Why don't researchers request payment for refereeing?

Question

One of the most criticized aspects of the current publishing scheme, is that academics do pretty much all the work for free and publishers get the money.

Why don't people just charge a fee when contacted by a publisher to referee an article?

I know why do academics write peer reviews?, that's not the question. The issue is why do it requesting no monetary compensation when the publisher is getting (for doing next to nothing) an extraordinary monetary compensation.

I think a better -- i.e., more reasonably attainable -- question would be "Why don't researchers get more academic credit for refereeing?" If you don't get paid for the papers you write, it's weird to get paid for the papers you referee. Writing a paper is certainly worth some academic currency, it just doesn't come out directly in dollars. However, credit given for papers refereed is moderate to nebulous to non-existent. That's what could be fixed, IMO. — Pete L. Clark, May 04 '16 at 16:09
I guess it's the same reason why the moderators of the site don't get paid. — Ébe Isaac, May 04 '16 at 18:55
I addressed this in this answer about why academics write peer reviews. — David Ketcheson, May 05 '16 at 07:53
I just got my PhD and I have the same question. I've had a couple of requests to review things and each time I've asked around -- "what's in it for me?" People just say it's the done thing. So far, the only explanation of a significant benefit I've had is "you get to see the paper before anyone else does." — foobarbecue, May 05 '16 at 16:21
Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. — eykanal, May 08 '16 at 20:29
What if 'refereeing' (peer reviewing) is already part of their job description, such as tenured professors who must stay abreast of new developments in their field. It is a natural part of their job description. — J. Roibal - BlockchainEng, Jun 21 '16 at 21:20

score 114 · Accepted Answer · answered May 04 '16 at 15:20

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Academics aren't upset about not getting paid for refereeing/reviewing - they're upset because journals charge too much.

There's really four points in the statement "academics do pretty much all the work for free and publishers get the money"

Academics do most of the work
Publishers do a comparatively small amount of work
Publishers get the money
Academics don't get any money

Just because people might object to some of the four points, that doesn't mean they object to all of them.

Academics do most of the work - Most academics wouldn't object to this state of the affairs. Of course academics do most of the work in publishing (especially reviewing) - they're the ones who are qualified to do it. You can't have some bureaucrat take care of reviewing the work, you need someone who knows the field.

Publishers do a comparatively small amount of work - Academics might grumble at this, but there's a comparatively little that the publishers are qualified to do. Typesetting, printing, maintaining the journal website, administration in the reviewing process ... and that's about it. All the actual content decisions have to be done by knowledgeable people (academics). There's certainly some journals which try to offload things like typesetting onto the authors, but in part that's financially driven ...

Publishers get the money - This is the main point of upset. Publishers charge what is viewed as an excessive amount. ... but it's not that they're charging money per se, it's more that academics lose access to the content due to expense. Most academics were completely satisfied when they had access through (paid) library subscriptions. It's only when budget cuts (and publisher price increases) caused libraries to cut subscriptions that academics got upset. But again, it's less having to pay for things and more not being able to access everything they need.

Academics don't get any money - This is the point you're addressing. However, I'd say most academics don't have a problem with it. Refereeing for a journal is considered by most to be community service - it's something that needs to happen, and they're the only ones qualified to do it. It's quid-pro-quo: others review your articles, and you review other people's. Attempting to make it a paid-for enterprise makes the person asking for the money seem greedy.

So where does that leave you? Academics (mostly) don't have a problem doing most of the work - and doing it for free. The complaints are on the publisher's side: they're charging too much for what little they do. Demanding that publishers pay academics for reviewing isn't going to change that. If anything, it will make journal access more expensive, as they now need to pay for reviewers.

So charging a fee when reviewing isn't going to fix the problem, and as Mark Meckes mentions in his answer, asking for one is only going to make you look naive and greedy to the (academic) editor who you're in contact with. Note that there's a very big difference between "Decline to review based on principles" and "Decline to review ... unless you pay me".

answered May 04 '16 at 15:20

R.M.

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It seems like the publishers are the smarts ones. The publishers get paid to do little while the PhD academic gets nothing for working a lot. – Darrin Thomas May 05 '16 at 01:41
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@darrinthomas Actually I do get something. I get a salary and reviewing papers is part of my job. So extra something for reviewing would feel a bit strange. – Dirk May 05 '16 at 07:37
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@Dirk Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't your salary stay exactly the same if you completely stopped reviewing papers? I mean, how would your university's administration know? – May 05 '16 at 09:49
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@NajibIdrissi Sure, but that’s a failure of employers to properly delineate research employees’ responsibilities on the job. Peer review, which is an integral part of taking part in scientific discourse, is a part of your job as scientist, regardless of whether your contract explicitly says that or not. – Konrad Rudolph May 05 '16 at 12:41
@NajibIdrissi Related: Is reviewing papers mandatory? – CodesInChaos May 06 '16 at 07:42
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@DarrinThomas I think the academics are the smart ones, they get a steady curated stream of interesting ideas in their research interests to read and digest, whilst all the publishers get is boring admin and nothing but money for recompense. – Racheet May 06 '16 at 12:14
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@NajibIdrissi: we report to our administration at the end of the year how many reviews we did for which journals. Just like we report how many manuscripts we wrote in the time paid by the same employer. Both is clearly part of the job description under the heading of "publication activities". Note that in my country not only post-docs but also PhD students are paid wages (lower, but still). I know few post-docs and PhD students who would (do) go on publishing and reviewing after their academic job expires. – cbeleites unhappy with SX May 08 '16 at 13:05
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"There's certainly some journals which try to offload things like typesetting onto the authors, but in part that's financially driven" - in part, that's also author-driven, once they've made the experience that some publishers cannot be left typesetting unsupervised without messing up papers in one way or another. – O. R. Mapper Jan 21 '18 at 21:48
I'm downvoting this answer for the simple and obvious reason that sustaining the expectation of doing referral work ad honorem hinders the entry of early-career academics into the publishing world. Doing this for free is a privilege reserved for individuals already employed by academic institutions allotting time for you to engage in such activities. The group most vulnerable to being left out here is graduate or post-graduate students who have to work outside of academia to make ends meet. – starseed_trooper Dec 28 '22 at 15:57
@starseed_trooper Please keep in mind that explanation isn't endorsement. From your comment it sounds like you don't necessarily have an issue with the accuracy of this answer in describing the current situation, but rather your issue is that the current situation is not the way you believe it should be. I don't know what to say to that, aside from that the question was primarily asking for an explanation of the current state, and that the StackExchange format isn't well suited for advocacy or for debating personal opinions. – R.M. Dec 28 '22 at 17:42
@R.M. I felt my comment was justified given that the answer endorses the system via the comment that "asking for one is only going to make you look naive and greedy to the (academic) editor who you're in contact with." I do agree that StackExchange is not well-suited for dialectics nor it should be. However, the Academia StackExchange usually has more room for ethical remarks than other spaces do. – starseed_trooper Dec 29 '22 at 01:07

