I would like to hear different opinions about the question: Why open-access journals reviewers do not get paid for their job?. Considering that open-access journals usually charge very high APC, why reviewers do not get paid for their services?. I think that giving a reasonable monetary incentive to reviewers would improve (considerably) the efficiency, in terms of speed and thoroughness, of the papers reviews. What do you think about this?
I suspect that many publishers that charge 'high' APCs are interested in correspondingly high revenues and profits, if this is, in fact, a significant motivation for a publishers, it is unlikely that they would want to pay reviewers, especially when they are able to get reviewers to perform this function without compensation.
Another factor may be simply that many publishers, especially non-profit publishers, may be unable to include paying peer reviewers in they budget.
Traditionally, most academics, I believe, consider peer reviewing an essential part of service to the larger research endeavor.
You may look into these related discussions:
https://www.researchgate.net/post/How_many_researchers_think_publishers_journals_should_pay_for_their_content_and_also_for_peer_review
https://www.researchgate.net/post/If_there_is_ever_going_to_be_a_time_peer_reviewers_will_be_paid_for_their_services_the_time_is_now
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Should_journals_pay_for_peer_review_work
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Reviewers_participation_should_be_considered_too
Almost no journals of any kind pay reviewers, whether open access or not.
Here is an interesting discussion and explanation of the different points of view on this issue.
https://www.the-scientist.com/careers/scientists-publishers-debate-paychecks-for-peer-reviewers-68101?fbclid=IwAR2xr1fTJKx8FEvi
Dear Simón Roa
I know of a "Great" Journal that has already published and accepted over than 2300 articles just at the beginning of this year 2024 for which each corresponding author will pay around 2200 USD for each payer!
This is a Super Bizness!!
Scientists are guided and oriented in well-defined themes which are the fashion of the century to be the best sold, otherwise their papers will suffer too much during the different stages of submission!!!
Open access journals charge publication fees from the authors' institutions while subscribed ones charge subscription fees from the institutions to enable the right of accessing the articles. So, in my opinion, no need to separate open access ones when discussing whether or not reviewers should be paid.
I think at least some small reward would be good. This can encourage the reviewers to accept a bit more articles and to review them more properly. Many of them do it with minimum effort just to show an activity and get points for internal evaluations. For example, there are lots of reviewers recently who barely read the articles and put the same questions all over. Like clarify the objective, what is the novelty, check language. Regardless of how well you write, these are fixed questions as a recent trend, always because of the text being unclear. There are sometimes content questions also making an impression that they do not read carefully.
(All the respect to the reviewers who spend effort and do their best.)
In addition to some payments, there can be an effective information exchange among the editors about the good and bad reviewers. Bad ones should not keep getting articles from different journals, regardless of their previous mess. Instead, good ones should be offered more articles with a payment for each.
* not always because of the text being unclear. (correction to the second last sentence in the second paragraph of my answer)
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