RE: Pay for peers (Re: Costs of publishing a journal)

["Nawin Gupta" <nawin@nawingupta.com>]

I want to underscore the distinction between paying for peer 
review and incentive for submitting a review on time.  To my 
knowledge, scholarly journals do not pay for peer reviews - none 
of the journals I have ever worked with paid peer reviewers (and 
they covered many disciplines).  Yes, as Paul mentions, some 
economics journals do pay for timely reviews - two of the 
economics journals I worked with provided a token incentive for 
timely submission of peer reviews.  We paid a small incentive to 
a few hundred reviewers each year, but then most of these 
reviewers may have submitted timely reviews anyway.  I believe 
serving as a peer reviewer is a "labor of love" for something 
reviewers deeply care about, and often the deed is anonymous.

Nawin Gupta
INFORMED PUBLISHING SOLUTIONS, INC.
Phone +1 773-623-9199 or +1 773-685-2007
nawin@nawingupta.com

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Anthony Watkinson
Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2009 5:56 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Pay for peers (Re: Costs of publishing a journal)

I agree with Paul that this would warrant a study. Unfortunately 
I suspect that there are too view journals paying sums for 
reviews and that economics is (as often) a discipline which in 
many ways works a little differently. If you work in a medical 
discipline as I do, it is natural to consider paying reviewers 
for delivering quickly. After all for many areas, speed to 
publication is of the essence. However conversations with editors 
reveal an overwhelmingly negative attitude to an innovation like 
this. One of the problems raised is that if you are actually 
paying the reviewer for anywhere near the time involved in 
writing a good review you have to pay such a lot more than $60 to 
match the money earned by a consultant physician.

Anthony

----- Original Message -----
From: "Courant, Paul" <pnc@umich.edu>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2009 1:56 AM
Subject: Re: Pay for peers (Re: Costs of publishing a journal)

> Some of the economics journals pay for a review that is timely.
> Once you've agreed to do a review, getting $60 for doing it within six
> weeks can speed things up.  I've never seen an evaluation of the
> effectiveness of this practice, although it's the kind of thing that
> economists like to study.
>
> -----------------------------
> Paul N. Courant
> University Librarian and Dean of Libraries Harold T. Shapiro
> Collegiate Professor
>    of Public Policy
> Professor of Economics and of Information The University of Michigan
>
>
> On 10/26/09 7:14 PM, "Rick Anderson" <rick.anderson@utah.edu> wrote:
>
>> For scholarly journals, I understand the standard practice is NOT to
>> pay peer reviewers at all. I would be interested in hearing from
>> other publishers on this list if any of them know of journals for
>> which peer reviewers receive payment, in cash or in kind (free
>> subscription?).
>
> I've done peer review for a number of scholarly journals, and the only
> one that has offered me anything like compensation is Elsevier.  I get
> 30 days of free access to Scopus every time I review a paper for them
> -- though it's apparently intended mainly as a help to the reviewing
> process, not as a sweetener to the invitation.
>
> Rick Anderson
> Assoc. Dir. for Scholarly Resources & Collections Marriott Library
> Univ. of Utah rick.anderson@utah.edu