The Scientist - USA (2020-11)

11.2020 | THE SCIENTIST 53

publishing world, then we should give up
our archaic notions of unpaid craft labor
and insist on professional compensation for
our expertise, just as doctors, lawyers, and
accountants do,” wrote George Mason Uni-
versity anthropologist Hugh Gusterson in
a 2012 opinion article for The Chronicle of
Higher Education. Academics should con-
tinue to review as volunteers for nonprofit
publishers, he argued, but should “just say
no” to requests from for-profit publishers
that don’t offer payment.
Similar arguments appear regularly
on Twitter and elsewhere online. “Hey
academic publishers! Your profit mar-
gin is like 30%,” wrote urban planning
researcher Natalie Osborne of Griffith
University in Australia in a 2018 tweet.
“If you want to ‘recognise me’ for peer
review, pay me! Pay everyone who
reviews for you!” Earlier this year, con-
sultant and former academic James
Heathers began a Twitter account dedi-
cated to lobbying for peer review to be
paid for like any commercial transaction.
“I review academic literature during
peer review for very, very large com-
panies, and it is one of their revenue
streams. When I do this, I want them to
pay me four hundred and fifty dollars.
No, I am not joking,” Heathers wrote in
the account’s first tweet.
This fairness argument resonates with
Mick Watson, a computational biologist at
the University of Edinburgh’s Roslin Insti-
tute, but he also cites more-pragmatic rea-
sons for why he thinks publishers should
pay for peer review. In addition to peer
review requests from journals, he receives
offers to serve on funders’ grant commit-
tees—work that he’s compensated for, he
notes. “If I’ve only got so much time to
spend on reviewing, then I’m going to pri-
oritize the things that are going to bring
in some money rather than the things that
aren’t.” Having served as an unpaid aca-
demic editor at several journals, where he
was tasked with seeing submitted papers
through peer review, Watson knows he’s
not alone in declining peer review requests
due to competing priorities. As an editor,
“you’re sending ten, twenty, thirty invites
into the ether,” he recalls. “And you just

either hear nothing, or you get instant

rejections back from people saying they

won’t review the paper.”

Not catching on

Of eight scientific publishers con-

tacted by The Scientist, only one, PLOS,

expressed enthusiasm for the concept

of paid peer review. “We’d love to com-

pensate our more than 9,000 Editorial

Board members and more than 100,000

reviewers in a given year, but that scope

is not sustainable for a publisher our

size,” the organization says in a state-

ment. PLOS is a nonprofit organiza-

tion funded through authors’ APCs, the

statement notes. Morgan says he doesn’t

anticipate PLOS journals reconsidering

such payments, absent an attitude shift

in the industry as a whole.

Such a shift does not appear to be in

the cards, at least for now. Apart from

PLOS and UC Press, none of the pub-

lishers contacted by The Scientist said

they’d so much as considered paying peer

reviewers. Nancy Winchester, the Director

of Publications for the American Society

of Plant Biologists (which publishes The

Plant Cell and Plant Physiology), writes

in an email to The Scientist, “We have not

considered paying peer reviewers. This is

not something that the Publications Com-

mittee and editorial boards anticipate tak-

ing up anytime soon”—although she notes

that reviewers earn points they can redeem

for society memberships or merchandise.

The Science family of journals simi-

larly has no plans to pay peer reviewers, a

spokesperson wrote in a statement to The

Scientist, adding, “Thankfully for us all,

many reviewers feel a sense of obligation

to participate, and that is a tradition that

has served science well.” In its own state-

ment, Springer Nature cited its efforts to

improve the peer review process, such

as a recent trial initiative to recognize

reviewers in published papers, but did

not address paid peer review. The Society

for Neuroscience (publisher of the Jour-

nal of Neuroscience and eNeuro) declined

to comment, and publishing giant Else-

vier had not provided comment by the

time this article went to print.

Despite the calls for change from

Gusterson and others, it’s not clear that

many academics support payments for

peer reviewers either. In 2018, Publons, a

site that enables researchers to track their

publications and other activities in online

profiles, conducted a survey of more than

15,000 researchers in the social and nat-

ural sciences and engineering, and found

that a little more than 17 percent selected

“cash or in-kind payments from journals”

as a factor that would make them more

likely to accept review requests. “Dis-

counts on publisher’s products or ser-

vices” was a factor for even fewer of the

respondents, just 4.5 percent, while 11.6

percent selected “personal access to jour-

nal content.” (Each respondent could

choose up to two factors.) In a separate

question about respondents’ reasons for

serving as peer reviewers, the most pop-

ular answer was: “It is part of my job as a

researcher,” followed by “I want to do my

fair share/reciprocate for reviews of my

work,” then “ To keep up to date on the

latest research trends in my field,” and

“ To ensure the quality and integrity of

research published in my field.”

It’s similarly been UC Press’s expe-

rience that the potential for compensa-

tion isn’t a significant motivator for peer

reviewers at Collabra: Psychology or Ele-

menta: Science of the Anthropocene, which

uses the same reviewer-payment model,

says Erich van Rijn, the publisher’s Direc-

tor of Publications and Open Access.

The editors of those journals “didn’t feel

that the opportunity to be paid as a peer

reviewer was something that was moti-

vating a lot of peer reviewers to work for

either of the journals,” he says.

Thankfully for us all, many

reviewers feel a sense of

obli gation to participate,

and that is a tradi tion that

has served science well.

—Science journals spokesperson