I am wondering why peer review is a still free task.
Good reviewers are diffiult to find, and peer-review turnarounds are worsening in terms of timing and quality.
Meanwhile publishers companies are breaking revenues records every year, rising publication and subscripcion prices.
Isn't it time to pay the reviewers?
Effect of Monetary Incentives on Peer Review Acceptance and Completion: A Quasi-Randomized Interventional Trial
"Peer review typically relies on experts volunteering their time to review research. This process presents challenges for journals that may face a shortage of qualified referees, resulting in either delay in handling papers or less thorough review than is optimal. We experimentally tested the impact of providing cash incentives to complete peer review assignments at Critical Care Medicine...
Providing cash incentive for completing peer review reports resulted in a modest increase in the share of invited reviewers who complete reviews for a specialty medical journal."
https://journals.lww.com/ccmjournal/abstract/9900/effect_of_monetary_incentives_on_peer_review.488.aspx
Very interesting study Ljubomir Jacić
However, I think that the introduction of monetary compensation should be accompained by other measures:
1) review quality check (e.g. I am not gonna pay you if you do not give me a high-quality review)
2) time check (I am not going to pay for it if you return it late)
3) they should have tried to attract new reviewers and not ask existing ones to review more. The experiment only demonstrates that reviewer fatigue is true and we already plateau their capacity of reviewing.
open the market: it is demonstrated that while authors are widespread worldwide, reviewers are mostly from USA and Western Europe. There is a huge unexplored market of reviewers in Asia, many of them as competent as their western counterparts.
The idea is to attract new reviewers, and not to overwork the existing ones.
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