academics/reviewers/editors already mentioned in this discussion that remuneration for the works of reviewers always have a positive impact on reviewing.

These are only my ideas and I believe there are many around who also have the same. We all would love to hear all of yours opinion.

I agree. Reviewers should be paid in scholarly journals which have some income. But, in not-for-profit journals, or open access journals, which are voluntarily published, this can not be true.

Is there any forum/union for the reviewers? If not then don't you think there should be one?

Academics in some developing countries are not well paid and even have to hold several jobs in order to feed their families. In such circumstances we should reward them for performing such an important and time consuming task as reviewing manuscripts submitted for publication.

Open-access journals and not-for-profit journals are not the same. Most open-access journals require fees from authors, sometimes quite substantial, so following your argumentation, reviewers should be paid in this case, too. This of course raises the next question of what to do with rejections. In case of rejections authors do not pay, so this might generate an additional pressure to accept poor manuscripts. Just to be clear, I am in general against paying for journal refereeing.

Scientific publishing is a juicy business with exponential profits. Elsevier and others receive articles for free, make them examined for free, put it on a website and make us pay for the 30-50 articles we need to be able to write other articles that we will give them for free, examine for free and so on. In other words, we pay a lot of money to write articles that we give for free to those to whom we will purchase many other articles in return.

I think that it would be normal that the laboratory where the reviewer is get some money for his work.

I would say that maybe it makes sense if journals pay universities (or have discounted fees) and then universities have a certain level of protected time (e.g. 2.5%, 5%) for their faculty members to do service = review articles. although, this system might not be easy to implement.

As far as I know, some journals offer either expedited review or reduced publishing costs to scientists who participate in a review process.

@ Iryna Lobach

I cannot imagine how this can be technically arranged. An university secretary will phone to you and say that for the next 12 minutes you should be writing a report? And stop at 13th minute, because the university has granted only 12 minutes of your time daily?

Another point is that in this case more people (not just you and a scientific editor) will know that you are doing a referee work for a given journal within some period ot time, and in some cases (only a few active scientists in a narrow field) this is enough to clearly identify you as the referee of some manuscript. I think that the anonimity of referees is too important for a proper peer-review process to be put in danger for money issues.

Yet another point (very timely regarding the budget stalemate in the U.S.;-): underfinanced institutions may force their scientists to do more referee work, i.e. accept all invitations for refereeing.

Better to reward reviewer indirectly rather than cash like access of journals free of cost for certain period of time, waiver in publication charge.

I am currently reviewing an article for a journal. I cannot access any article cited in the paper to examine if the authors' statements adequately reflect what is in the respective cited article. To do so, I would thus have to pay 50 citations * 40 dollars each = 2000 dollars, just to do the reviewing process for the journal for free. I have a word for that: scam.

So, the minimum would be to give access to all resources to all reviewers over the reviewing period and an additional bonus of let say 30 days to say thank you. I know that some journals do that. That should be mandatory.