A Quick Fix for the Referee Crisis

Pay per submission

As a general rule, if you want strangers to do some work for you, it can be a good idea to offer payment. Unfortunately, many academics seem ideologically opposed to markets. So, like many a communist system, we end up with shortages and quality control issues. Fortunately, we don’t rely on academic peer review for food. But it does influence job prospects, so I feel for any grad students whose work may be stuck in the system for a year or more due to the referee crisis.

It’s not surprising that there’s a referee crisis, when you consider the incentive structure of our current peer review system:
(i) There is no personal cost incurred when you add to the reviewing burden (by submitting a paper to a journal); and
(ii) There is no reward for doing work (i.e., serving as a referee) that relieves the reviewing burden—nor for doing a good job of it.

The obvious fix: journals should charge hefty submission fees, and use the money to pay editors and referees for their service.

This fixes the incentives instantly. It turns refereeing from a chore into an opportunity. And the desire to receive more such opportunities in future creates an incentive to do a good job. It also creates an incentive against flooding the system with low-quality submissions: if you had to pay, say, $300 per submission, you’re likely to be more discerning about which papers you send in.

Objections

Q. “I can’t afford to pay that much to submit my papers to journals.”

A. Referee a few times and it should all balance out. (For reasons of tax efficiency, I imagine that publishers might instead offer “credits” to referees, charge a certain number of credits for a paper submission, and allow authors and referees to “exchange currency” between credits and dollars as needed.)

If what you’re really saying is, “I want to get more out of the system than I put in,” then it seems reasonable to ask you to pay for that privilege.

Q. “Isn’t charging money for anything inherently unfair, since some people can afford more than others?”

A. The peer review system is not a charity; why place the burden on it to remedy perceived economic injustice? If grad students or adjuncts deserve research subsidies, take that up with their universities. (Personally, I’d recommend that academic departments cover the costs of a couple of journal submissions per person per year.)

Stepping back, it always strikes me as crazy to tolerate gross inefficiency just because switching to a functional system would have costs for some. Dysfunctionality has even greater costs, and those costs also fall disproportionately on less-advantaged members of the academic community (esp. grad students).

Q. “Won’t monetary incentives undermine the intrinsic motivation to referee?”

A. What intrinsic motivation? I assume that most academics currently do their share of refereeing out of a general sense of duty—I tend to referee around a dozen papers per year—but there’s a lot of variation, and it would seem only fair that those who do more should be rewarded for it. (I’d actually feel better about refereeing if the existence of freeloaders didn’t make me feel like a sucker for doing my part.)

Q. “Won’t monetary incentives encourage people to referee too much, and do a superficial, sloppy job of it?”

A. The hope would be that editors track the quality of referee reports, and use these track records to influence who they do or don’t invite to referee in future. (At worst, this may still be an improvement over the status quo, where it’s not uncommon for people to do a superficial, sloppy job while refereeing too little! )

Q. Won’t this generate an annoying amount of tax compliance paperwork, each time you referee for a new journal (or publisher)?

A. We’re already paid by publishers for reviewing book manuscripts, and it doesn’t seem that bad? I’m always happy to get paid for stuff, even if I do then have to report it to the IRS come tax time.

Any other thoughts or objections?