score 42 · Answer 2 · answered May 04 '16 at 14:09

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Leaving aside arguments for and against the current system, here's what will happen if you --- as an individual academic --- are contacted by a publisher and attempt to charge a fee:

You will most likely be contacted, not by a "publisher" per se, but by an editor, who is another hard-working academic getting little or no monetary compensation for their job.
You say something like, "This is my fee for refereeing an article."
The editor responds, "Sorry, we have no budget to pay for refereeing," and goes to look for another referee.
In the best case scenario, the editor --- who is most likely a well-regarded senior researcher in your field, the sort of person who may make or influence decisions over your hiring, promotion, grants, and the publication of your own papers --- now has the impression that you're deplorably ignorant about how the field operates. In the worst case, the editor thinks you're a jerk who's actively seeking to make life harder for other people working in the field.

answered May 04 '16 at 14:09

Mark Meckes

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Well, that assumes my response to a contact asking for refereeing services would be "This is my fee". I could easily explain why I do this (i.e.: a matter of fairness) and even attempt a compromise: I'll do it for free only if it's an open access paper, else there's a fee due to the aforementioned reasons.. – Gabriel May 04 '16 at 14:34
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@Gabriel in that case, replace step 4 above with that senior researcher thinking of you as a pretentious jerk who doesn't really get it. Refereeing is part of "service to the profession". No, it's not directly compensated but it's part of the networking and improvement of the profession we do. – virmaior May 04 '16 at 14:50
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@Gabriel: Even with an explanation, you're still saying something like "This is my fee," and for non-open access papers, your proposed compromise will still run into the cold hard fact that, in most fields, the editor simply has no budget from which to pay a referee. – Mark Meckes May 04 '16 at 14:55
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On the other hand, if you simply say "I only referee for open-access journals," you'll come across as making a statement about the system. It's a statement that the editor may or may not sympathize with, but you won't come across as not even knowing what the system is. – Mark Meckes May 04 '16 at 14:57
@MarkMeckes There may be a misunderstanding here. Open-access journals are free for the readers. The authors however usually need to pay a considerable amount to the editors for the publication of their articles. – RHertel May 05 '16 at 19:34
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@RHertel: That depends on the field. In mathematics (my field) and physics (the OP's field), author-pays open access journals are rare, and at least in mathematics there are now a number open access journals which are free to everyone (I'm not sure about physics). But in any case, I'm only commenting on what the OP suggested he might say. – Mark Meckes May 05 '16 at 21:57
@MarkMeckes Thanks for your feedback. I didn't mean to criticize your comment, just to clarify an aspect. My field is Physics and I have quite some experience in the publication process. As far as physics is concerned I cannot confirm your statement. Granted, open-access journals are generally rare. But most if not all of them are "author-pays" journals with publication charges typically well above $1000. Unless one counts unreviewed publications such as arXiv.org. I'm glad to hear that Mathematics has apparently evolved further. – RHertel May 05 '16 at 22:12
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...and the presence of considerable publication fees could make the reviewing process problematic. A possible conflict of interest of the editor cannot be ruled out categorically, since any paid-for publication increases the journal's revenues.... It's a complicated topic. – RHertel May 05 '16 at 22:28
@MarkMeckes This makes even less sense though. Fees for open access journals are the most jaw dropping. It makes it sound like you REALLY support a system where authors get ripped off. – spacetyper Jun 07 '22 at 06:30
@spacetyper What did I say that sounds like that? I didn't express support for anything, either in my answer or in the comments. – Mark Meckes Jun 07 '22 at 14:32

score 23 · Answer 3 · edited Mar 16 '17 at 15:50

In some fields, for some journals, they are paid a fee. [File this as yet another example of "academia varies more than you think"...] This approach seems to be most popular with economics journals - as they are heavily into studying the way people can be motivated by money, I suppose this makes sense!

An exceptional example is the Journal of Financial Economics - most articles have a single reviewer, who is paid $275 cash (and a ~$200 discount off their next submission), contingent on a timely review. Lower down the scale, the Journal of Banking and Finance talks about offering "tokens of appreciation" for reviewers; there's no cash value given but the phrasing suggests it's probably a good bit lower.

Now, why do these journals do it? Probably because they always have done, an explanation which applies to a lot of strange quirks of the academic system. But is it a good idea? The recent proposal by Scientific Reports to have a two-track paid- and unpaid-peer-review system was incredibly contentious, after all...

The Journal of Public Economics recently tested the system out - they took 1500 review requests for their papers, and divided them into four groups:

a six-week deadline, but no penalty for missing it
a four-week deadline, but no penalty for missing it
a four-week deadline, and a promise of $100 payment for meeting the deadline
a six-week deadline, but reviewers told turnaround times would be made public

All variants worked well. The group with a four-week deadline had an average turnaround time of twelve days less than the six-week deadline group. Payments took another eight days off the turnaround time, and "public credit" another 2.5 days. The money/credit groups wrote slightly shorter reports, presumably as they were more motivated to make a hard deadline, but the editors did not see them as of noticeably lower quality.

