The journal Nature has hosted, in effect, a year-long sporadic conversation about the status and prospects of peer review in the digital age. The most recent contribution frankly advocates paying reviewers, and suggests a pay rate.
In a 23 January 2014 letter, Dan Graur of the University of Houston's department of biology and biochemistry, who has served as associate editor of several refereed journals, charged that "the biggest consumers of peer review seem to contribute the least to the process." He proposed that "journals should ask senior authors to provide evidence of their contribution to peer review as a condition for considering their manuscripts." Whether or not Graur meant his phrase "contribution to peer review" broadly, among the thoughts offered in nearly a dozen online comments was the proposition that senior authors often contribute in other ways, closely related to the reviewing of papers.
A month later, a letter citing Graur from Sascha Ott and Daniel Hebenstreit of the systems biology center at the University of Warwick, UK, proposed that peer review be made subject to market forces. Instead of following Graur's suggestion for corralling more peer reviewers, scientists could supplement their salaries by becoming professional reviewers part time.
In November, Nature carried a commentary by Martijn Arns, director and researcher at Research Institute Brainclinics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Under the headline "Open access is tiring out peer reviewers," the thumbnail summary said, "As numbers of published articles rise, the scholarly review system must adapt to avoid unmanageable burdens and slipping standards."
Arns cited anecdotal evidence about adherence to standards. Then he observed that first the digital age itself, and later the proliferation of high-volume author-pays open access, have compounded the demand, escalating the pressure on "overworked and fatigued reviewers." As a remedy, he suggested what amounts to triage for submitted papers, with presumably voluntary, community-wide post-publication peer review online sufficing for certain categories of work. Prepublication peer review would be reserved for "papers with more direct societal impact, where the question of whether to publish at all is more relevant."
Now, in Nature's 8 January edition, a letter citing Ott, Hebenstreit, and Arns has appeared from University of Toronto professor and biomedical researcher Eleftherios P. Diamandis. He attaches a possible number to the free-market remuneration idea: "say, US$50 per hour." He continues:
Publishing in an open-access journal costs around $1,000–$2,000, so paying $200 to a reviewer does not seem excessive. The authors and the journal could split the cost equally.
Prospective reviewers would be more inclined to do a speedy and thorough job. Retired scientists with extensive expertise and plenty of free time would be keen to participate. Editors would be spared the hunt for willing referees.
On Nature's necessarily ruthlessly winnowed "correspondence" page—that weekly's name for the letters to the editor that those word-count-economizing editors so rigorously distill—there's sometimes room for just a little bit more than a letter's essence. Diamandis's letter ends with an implicit reminder that peer reviewers are people, not just sources of scientific labor. He concludes: "We could then use our reviewing fees to buy back some pleasure—I might go for a billiards table, a pinball machine or even a fancy treadmill."
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Steven T. Corneliussen, a media analyst for the American Institute of Physics, monitors three national newspapers, the weeklies Nature and Science, and occasionally other publications. He has published op-eds in the Washington Post and other newspapers, has written for NASA's history program, and is a science writer at a particle-accelerator laboratory.
