Should Peer Review Be Paid, Restructured, or Abolished? | Prophy Roundtable #9

Should peer reviewers be paid? Four people who run journals and the systems behind them answered, and none of them chose payment alone. Reviewers work for free, and publishers are paid for the peer-reviewed article. Submissions keep rising, and the same reviewers are asked more often. We put one question to the panel in advance: should peer review be paid, restructured, or abolished? The four answers were four different restructures. David Haber, speaking for himself rather than ASM, would abolish both the volunteer model and payment per review, and make reviewing a salaried profession with accreditation and a career path. Kruna Vukmirovic would fix the inputs: IUCr journals have run submissions through automated data validation since the 1990s, so a reviewer reads the machine report before the paper. Neil Blair Christensen would split "peer review" into the jobs it covers (screening, verification, expert exchange) and treat each differently, with payment worth discussing only for the last. Selina La Barbera would restructure with meaningful recognition and remuneration where appropriate, tested in targeted experiments. Then the money. Who pays: the APC, the subscription, the author, or the budget that pays for science itself? Christensen told the story of Collabra at University of California Press, where reviewers were offered a share of every APC and most gave it to the journal's waiver fund. La Barbera cited Biology Open's Fast and Fair experiment, a 95% cut in time to first editorial decision, and noted it also changed recruitment, deadlines and quality checks, so the gain can't be put down to payment alone. Vukmirovic warned that journals that pay would pull reviewers away from those that can't. By the closing round, Haber and Christensen agreed that not every paper will get a human reviewer, and neither expects the system to change much. Vukmirovic and La Barbera held to restructuring. PANEL David Haber — Director, Publishing Operations, American Society for Microbiology Kruna Vukmirovic — Head of Publishing Strategy, International Union of Crystallography Neil Blair Christensen — Sales Director, Molecular Connections Selina La Barbera — Publishing Director, Journals, EDP Sciences Moderated by Gareth Dyke, Partnerships Director at Prophy. CHAPTERS 0:00 One question: should peer review be paid, restructured, or abolished? 2:23 David Haber — abolish volunteerism and make reviewing a profession 3:52 Kruna Vukmirovic — restructure before the reviewer sees the paper 5:21 Training the next generation of reviewers 6:54 Neil Blair Christensen — peer review is several jobs under one label 8:24 Rejected at one journal, accepted at the fourth 9:59 The foundational problem: peer review is invisible 10:58 Selina La Barbera — restructure, with recognition and remuneration where appropriate 13:24 Biology Open's Fast and Fair: 85% faster, but not payment alone 14:56 Recognition can't come from publishers alone 16:54 Is the volunteer model already gone? 18:53 Exhausted editors, and why not pay the authors? 20:31 Collabra: offered the money, most reviewers gave it away 24:07 Who pays, and what exactly should we reward? 26:16 Someone always pays: the APC, the subscription or the author 27:52 Haber — the money that pays for science 30:14 Christensen — everyone is incentivised by volume, except reviewers 33:45 La Barbera — new money or redistributed money? 35:15 Haber — community building or a profession 38:45 ASM's model: from early-career review boards to editorships 40:06 Vukmirovic — what paying reviewers would cost a small society publisher 41:31 Human review is fallible; standards come first 42:52 La Barbera — what kind of peer review system do we want to build? 44:36 Christensen — does this paper need an expert reviewer? 47:56 Closing round: Haber — only journals that can afford it keep human review 50:14 Vukmirovic — far too many low-quality papers 50:44 Christensen — no fix is coming 52:17 La Barbera — restructure, recognise, remunerate where appropriate 53:09 Sign-off ABOUT PROPHY ROUNDTABLE Prophy Roundtable (formerly Prophy Predicts) is a monthly online discussion. We bring together practitioners from across scholarly publishing, ask them the same question in advance, and find out where they disagree. Episode #8, "The Speed–Quality Trade":    • Peer Review Speed vs Quality: Is Time to D...   ABOUT PROPHY Prophy helps publishers identify relevant reviewers, detect conflicts of interest, and discover related research using a database of 199M+ publication records and 103M+ researcher profiles. Learn more at prophy.ai. LINKS Prophy: https://www.prophy.ai Previous episodes:    / @prophyai   Subscribe for the next episode. #PeerReview #ScholarlyPublishing #AcademicPublishing