So... yes, payment can work. But it relies on the journal having the money (two reviewers is $200/paper), and - intriguingly - it's not quite as effective as the no-money-needed option of just giving a shorter deadline. And even when it does work, it only makes sense if done systematically by the journal. Individuals asking to negotiate their own review payments is unlikely to work in the same way.

Was there any study on whether money alters the content or biases of the reviews? — Nemo, May 04 '16 at 19:41
@nemo I believe they said they wereno more or less likely to recommend acceptance, which seems a decent first approximation for 'no more biased than usual' ;) — Andrew is gone, May 04 '16 at 19:50
I wonder whether the reviewers get that money themselves if they do the review while they are formally working. May depend heavily on the jurisdiction, of course. — O. R. Mapper, Jan 21 '18 at 21:56

score 16 · Answer 4 · answered May 04 '16 at 14:11

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Because that's not how it works.

That may seem unsatisfying, but it's the answer. It's part of scientific culture that peer reviewing is done without charging, just as it's part of business culture that you don't wear sagging shorts and torn t-shirts to work.

Is it something that might change? Sure; it's not a formal contract, it's a cultural thing, and cultures change. But most scientists feel that peer review is a good thing, and most scientists feel that it should be free, so it's unlikely that it will change soon.

Keep in mind that, while there's a lively on-line debate about the merits of peer review and open-access publication and so on, this is a debate among tiny and non-representative populations of scientists. Don't confuse the passion and attitudes that you see on-line with how most scientists actually feel.

answered May 04 '16 at 14:11

iayork

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I'd give 100 up-votes for your last paragraph if I could. – Cape Code May 04 '16 at 15:07
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How do you perceive most scientists actually feel? – Gabriel May 04 '16 at 15:10
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I don't experience much discrepancy between on-line debates and how scientists I know and work with feel. Could you elaborate on the last paragraph? – gerrit May 04 '16 at 15:15
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I would be surprised if one in ten of the scientists I work with actually knows there's a debate about open access and peer review, and I would be astonished if more than one in a hundred gives a shit. Online debates are heavily skewed toward younger, computer-oriented, new researchers. If you spend most of your time talking on-line, or if your colleagues are mainly young, computer-oriented new researchers, you may think you are more representative than you actually are. Older scientists are still common, and you're not speaking for them. – iayork May 04 '16 at 16:51
@iayork what is your field of study if I may ask? – Gabriel May 04 '16 at 18:06
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Biology. I believe there are several of us in the world. Is this really your first exposure to the notion that you are not representative of all scientists? – iayork May 04 '16 at 18:09
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Uh? Are you talking to me or somebody else? I've no idea what you are talking about. – Gabriel May 04 '16 at 19:47
@Gabriel: My guess is that iayork's last comment was meant to be directed to gerrit. – Mark Meckes May 05 '16 at 10:39
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This is not a very satisfying answer. Essentially it states that things are the way they are because that's how they've always been, and concludes with a rather patronizing comment dismissing the debate. I'd argue that this type of answer is actually rather unacademic behavior, offering no insights and no real analysis. – mtall May 07 '16 at 07:27
"debate about the merits of peer review" - as opposed to...? "open access" - as opposed to those high-fee journals? – einpoklum May 08 '16 at 13:37
@mtall that's true, the answer lacks one point: that the system is the way it's always been because it works fine. – Cape Code May 18 '16 at 19:31

Nate Eldredge · Answer 5 · 2016-05-04T15:24:20.343

If you do this on an individual scale, as Mark Meckes says, it's basically the same as just declining to review the paper. The journal is not going to pay you; they will find someone else.

You could ask "What if everyone started demanding money?" That's essentially a proposal that researchers as a group should strike for higher wages. Like any labor action, it'll only work if a large majority of the labor force participates and is well organized. Anybody who's served as a department chair can tell you that organizing any significant number of academics to agree on anything is, well, challenging. Here you are talking about organizing all the academics in the world.

If somehow a strike were to be effective, large commercial publishers might eventually knuckle under and start paying; small publishers might not have the resources, and might go out of business. At least in the short term, it would be very disruptive to the academic community: initially, publishers would probably just look for referees who weren't on strike ("scabs") and the review process would be greatly delayed. Some journals might suspend publication. Ultimately, the people most harmed would probably be junior researchers who need to publish in a timely manner in order to maintain or advance their careers. So you'd have to have a consensus that the long-term gain outweighs the short-term harm.

To use a physics analogy, we're in a potential well; there might be a lower-energy state (one in which reviewers get paid), but the activation energy to get from here to there is extremely high.

Yes, it's more of a large scale question that rather "Should I do it?". The conditions need not be the same for every publisher. E.g.: If it's a large publisher and a closed paper, there's a fee; if the paper is open access, there's no fee; if it's a small publisher, little to no fee, etc. — Gabriel, May 04 '16 at 14:39

score 7 · Answer 6 · answered May 05 '16 at 07:34

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Because keeping money out of the publisher-reviewer relationship is a very good feature of the current dominant publishing model.

