I am relatively new to this forum, and this issue may have been raised before. I have recently been requested by one of my peer reviewers to pay for the peer review of an article in our journal. I have indicated that is not our current policy, nor are we likely to start, but was informed that at least one international journal was paying for peer reviews. In my experience as both a reviewer and as an editor, this is the first time I have come across such a request, and I would appreciate any comments from other editors as to whether this is becoming common practice, how appropriate it is and how widespread.

Andy Robertson
Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Global Health Protection
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I think this is not a widespread practice. We don't adopt it in our journal because we don't have funds, but if we could do it, we were in better position to ask from the reviewers quicker and better quality reviews.

Julio Voltarelli
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Dr Robertson raises an issue that I was about to bring up.

We have problems finding reviewers in statistics and health economics—these people are not physicians and they do not feel that they owe us. Should we pay them for reviews?

Joseph Milerad
Scientific-Editor-in-Chief, Journal of the Swedish Medical Association
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I am familiar with a journal that paid for reviews for a number of years and then saw reviewing quality go down anyway. The board decided to withdraw payment for reviews and instead put the money toward paying for a technical reviewer who would look at statistics more carefully among other things. I only mention it because paying doesn’t seem to guarantee quality.

Mary Ellen Kerans
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I am not aware of paying for clinical evaluations. I am aware that many journals do pay stipends to statistical reviewers (our journal does); I think larger journals probably have the funds to retain a statisticians on staff or on a contract basis. 

Michael Vasko
Managing Editor, Arch Phys Med Rehabil
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I have worked as co-editor in many journals in my country (Iraq), and have reviewed innumerable articles for various local journals. Only one journal used to pay reviewers. I find that the recognition of the efforts of a good reviewer can be done through better ways, such as acknowledging the reviewers of the past year in the first issue of the following year, or sending letters of acknowledgment from the editor to the reviewers who have returned timely and high quality reviews during the past year. It really depends on the policy of the journal, which should be made transparent to all (reviewers, authors, readers and editorial boards).

Nada Al Ward
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We have not done that, but it's an interesting idea. We have many reviewers who are substantively knowledgeable, but may not be familiar with some of the diverse statistical pieces used in some articles. I have spent many years studying stats and run workshops in the area, but there are still lots of methods that I simply must take on faith that the author has performed correctly. I feel that I overuse those of our reviewers that are knowledgeable in particular statistical areas. Having a person on staff who could double check methods and also help ensure consistency across papers in reporting methods would up quality, I would think, more than paying reviewers across the board.

Nancy Darling
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www.jmir.org pays its peer-reviewers for fast-tracked papers (if they submit their reviews within a week). This serves as an additional incentive for reviewers to deliver timely peer-review reports. Authors can request to fast-track a paper on submission and pay an additional fast-track fee, part of which is used to provide a financial incentive to the reviewers to meet the tight deadlines. It works well—we have always been able to make a decision for fast-tracked papers within the 10 days we promise. Not all peer-reviewers actually accept (or are allowed to accept—US gov’t!) the payment.

BMJ used to “pay” their reviewers by sending them GBP50 vouchers, but recently abandoned this practice, as far as I know.

Gunther Eysenbach
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Here are some other ways to recognize peer reviewers:

Send handwritten thank you notes. This always was very much appreciated and only takes a few seconds as each review comes in. If the number of reviewers is too great, send a digital thank you card by e-mail with the editorial board’s signature. (I know a graphic artist in the US who can make a digital card for your pub via e-mail for $100-$200 US—Jessica Carter Forkner, jess@jessforkner.com).

Send out annual certificates signed by the editor in chief and president of your association to the reviewers who review more than 5 or so manuscripts. This is what I was using: http://shop.baudville.com/index.asp?CID=2  They are a bit expensive, but the certificates are very nice and very well received. We always had a jump in people asking to review after sending these out.

Send bound copies of your journal to the top reviewers, reviewers who review more than 15-20 papers. Save-A-Book, in the US, can bind them for about $35-$45 plus shipping/volume.  http://www.save-a-book.com/contact.htm    http://www.save-a-book.com/products.htm

List the active reviewers for the year along with a thank you note in the Dec issue. Highlight the names in gold, bronze, and silver of the reviewers who reviewed frequently. For example—15-30 reviews gets a gold designation, 10-14 gets a silver designation, 5-9 gets a bronze designation. If you are on a tight budget, metallic inks are expensive, so just use regular colors.  http://www.nmanet.org/images/uploads/Journal/Review2030.pdf

Give the peer reviewers CME credit for hours reviewed. I can send you info on this process.

