I’ve been writing about various challenges and crises in scientific publishing since the origins of this blog back in the distant days of the Nature Science Network. Several million papers have been submitted, reviewed (with varying degrees of rigour), and published (at varying costs) in the years since, but I think it’s fair to say that the whole system is still not quite perfect. As workloads of practising scientists continue to spiral, one persistent challenge is finding qualified people to review the torrent of submissions at any one journal. And one potential (and probably partial) solution to this, which appeared in my feed most recently in this post from Trevor Branch, is for the publishing giants to divert some of their profits into actually paying reviewers for their time.
Now as I’ve written before, I am in general an advocate for paying people for the work they do, and given a Truss-related 40% hike in my mortgage repayments I’m not going to sniff at the opportunity to supplement my income, especially if it is just doing things I do anyway. But I have a few questions about how a system of payment for reviewing would work, in practice. (All of this assumes good actors all round, committed to thorough and conscientious reviews, which seems reasonable as I can’t imagine anybody playing the scientific publishing system for personal gain…)
First things first: how much? If you start to pay people for their time, you need to pay enough for it not to be insulting. Funding agencies are increasingly paying reviewers or panel members, and in my experience rates for this come in between about £200 and £500 a day. So that might be a reasonable benchmark - considerably less than one might get for private consultancy as a PhD-qualified scientist, but not insultingly low. The next job is to scale that to how long it takes to review a manuscript, where I will throw out a figure of 2-3 hours (this is broadly in line with what people have self-reported, although there is a lot of variation and quite a long right hand tail). So let’s call it somewhere around ⅓ to ½ a day - suggesting that something in the region of £100-£200 might be a reasonable fee for a single review. (Of course, people may favour some kind of an increasing scale from non-profits through society journals to the big glamour mags.)
My second thought was how would this be administered, practically? Although publishing is concentrated into a few massive publishers, there are still quite a number of players in the game - would you be contracted to everyone you reviewed for? And how would it be taxed? This might be obvious for those in jurisdictions where tax returns are an integral part of everyone’s working life, but for those of us in PAYE systems where tax on our primary income is deducted at source, little bits of extra income coming in from multiple ‘employers’ could cause a massive headache, out of proportion to the few hundred pounds extra per year it brings in.
Ultimately, would I be more likely to agree to a review if I were getting paid for it? At this relatively comfortable stage in my career - mortgage notwithstanding, I’m doing OK, and I do have ‘scholarship’ hours baked into my workload - probably not. But there have been times when it would have made a significant difference, for instance between post-doc contracts when things were very tight. So I’d be interested in seeing more concrete plans for how this could work, and to reassure me that publishers would not respond by simply increasing fees, effectively directing even more public money into private hands.