Some of the unwanted things that paying reviewers would result in:

unqualified or overbooked academics to accept all reviews resulting in a drop in review quality.
academics accepting to review papers that are not interesting to them, thus probably lowering the scrutiny threshold.
people maximizing the number of reviews they do in a year thus allocating less time to each. -> drop in quality.
people refraining from outright rejecting frivolous and junk papers on first screening to try to charge a full review
etc.

answered May 05 '16 at 07:34

Cape Code

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All very good points indeed, but money is definitely not out of the publisher-reviewer relationship. Publishers get money (a lot) from reviewers in the form of subscriptions, be it individual or academic. – Gabriel May 05 '16 at 12:57
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@gabriel Your point seems more to be about the relationship between Publishers and Readers. I think CapeCode's answer is talking specifically about the social/professional transaction between publishers of a paper and reviewers of the paper. The fact that reviewers are also readers is relevant to wider issues but not, I think, to this particular answer – Yemon Choi May 05 '16 at 16:28
@YemonChoi if reviewers were not also readers then this issue would not exist, since no one would do this job for free getting absolutely nothing in return. – Gabriel May 05 '16 at 16:33
@Gabriel publishers charge for the publishing, not for the review nor the actual work resulting in the publication. Authors and reviewers *are" paid to write and review, that's what their stipend, salary, grants are for. – Cape Code May 05 '16 at 18:49
@CapeCode the "publishing" charge does include the actual work and the review, without either there would be nothing to publish (obviously) and thus nothing to charge. No, authors are not paid to review, that's the whole point. You could only include that task into their salaries if the Universities themselves were the ones publishing (and profiting), instead of some external company which has nothing to do with the process. – Gabriel May 05 '16 at 19:16
@Gabriel nope. Publishers charge for the publishing process as a service, not for the content. Same thing a telephone company charges for the time spent talking, not for how enjoyable the discussion is. Imagine how much would a paper cost if it that charge had to cover the time spent by the authors and reviewers creating the content. – Cape Code May 06 '16 at 07:31
@CapeCode nope. Publishers charge for the publishing service of the content. Imagine how much less would a paper cost if there was nothing in it? It would have to be a number very close to US$0.0. Perhaps a few cents for the blank page if they sent it to you? – Gabriel May 06 '16 at 11:55
@Gabriel I agree with what you wrote in your last comment but fail to see your point. Nobody would buy an empty paper. That's the virtue of subscription-based publishing model. It creates an incentive to curate for articles that people are more likely to read. – Cape Code May 17 '16 at 07:41
@CapeCode the only true incentive for curating articles is the advancement if science. Publishers could create an extra incentive by sharing the enormous wealth they amass for doing next to nothing, with the people who actually do the hard work. But they don't, now do they? – Gabriel May 17 '16 at 13:45
@Gabriel the only true incentive for curating articles is the advancement if science that clearly doesn't work since academics don't self sensor their stuff when they know it's irrelevant or redundant with existing literature. Off course publisher, especially for-profit ones, contribute to research funding either directly or indirectly via the taxes they generate. – Cape Code May 18 '16 at 09:12
@CapeCode Off course publisher, especially for-profit ones, contribute to research, now that's just silly. Of course they don't. Whatever amount they might give back is immensely outweighed by the amount they take via their shameless business model. – Gabriel May 18 '16 at 15:38
@Gabriel What's silly is to ask a question when one is not interested to hear answers that diverge from one's political ideology. They don't "take" anything, nobody forces academics to use commercial publishers. As for "shameless business model" I trust you refer to the author-pay open access model that provides incentive to accept more papers than a journal should, right? These are indeed shameless. – Cape Code May 18 '16 at 15:46
@CapeCode not sure what you mean. I've heard great answers here with which I don't agree, yours just wasn't one of them. Academics are indeed forced through institutionalized requirements of where to publish. It would be silly to deny this. I refer exactly to what I referred. You obviously have a horse in this race, which is fine. Just don't expect me to agree with you on account of this. – Gabriel May 18 '16 at 15:51

score 2 · Answer 7 · edited Jun 10 '20 at 14:12

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Summary:

most academics I know are paid for reviewing (via their employment contract)
thus it would be up to the employer (university/research institute) to charge for the service
I'll outline the burocratic and legal steps needed on the reviewer side (in my country: Germany) to be able to charge personally for a review. For many academics, this burocratic offset compared to what you can earn this way is not attractive.

First of all let me say that from my experience

academics do pretty much all the work for free

I think this is true at best for a very small minority of academics. My work contract says that (among other things) I'm paid for "publication activities" and that clearly includes reviews. Clearly as in administration asks me to report for yearly statistics number of reviews done for which journals just like they ask for manuscripts, oral presentations and posters.
So while I'm not paid by the publisher, I am paid by my employer for the reviews. And I know very few academics who go on publishing and reviewing after the academic job ends - few people put that much effort into a hobby. (I'm thinking here more of graduates/post-docs without job than of retired professors because I think the out-of-job-academics are the better control group for this discussion)

For me this makes the question very similar to why does a car mechanic work who is employed by a workshop not charge the customer directly? Answer: it's the employer who charges the customer (via their administration), the mechanic is paid by their wage.

We now may ask why doesn't the employer (research institute, university) charge the publisher for services received? IMHO this is a sensible question and one that actually should be asked. Edit: However, to me this is not the same as the question asked why a single researcher doesn't charge the publisher. The standing and the aims in these negotiations are IMHO totally different of a single researcher compared to a university/research institute.

[slightly off topic: one answer to this may be that for academic institutions of a certain size the number of reviews done by the staff comes close enough to the number of reviews needed for the publications of the same staff - so introducing payment for reviews (including the institution needs to pay for the reviews they receive) just means that more VAT needs to be paid, and thus generates a net loss.]

Edit: Why do I think that charging for review will lead to charges for having your paper reviewed? For one thing, of course commercial publishers won't like to diminish their profits if they can avoid it. But even then: assuming an open source source publication fee of, say, 1500 EUR/US$ leads to 500 EUR/US$ profit (that's 33 %) for the publisher means that 500 EUR/US$ could theoretically be spent for the review before the publisher will enter the loss zone. That pays (see below) for maybe 5 - 10 h of professional academic review time. I often spend considerably more on a single review (see e.g. https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/5799/725 where @JeffE cites a rule of thumb of about 1 h/manuscript page - we often have 15 - 25 manuscript pages). I don't know what the average number of reviews is per published paper, but I'd guess that it is somewhere near 10. But even a low guesstimate of 3 for the first round + 2 for the second (that doesn't even include that papers are declined!) means that 5 x 20 h = 100 h of review time per published paper. That's something like 5000 - 10000 EUR/US$, or 10 - 20x the huge profit of the publisher.