Give reviewers discounted membership.

Give reviewers discounted convention fees.

Give reviewers complimentary subscriptions.

When you get those one or two reviews each year that are completely outstanding, have the EIC write a personal thank you note. Reward the consistently top reviewers with positions as associate editors, editorial board members etc.

Provide a referral letter when requested by the reviewer acknowledging that they reviewed manuscripts for your journal and then list those manuscripts.

During the annual meeting, invite the active reviewers to a breakfast one morning. About 25-30% of them will show up. 

Paying reviewers might not be the best way to reward reviewers. Some reviewers put in much more effort than others. Some are late, some early. Too many variables. Plus it will raise the cost for authors who are reviewers themselves. You would need more money to facilitate the process, coordinate getting the money from the authors to distribute to the reviewers. That sounds like much more trouble than its worth. Plus for the reviewers, would it be worth the trouble of having to add that to their income for tax purposes (US). You’ll find a couple of people asking about pay. Some are just seeing what they could get. It doesn’t mean you should feel that you have to say yes. My response to this (thankfully) rare query about payment was something like, “People review for the scholarly contribution and some list the activity on their CVs.”

I hope this helps someone.

Kimberly Fradette-Taylor
Publications Manager, American Society of Nephrology
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I know of no journals that pay peer-reviewers. It is a service that all of us provide to support the medical literature and the advancement of science. With the exception of the 5-6 very top journals that have huge circulations and advertising income, medical journals run on shoestring budgets and could never afford to pay peer reviewers. My journal receives well over 1000 manuscripts a year and send 2/3 out to 3 external peer reviewers each. That comes to around 2000 reviews per year. If we paid just $5 per review, that could come to 7% of our total editorial office budget.

As we write each year in our annual editorial recognizing and thanking our peer reviewers, peer-reviewed journals survive because of the selfless contributions and dedication of their peer reviewers. This has been a long tradition in science—medical and otherwise. This potential reviewer for your journal must be new to the process.

Bill Tierney
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The ways of rewarding peer reviewers suggested by Kimberley Fradette-Taylor are excellent. I do not believe most reviewers do it for money (and our qualitative research supports this), and it would take large sums to make that a major motive. We have found that common major motivations are a sense of responsibility to one's colleagues and to the development and nurturing of new science. I do think paid statistical reviewers are a valuable addition if they can be afforded, and raise methodologic quality in a way that other reviewers cannot.

I would add to the list of rewards that most reviewers have academic affiliations, and a powerful reward is recognizing the intellectual and creative activity of reviewing. CME is one way of doing this. Our journal also publishes not only annual lists of all active reviewers, but also ranks the top fifty each year by quality, volume, and speed. Those who are in the top reviewer list twice in the past four years become Senior Reviewers and are listed on the masthead each month (as well they should be). (These senior reviewers then become an excellent pool for future editorial board candidates).

We send annual evaluation summary letters to reviewers, with our great thanks to the good ones. We point out that this is an intellectual activity crucial to the advancement of science, and should be recognized as such by promotion and tenure committees. We send them a letter to that effect encouraging them to include these letters summarizing their contribution in their file, to list it in their CV, and to present it to their promotion and tenure committee. Carefully done peer review is probably as important to the advancement of science as is authorship itself.

Michael Callaham
Annals of Emergency Medicine
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I agree with Michael. To get an opportunity to review a manuscript is an honor because it is nothing but recognition of the intellect. This feel-good factor by the reviewer is the greatest reward.

Sadhu Charan Panda
Editor, Journal of Community Medicine
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I agree completely with Bill. Often the folks who review for journals are the same people who write for them; I think the quid pro quo principle here is that reviewers provide fair reviews to ensure a high quality journal to which they themselves might at some point send their papers.  (Not sure how well I’m explaining this but I hope you get the picture!)

As Bill notes, most of us couldn’t afford to pay our reviewers even if we wanted to. I supposed in an author-pays OA scenario part of the fee could go to reviewers—but I can’t help but worry that money paid out in this way might eventually corrupt the peer-review process (which already is accused of being unfair).

