Re: SAGE rolls out rewards program for all journal reviewers

[Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>]

In fact we do no know what the market price for peer review of 
monographs is because there is no market.  I cannot agree with 
Sandy that the way to get at a price is by determining the pro 
rata share of a reviewer's salary.  There are faculty who earn 
far more doing part-time consulting than they do in their 
official institutional duties, and there are faculty whose time 
spent reviewing materials is effectively billed out a lower rate. 
Anyone who has been following the news about the sale of the 
Huffington Post to AOL will have noticed that there is a huge 
stable of unpaid bloggers working for the Post.  Unpaid.  Would a 
prospective reviewer of a monograph hold out for more money? 
Would the reviewer feel that being associated with such a review 
is a good thing to do professionally speaking and thus be willing 
to do it for free?  Is the professional benefit as it is with the 
Huff Post?  Or perhaps the benefit is deemed to be so great that 
the reviewers would pay for the opportunity to do the work.  If 
that last item sounds ridiculous, think of the many author-pays 
OA services that are now flourishing.

What has really piqued my interest in Sage's announcement is how 
the"free" service will be viewed by the IRS.  Is that access a 
form of income?  At what value?  Or is the access (for 30 days, 
remember) simply a promotional tool, as I would think, and the 
IRS is being told that this is not "payment" at all?

Sage is an outstanding organization and like all outstanding 
organizations, for-profit and not-for-profit alike, must be 
assumed to know what its own interests are and how best to pursue 
them.

Joe Esposito

On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 9:06 AM, Sandy Thatcher
<sandy.thatcher@alumni.princeton.edu> wrote:

> I daresay that paying peer reviewers at market prices would also be
> the nail in the coffin for monograph publishing. While university
> presses and academic commercial publishers do pay faculty a modest
> honorarium for reviewing book manuscripts, it is just that, an
> honorarium, and not compensation at the rate the faculty would be
> earning if their salaries were prorated to the time spent.
>
> Sandy Thatcher
>
>
>