So, yes, the reviewing is a huge amount of work and it needs to be compensated, like writing the papers needs to be compensated. And yes, it is the researchers who do this. But even the most evil shark publishers with 40 % profit of a 1500 EUR fee for an open access publication would be able to pay for that.

How to charge a publisher for services received (i.e. the review) as the reviewer in person?

(this is for Germany, other legislations will differ)

On the other hand, well, yes: why not charge the publisher?

Scientific reviewieng is a classic professional service of freelancers (German: freiberufliche Tätigkeit). In order to do such freelancing, you first of all need to make sure that there is no conflict with any employment. This is best done by exchanging a couple of letters with your professor/director/administration. Unless they actually have some deal with the publisher, they probably wish you good luck and are happy with that.

You then go to the tax office and ask for a freelancing tax number. If this is just for the few reviews you do, you'd also ask for exemption of VAT, otherwise you'd need to do VAT declarations (if dealing with a publisher in a EU foreign country, things are more complicated). But at the very least, the freelancing tax number means that your income tax declaration becomes mandatory, gets an additional set of forms for the freelancing and you have a shorter deadline to hand it in.

You'll need to put in this effort regardless of whether you are actually able to convince a publisher to pay you or not.

I guess most researchers I know think that compared to doing the review for the academic salary this extra money is not worth the extra burocracy. (I know of one colleague who told of his burocratic experience where an extra payment < 1000 EUR for a seminar was concerned)

Now, I anyways do freelancing, so the marginal effort for me is low (as it is for people who anyways do vocational tax declaration and do it early). However, so far I have to say that the market price of reviewing is rather unattractive. I've been offered 100 US$ to do a quick "review" within a couple of days (no full review was asked but rather something like an opinion on the manuscript and pointing out which points I'd recommend should be addressed before actual submission).

Some comparisons:
I estimate that I cost my employer about 75 - 100 US$ / h (of which 22 US$ / h actually arrive at my bank account after taxes + social insurance for me have been paid). Thus, the offered market price for the review service boils down to the cost of 1 - 1:10 h for my employer. Even though my freelancing doesn't have as much overhead (e.g. because small-scale freelancing on the side is covered by the social insurance of the employment contract), I'd need to finish that review within ca. 2 h to get the same hourly wage I get for my employment contract. Also as it is very much on-demand of the journal, it cannot even be used too well for filling up time when I don't have a customer. So all in all, even though my marginal burocracy for doing this is low, it is not super-attractive. In fact, I'm better off if I can put the time onto my academic time sheet. You may decide differently, particularly if your employer does not accept a time sheet.

Another comparison: for me, the hourly wage for such a review is close to filing VG Wort claims - though the hourly wage there would be better if I had more papers to file, as there's quite an offset of remembering how to do things that need to be done just once per year.

edited Jun 10 '20 at 14:12

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answered May 08 '16 at 14:53

