Peer Review: You Aren't Going to be Paid

Volunteers with no funding or scant recognition

There is a two pronged issue with the current funding landscape of peer review – both with the more obvious body of people seeking funding for their article or research and the issue I’ll get into now, which is the issue of getting peer reviewers who are both good and willing to complete a peer review. You may not know this, but a majority of journals who peer review articles have peer reviewers on a volunteer basis. What that means is that there is a growing issue in the peer review landscape to get reviewers who are both skilled enough to do peer review and have the time/energy/desire to do peer review with no sign of reward. Lucky for us, Gropp et al. (2017) has done a lot of the legwork to break down the issues in “Peer review: A system under stress” where they discuss the various issues with peer review (p. 408).

So what can one expect when peer reviewing:

1. Limited training: while the journal may offer tutorials on how to peer review, it will mostly be on the shoulders of the peer reviewer to know how to correctly peer review (Hopewell et al., 2014, p. 4).

2. “I’m not really a ‘peer’”: some peer reviewers run into the issue that they lack knowledge on everything within a research article which they are asked to review. For example, someone may be asked to review an article which includes statistics, but may not have the knowledge or skills to properly review statistics, even when the article itself is in their field of study (Gropp et al., 2017, p. 409).

3. No money, no prestige: While offering money has been explored with poor results in the past (Gropp et al., 2017, p. 409), there is still the issue of incentivising peer reviewing. No reward or recognition is given to those who do peer review, leaving the pool of volunteers smaller than it might be otherwise.

Reading the small print: funding for the researchers

Of course, it isn’t just rewarding the peer reviewers which is an issue within the journaling landscape. It also supplies money to those who actually publish research to get peer reviewed. Here’s a quote from Bendiscioli (2019) that highlights one of the biggest issues with getting funding in the first place for researchers “In addition, various criteria used by peer reviewers to allocating funding—notably the numbers of publications, citations and the name or impact factor of the journals where scientists publish their research—are being criticized for limiting creativity and the exploration of untested ideas” (p. 2). Even getting your researching-foot in the door can be difficult for those seeking funding or publication. This is often an unknown issue of peer review, because researchers can have the expectation that having gotten the article written will have been the hardest first step. However, the cold truth of it is that there is a limited pool of funding and a limited pool of articles being accepted and having the best article can still run into issues like bias and just not having proposed the idea at the right time.

So what’s to be done?

When it comes to funding the researcher, the biggest move to correcting the funding issues for researchers is considering alternative ways of selecting who can get funding, rather than just relying on peer review (Bendiscioli, 2019, pp.1-3).

Here are some varied options (from Bendiscioli’s “The troubles with peer review for allocating research funding”):

● Distributing the funding equally to all qualified researchers without selection expert

● Administrators to select proposals for funding (as used by US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)

● Peer review only an applicants’ past performance – not the current project validity (as done by Howard Hughes Medical Institutes and others)

● Fund projects that have the broadest positive outcome (as used by the US National Science Federation)

But as that is not the only funding issue, what about the issues with incentives for those who do peer review?

Gropp et al. (2017) suggests this: “An alternative incentive model suggested, particularly for research application reviewers, was to explore a process in which a program officer identifies good reviewers (e.g., timely, responsive, and thorough) and enters these individuals into a lottery for research funds” (p. 409). It would offer reviewers to be selected for research for their own projects while also identifying those who deserve recognition for their articles. It’s a neat little circle, offering opportunities beyond just a simple volunteer exchange, without presenting a strain to the budget of paying peer reviewers, which might result in the bill being passed back to the researcher. Of course, it wasn’t the only suggestion from “Peer review: A system under stress,” which offered many other good suggestions, including “Another model, which would be appropriate for publication and proposal review, is to once again ensure that this “community service” is properly acknowledged and rewarded through professional evaluation, promotion, or tenure procedures” (Gropp et al., 2017, p. 409). A simple solution, which would offer less pressure on the journal, would instead fall to recognition from the reviewer’s institution, which would supply rewards. Both of these suggestions for compensation are good ones, though they might involve a more in-depth attempt to implement them than the current system. But as it stands, the current system needs improving, both for the researcher and reviewer, so that both can get what is best from this system.

Work Cited:

Bendiscioli, S. (2019). The troubles with peer review for allocating research funding: Funders need to experiment with versions of peer review and decision-making. EMBO Reports, 20(12), e49472. https://doi.org/10.15252/embr.201949472

Gropp, R. E., Glisson, S., Gallo, S., & Thompson, L. (2017). Peer review: A system under stress. Bioscience, 67(5), 407-410. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/bix034

Hopewell, S., Collins, G. S., Boutron, I., Yu, L., Cook, J., Shanyinde, M., Wharton, R., Shamseer, L., & Altman, D. G. (2014). Impact of peer review on reports of randomised trials published in open peer review journals: Retrospective before and after study. BMJ (Online), 349(jul01 8), g4145-g4145. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.g4145