52 THE SCIENTIST | the-scientist.com
CAREERSB
ack in 2015, academic publisher
Dan Morgan, then of the University
of California Press, took to Medium
to argue that a foundational assump-
tion of his industry—that experts should
volunteer their time as peer reviewers—
is flawed. “I am fairly sure I have never
volunteered my time but then had a
3rd party charge a commercial, profit-
generating price for it,” he wrote. “[W]e
all know that some publishers are getting
very, very rich, while nothing tangible is
making its way back to the primary vol-
unteers making this happen.”
In return for their labor, Morgan
asserted, reviewers for commercial pub-
lishers should have a say over the use of
some portion of the revenue from pub-
lished papers. As an example, he cited
the model of an open access journal he’d
cofounded the previous year, Collabra:
Psychology. Reviewers for that journal
earn credits that give them control over a
portion of the quarterly revenue from the
article processing charges (APCs) charged
to authors: they can choose to direct the
money to an APC waiver fund, which
enables researchers who don’t have funds
budgeted for APCs to publish in the jour-
nal, or to their own institution’s budget
for open access–related costs, or they can
pocket the money themselves.
The idea was: “Let’s test [whether we
can] set up a system whereby the value
that gets created in the scholarly pub-
lishing system could not just all go to
publishers, but could also be hard-coded
to circulate and return back to the aca-
demic community,” explains Morgan,
who left UC Press for PLOS in 2018.
Collabra: Psychology represents
a rare example of a journal that gives
reviewers the option of monetary com-
pensation. Although the idea that peer
reviewers should be paid for their work
crops up periodically in online discus-sions and opinion articles, the Collabra:
Psychology model hasn’t elicited interest
among other scientific publishers who
responded to The Scientist. Still, there is
a widespread sentiment among publish-
ers and reviewers alike that some stron-
ger form of peer reviewer recognition is
needed—and some initiatives are taking
steps in that direction.Making the case
Like Morgan, academics who think they
should receive compensation for review-
ing—at least from commercial publishers—
often cite the perceived unfairness of per-
forming free labor in service of companies’
profits. “If academic work is to be commod-
ified and turned into a source of profit for
shareholders and for the 1 percent of theShould peer reviewers be paid for their work?BY SHAWNA WILLIAMSShow Me the Money
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