cbeleites unhappy with SX

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"most academics I know are paid for reviewing (via their employment contract)" doesn't seem to be true based on what you say, but an assumption from "I'm paid for "publication activities" and that clearly includes reviews". In any case, you simply shifted the question to "why doesn't the employer (research institute, university) charge the publisher for services received?", which is basically the same issue. You say that in Germany you can charge, but to "convince a publisher to pay you" means that it is still up to the publisher, so it's pretty much the same deal as everywhere else. – Gabriel May 08 '16 at 15:11
The downvote is not mine BTW, I always leave a comment explaining why I downvoted whenever I do. – Gabriel May 08 '16 at 15:11
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@Gabriel: the standing a single researcher has in negotiations with a publisher is so much different (worse) than that a whole university (or, as in Germany most universities are state owned and organized in library networks) has that I consider it a different question. The more so, as a PhD student or post-doc is professionally judged by the journals where they published and therefore doesn't have the freedom to decline working with the big publishers. Whereas a university does have the resources and standing, e.g. to run an open access journal (see e.g. www.jstatsoft.org, look for "Support") – cbeleites unhappy with SX May 08 '16 at 16:35
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... the more so, as the cost for reviews based on the hours spent is huge (see edit). – cbeleites unhappy with SX May 08 '16 at 16:47
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As for "most researchers are paid for doing reviews": this is standard duty for academic work in all countries where I've been working so far. Standard as in saying "I cannot do XXX because I have to do this review" and reviewing in the office during work hours. I know lots of people who stopped all academic activities (including publication) when their contracts ended, but very few (1, actually) who'd maybe consider keeping it up without being on a job that is connected to this publication activity. Reviewing is typically stopped pretty much immediately, even if they still publish. – cbeleites unhappy with SX May 08 '16 at 16:52
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"most researchers are paid for doing reviews", that's precisely the point: they are not. You think it is "standard duty for academic work" apparently because your University asks you to report your reviews. Would anything change if you stopped reviewing altogether and focused on publishing? For most researchers, nothing would change. They'd still receive the same salary as compensation for their work. You seem to believe that if you stopped reviewing your University would either fire you or reduce your salary? – Gabriel May 08 '16 at 17:56
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I agree with Gabriel: I know of no university in which faculty are in any reasonable sense directly paid for their reviews. Faculty are not directly paid for anything that isn't specific to the university, as reviews for a journal certainly are not. For some kinds of academic work, the quality and quantity of it is evaluated in some way and this goes into hiring, promotion and salary decisions. This does not apply to reviews, which are not even systematically reported and certainly never fact-checked (it is not even clear that they could be). – Pete L. Clark May 08 '16 at 18:02
" Standard as in saying "I cannot do XXX because I have to do this review" and reviewing in the office during work hours." Perhaps there are cultural differences at work here: I have never heard anyone say that, ever. If one of my colleagues cancelled their office hours for a week in order to write a review, it would look very bad. May I ask whether @cbeleites is or has ever been a tenure track faculty member? The profile suggests a slighly different job. – Pete L. Clark May 08 '16 at 18:06
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@PeteL.Clark: I cannot vanish for a week because of a review, but it is quite normal to tell my supervisor that I need to finish a review tomorrow and therefore the meeting about x or the half-day experiment z will/should if possible take place only the day after. As for the checking, it is quite common that a professor "assigns" reviews to their staff/PhD students. The official way is that they email to the editor the address of one of their students (the less official way is of course to hand over the manuscript and ask for the review). This is my experience also in institutes that did ... – cbeleites unhappy with SX May 08 '16 at 19:28
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... not ask for a count of reviews at the end of the year. As for how this enters decisions, I'm sure if I'd refuse to do a review my supervisor/professor/director asks for this would enter the decision to (not) renew work contract pretty much the same way refusing to do some measurement would. There's another possibility for checking: some journals in my field publish yearly acknowledgement lists of all reviewers. And of course, the professor as editor of a journal does see whether I refuse to review for that journal. – cbeleites unhappy with SX May 08 '16 at 19:33
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I decided that I do not want to get into tenure track (or habilitation: the moment you become group leader here you pretty much stop doing research because all you do is writing grant proposals, lead a group, and maybe write a bit at the papers and in the lower group leader levels do reviews. Higher levels/professors probably don't do much reviewing, they assign students to do it ;-)). But the review "customs" are the same with my direct supervisor/small boss who did his habilitation before he came to the research institute. In general, I'd say not doing reviews would influence my job outlook – cbeleites unhappy with SX May 08 '16 at 19:40
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... similarly to how not helping colleagues if they have questions or need a measurement done with "my" instrument. It may not be discovered, but I think people will realize that I skip this duty. And sure, a group leader may tell me that I should refuse doing reviews because my work time is needed for xyz. On the whole, however, I'm responsible for organizing myself, and I'm expected to find a viable compromise. One "discovery" is that actually spelling out that time is a limited resource (and I have no reputation of leaving early or not doing my share of work) is acceptable. – cbeleites unhappy with SX May 08 '16 at 19:45
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(This all applies as well to when I was working full-time for research and university institutes. The special situation now is that I reduced to part-time and pretty much completely remote work a couple of months ago in order to start a business, so I do keep a time sheet and have a far better overview of how much time I spend with which activity - which is something also full-time academics can do, and it may trigger interesting discoveries. It certainly does for me) – cbeleites unhappy with SX May 08 '16 at 19:47
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Thanks for a very detailed and informative response. I didn't say that not doing reviews would have no consequences whatsoever, but rather that (i) universities do not pay faculty to write reviews and (ii) the amount of credit one gets for reviewing is vague and random, but never rises to the amount of time it takes to do a good job. I am very sorry to hear that in your neck of the academic woods students must do work that is intended for their advisors or they get dropped.... – Pete L. Clark May 08 '16 at 20:36
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....That sounds quite negative to me, but there are probably cultural differences at play. As for me: I refereed exactly one paper as a student, and I don't think my advisor knew about it. I've graduated three PhDs, and I have passed off one refereeing request to one of them: I thought it would be beneficial for him to read the paper and get the experience. In my field, one cannot assume that a professor at any level has any students at all, let alone has students qualified to do his work. But I will say that "forced by your advisor" does not sound like a good synonym for "getting paid". – Pete L. Clark May 08 '16 at 20:39
@PeteL.Clark: "universities do not pay faculty to write reviews" - if renewal of a work contract is endangered if the employee refuses to conduct assigned reviews, this sounds pretty much like writing reviews is a part of the job in one way or another. And while what cbeleites has written fully matches my own experience, you are right in that "the amount of credit one gets or reviewing is vague and random" (in that there is no fixed mapping between, say, "words in a review per year to write" - luckily, in my opinion). I am not sure what is meant by "never rises to the amount of time it ... – O. R. Mapper May 08 '16 at 22:35
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... takes to do a good job", though. Indeed, the total effort for writing a single review is considerably lower than the effort required for authoring a single paper. But then, that applies to many of one's tasks as a (research-related) university employee, and merely producing good results in the most substantial of one's tasks while failing at all the smaller tasks can overall certainly not be called "a good job". – O. R. Mapper May 08 '16 at 22:42
@O.R. Mapper: My point was that apparently only a student's continued employment could be jeopardized in this way. For a faculty member, the review requests just don't come through the university in any way, so there would be no way for the university to distinguish between simply never getting review requests (which does happen to some of my colleagues) and refusing them. Moreover, if reviewing is explicitly listed in the contracts of European professors, I would be interested to know. It is certainly not listed in my contract.... – Pete L. Clark May 08 '16 at 22:49
Just because you can report something doesn't mean it is a part of your job. (I could report review requests as well. I don't because I know that they will not be evaluated in any way.) Concerning the quoted passage, I meant what I said: one can spend hours or days working on a good review. Or one could never do any reviews, or one could spent much less time and perhaps (perhaps!) get asked less often. None of these things have any significant bearing on one's future career, IME. I have never heard review work brought up in hiring / promotion / raise considerations. Have you? – Pete L. Clark May 08 '16 at 22:52
By the way, if you are a faculty member whose reviewing responsibilities are viewed in any significant way by your employer, so that you feel that "I get paid by my university for my reviewing" applies to you, it would be great if you could leave an answer to that effect, along with the corroborating details. – Pete L. Clark May 08 '16 at 22:57
@PeteL.Clark: Bachelor/Master students never do reviews. Only members of the research and teaching staff of the universitiy (i.e. professors, postdocs, and doctoral candidates) do. Granted, review requests to professors are not registered anywhere, and it is merely my (possibly mistaken!) guess that actively refusing to accept review requests will, over time, lower the professor's reputation in their community and thus their chances for finding partners for collaboration - which in turn is an obstacle for conducting the work they are paid for. If, however, reviews can not only be ... – O. R. Mapper May 08 '16 at 23:09
... reported to someone (I agree that in itself doesn't mean anything), but are actually considered in the decision for renewal of one's contract, in my opinion this pretty much makes reviews part of the job. I am not sure about how often review work is brought up in hiring considerations (or how often some practical experience in conducting reviews is - reasonably or not - taken for granted after a few years of conducting research). I can indeed say that I have frequently heard the aforementioned statement "I cannot do XXX because I have to do this review", though, so my hunch is that ... – O. R. Mapper May 08 '16 at 23:09
... your experience of never having heard a particular statement is not necessarily representative across the cultural divide you alluded to above. For any specifics, however, I suggest opening a separate question along the lines of "Who learns about a researcher's reviewing activity?" – O. R. Mapper May 08 '16 at 23:09
I appreciate your reply and I may ask a question, if I can think of a good one. I didn't say or mean to imply that never doing any reviews ever would have zero repercussions. There is quite a lot of room between that and the claim that it is part of what faculty are paid to do. I mean, in some sense we are being paid for absolutely all of our academic activities....but this is a pretty weak sense. – Pete L. Clark May 08 '16 at 23:43
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In terms of reputation in the community: I have zero information about anyone's refereeing except mine, but if someone who came to me with a good idea for a collaboration and I happened to know that she categorically refused all referee requests...I would be happy to collaborate with her. What is in it for either of us not to collaborate? – Pete L. Clark May 08 '16 at 23:44
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@PeteLClark: "What is in it for either of us not to collaborate?" - self-protection against ending up in a collaboration where all tasks that do not yield an immediate benefit to the other participants end up with you because they are generally unwilling to spend any effort on the not directly rewarding parts of a project? – O. R. Mapper May 09 '16 at 00:09
Comments are not for extended discussion; this conversation has been moved to chat. – eykanal May 09 '16 at 13:18

score 1 · Answer 8 · answered May 04 '16 at 23:14

[Caveat: I agree that the publishing system is quite flawed. Meanwhile, let us have another look]

While cash has become the most common payment method, it is not the only one. Let us talk about barter:

[...] a system of exchange where goods or services are directly exchanged for other goods or services without using a medium of exchange, such as money.

In some countries, academia is not the best paid occupation, for instance young researchers. So the reward of researchers is not only money. Let us call the other reward: "knowledge". Knowledge is not a standard good. You cannot say:

I'd like to buy 3 pounds of algebraic skills
Sure! For here or to go?

You can learn by yourself, for yourself, but except for rare beautiful minds, one needs evaluation. As for many creative works, evaluation is difficult without peers, science is a cumulative progress of unassigned tasks. Evaluations are legion: peer-review, seminars, collaborations, teaching.

The first time I submitted a paper, I had almost no idea about peer-review. The first return was an shot in the head. Teached me a lot. I got reward from being peer-reviewed. I learned that the anonymous guys did that for free. So I reviewed. For free.

Wait, no really.

By reviewing, I almost got access to work in progress, to half-finished works, but anyway current trends, 6 months to 2 years before actual publications, quite sooner than other folks. Time is money
By reviewing, I had to sharpen my reading tool, to discover topics at the borders on my knowledge, to read at least cited works. Work is money
By reviewing, I had only once the opportunity to share reviews of a pool of papers with colleagues (ICIP 2003). We learned that one may be wrong, and two others could correct. Minority report is money
By reviewing, I learned conference and journnal habits, priceless for my publications. Efficiency is money
By reviewing, I compensate for others who review my stuff. Payback is money

For these several reasons, and some more, I do reviewing in a barter mind. What is troublesome is that somebody else draws actual money from that. We might be at the verge of a Ponzi pyramid of scientific publishing.

I agree but money is money and publishers get to keep it for doing pretty much nothing. That's not fair. — Gabriel, May 05 '16 at 00:35

score 1 · Answer 9 · edited May 08 '16 at 22:58

My personal view on the matter is that journal / refereed venue publication should be a collaborative non-pecuniary effort of scientific communities in different fields, in which nobody gets paid for doing specific tasks like reviewing a paper but it is acknowledged that as an academic, some of your time is spent doing that, and as a university, research institute or other entity which garners benefit from scientific research - you would be obliged (morally? socially? legally?) to "contribute reasonably" to this effort.

Of course, this leaves the open question of what would be fair for people who are not employed as researchers. It's not about whether they get compensated, but rather how they can spend time on non-affiliated research activity and not go bankrupt, or work "two jobs", their "day job" and unpaid research-related work. This problem is especially accute for people employed in precarious teaching-only positions in Academia, and for that I might agree some compensation-per-review might be in order - although it's a matter for the academic labor unions to struggle for.

score 1 · Answer 10 · answered Aug 05 '17 at 13:03

I agree that reviewers provide a valuable and uncompensated service.

I believe most academics, however, are sadly misinformed about the work that goes into publishing an article after the reviewers approve it.

I am a former researcher turned manuscript editor. I have published a first author paper and a second author paper in a biological science. I have worked in medical and scientific publishing for 13 years as an editor and now as a consultant.

Top journals likely have no difficulty getting top reviewers. However, the lesser known journals (some of which I happen to consult for) do not have folks beating down their doors to review articles. They must approach those who may or may not be well-qualified to review an article.

I consider myself the last bastion of reason in the publication process. Just yesterday, I spend 9 hours as a paid consultant on an article that was so illogical, so full of errors, and so ill-referenced that I wondered how the reviewers could have possibly thought it was appropriate for publication. This journal hires me because they know I am capable of critically editing research. I have spoken to them on many occasions about the poor quality of the articles that are approved by reviewers.

My goal as an editor is to prevent embarrassment for the journal and to protect the scholarly literature from garbage. I take this responsibility very seriously.

The first editor spent likely 30 hours researching and rewriting to replace the garbage that was submitted and approved by 3 reviewers, conveying these to the author and then receiving and incorporating the comments from the author. Then the article came to me. I spent another 9 hours editing and pointing out serious errors in fact and consistency. The article needs another rewrite, which the editor will ask the author to do. This process is far from over. The designer will need to craft the illustrations and typeset the article. The production editor will need to manage the final proof process. The publishing process is far from the “nothing” that many scholars believe -- only those who have never seen it from the publishing side would say that.

The time pressure is enormous. The reviewers have approved the article and therefore it was placed in the publication queue. The editors MUST get the article into shape, poor as it is, for publication. We are not the experts, of course, so we have no recourse. I have been stuck on more than one occasion with the task of completely rewriting an illogical, inexpert, poorly referenced article because it was in the queue—the reviewers approved.

The journal pays through the nose for my services and the services of their in-house staff. I despair at the naivete of those who believe that the publisher gets paid for doing "next to nothing."

To force the publishers out of the process will dramatically reduce the quality of the medical and scientific literature. This I cannot abide.

Welcome to Academia SE. We have many questions which could benefit from your insight to the publishing process (e.g., this question of mine). Unfortunately, this question isn’t one of them, as it is asking about why the reviewers do not receive payment, not what the journal staff does and why this deserves payment. Please understand that we follow a strict question-and-answer format and answers that do not address the question will be deleted. — Wrzlprmft, Aug 05 '17 at 14:26
Ah. I felt that I was commenting on the premise of the question, which was "academics do pretty much all the work for free and publishers get the money." I believed the premise of the question to be flawed. My apologies if I spoke out of turn. — S Cook, Aug 06 '17 at 17:50

score 0 · Answer 11 · answered Jan 21 '18 at 21:16

The short answer is that the publisher can't afford it (the Cost of Knowledge boycott notwithstanding). If reviewers demanded payment en masse either the system will break down or they'll be paid a pittance per review, and reviewers will complain that they're being made fun of (see this for what happened when the New England Journal of Medicine paid $5 per review).

We can get a sense of how much revenue a journal makes by using OA prices & the number of articles it publishes a year. (This has many potential problems, but I ignore them for simplicity). A moderately large journal might publish 100 articles a year. OA prices vary widely but I'll take $1500 as a baseline. Some publishers can go lower by cutting corners e.g. for copyediting and marketing, but that's clearly less than ideal. So the journal might have a revenue of ~$150,000 per year. Some of the revenue goes towards paying for the editorial management system, marketing, production, possibly the editor-in-chief's honorarium if applicable, and so on. Let's assume a net margin of 10%, i.e. a profit of $15,000 a year.

Next let's assume the journal has a rejection rate of 75% (for comparison the most selective journals have rejection rates of over 90%). Assume the journal requires two reviews per manuscript to make a decision. That means the journal needs a total of ~800 reviews a year. If it paid $10 for each of those reviews, that's over half the net margin gone! Viewed from this perspective, NEJM didn't pay $5 for each review because they were making fun of the reviewers. They did so because it was all they could afford to pay.

Finally let's not forget that this is a reasonably large journal - 100 papers / year. There're many smaller journals around, many of which are not indexed by SCI and therefore don't have an impact factor. These journals are almost always loss-making. They only stay afloat because the publisher subsidizes them using the profit margin from their larger journals. If these journals also had to pay for reviews, they would lose even more money. Publishers would be incentivized to shut them down, which hurts research since the papers published in these journals aren't necessarily bad, they just tend to be boring and low novelty. To top it off even this reasonably large journal is probably facing subscription cuts in the current market (see my answer to a different question).

Having said all this, this applies only to journal articles. The sheer volume of reviews required in journal publishing makes it hard to pay reviewers, but if you're reviewing book proposals, you can expect some compensation. You might not receive cash, but you should be able to e.g. get a free book from the publisher's collection.

Can't afford it? https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science — Gabriel, Jan 21 '18 at 23:08
Yup, can't afford it. Elsevier might be a (slight) exception because of its exceptionally high profit margins; other publishers don't do nearly as well. But you can still do the calculations. That article quotes Elsevier as receiving 1.5 million submissions a year. At 2 reviewers per submission, how much can it afford to pay reviewers before its entire profit is wiped out? The fact that no publisher - including those started by people complaining about publishing - pays its reviewers is a giveaway as to that idea's feasibility. — Allure, Jan 21 '18 at 23:39
Slight exception? Did you read the article? Did you see their annual revenue? Elsevier owns a quarter of the scientific journal market, and combined with two other similar companies they hold half the market. Their profit margins are obscene. It's ridiculous to say they can't afford it. Smaller journals are not the problem here. They don't have the power to hold entire universities hostage, these companies do. — Gabriel, Jan 22 '18 at 01:13
You are incorrect. There are approximately 2.5 million articles published every year (http://www.stm-assoc.org/2015_02_20_STM_Report_2015.pdf; this is likely to be an underestimate since it only counts English articles). Elsevier publishes 400,000 of those, giving it a market share of 16%. Elsevier's profit margins are not entirely due to journals - the company also operates Scopus, ScienceDirect, etc. You can get a sense of what journal margins are like by looking at another publisher's annual reports, e.g. Wiley's. — Allure, Jan 22 '18 at 01:32
Incorrect regarding what? Elsevier's annual revenue is over £6b. Market share and amount of journals owned by Elsevier are two different things. — Gabriel, Jan 22 '18 at 01:37
Your market share statement is incorrect. If you're going by "number of journals" then their market share is even smaller. The linked report quotes 28100 journals, of which Elsevier has 2500. That's 8.9%. — Allure, Jan 22 '18 at 01:40

score 0 · Answer 12 · answered May 04 '16 at 14:47

This is the same question that I often think. From your point of view, yes, you are right in your place. Why should not we get money for review? However, main point is who will decide to give money? And how the amount would be fixed? Based on what? Who will judge? Editor-in-chief, or other person? Since we don't have the clear understanding and methodology for these, there is no money for reviewers.

And regarding publishers, apart from reviews, there are Publishing staffs who are responsible for handling the post acceptance process. Thus, money is required for publisher for the salary of these staffs, also for the journal advertising. Conference is another typical issue. Following this way, you can find where money goes.

Another important aspect, sometimes research can't be measured by money, however, research produces a huge amount of money.

Why don't researchers request payment for refereeing?

12 Answers12

How to charge a publisher for services received (i.e. the review) as the reviewer in person?

Linked

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