Lisa Dittrich
Managing Editor, Academic Medicine
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Our journal (Revista Biomedica), being a small one, with an even smaller budget, could never reward reviewers with cash. So the alternative ways that have been proposed—some we regularly use, others not—are of much interest to me. You mention that you grade reviewers according to the quality, the volume, and the speed of thier contributions. Could you please tell me (and perhaps others would like to hear about it) how you assess the quality of the reviews and who does this evaluation?

Fernando J Alvarez
Associate Editor, Revista Biomedica
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Two modes that I know of:

1) Saudi Medical Journal (and other Saudi journals) awards CME hours to reviewers, 1 CME hour per review, and maximum 5 per year with the approval of Saudi Medical Council.

2) JAMC (J Ayub Med Coll Abbottabad) takes a processing fee from authors, but if you review 2 papers for JAMC you will not be asked for processing fee.

Ahmed Badar
Pakistan Journal of Physiology
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When a peer reviewer takes part in the indirect development of a manuscript, the best rewards that he can have are the beneficial effects of the results on the reduction or the disappearance of morbidity and the increase in the life expectancy.

Hnid
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The Journal of the College of Physicians & Surgeons Pakistan (JCPSP) has a policy of paying an honorarium to reviwers of manuscripts submitted to JCPS for publication as well as acknowledging the work done by the reviewers.

Fazli Ghani
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Prima facie, it appears payment ensures compliance. Any honorary work done is likely to be delayed, or done cursorily. But it is very individual. I, for one, do not accept any payment for reviewing a paper, or even a book proposal. And so would maybe so many others.

At MSM, we do not pay, or encourage reviewers who expect payment, for reviews. But its easy to be idealistic when there are not many reviews to be handled, and deadlines are not that nerve-racking.

There are many who want to know how much can they get. And not just in kind, which is what we mean when we talk of scientific advancement, patient welfare, journal quality etc. They want to know the monetary benefits. The journal concerned has to decide whether it wants such reviewers.

A journal, hence, has to take its decision based on its guiding principles, its budget, and the likely demands, overt or covert, perceived or expressed, of its present and potential pool of reviewers.

There cannot be a hard and fast rule.

Ajai
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There is a flip side of payment.

I DO accept payment for reviewing textbooks and for reviewing book proposals, because it is a professional service asked of me by a publisher to help them make a financial decision—whether or not to invest in this book.

I accept these projects when the money is worth more than my time, given my schedule at that point in my life. And they pay pretty well—always several hundred dollars for only a few hours work.

I use different considerations when I agree to accept a journal manuscript to review. In those cases, I accept or not depending upon my interest in the manuscript, my obligation to the journal and that particularly sub-field, and whether or not I think I have time to do it within the deadline. There is also a quid pro quo thing—I am offering service to a journal and an editor that I hope will increase my prestige within the field. Especially as a junior person, I found such invitations a flattering acknowledgment of my standing.

If I were offered money as an incentive, I would say no MORE often. This is because quantifying my effort would probably lead me to conclude that this was not a good investment of my time. The intangibles are worth more and putting a monetary value on it devalues them.

BTW, I realized the other day that, as an Elsevier journal, we do offer reviewers some compensation. They get free Scopus access for 30 days as a thank you gift. I'm not sure how I feel about that, because our default reviewer invitation letter emphasizes this as a big thing. I think it would be better if the letter focused on the intangibles and put the thank you access as a postscript.

Nancy Darling
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In contrast to the bulk of opinions about this question, I have the strong feeling that you are right. I have problems with the journals that charge submission fees from the authors and don't pass part of these fees to the reviewers.

Júlio Voltarelli
Co-editor, Medicina-Ribeirão Preto
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Do many journals charge the authors submission fees? Is this not a short step away from vanity publishing?

Presumably they are not peer-reviewed journals?

Deborah
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When a person, very rich, gives a tip of 20 dollars to a parking attendant, a poor person finds he must pay more than 1 dollar for the parking of his car although he can little afford it. I hope that Nancy understood me.

As regards the reviewer who wants compensation for his work, I find that this work can’t, in any case, be compensated, since it enters within a framework of a desire of all the scientific community to purified science. Thank God that the medical journals agree to give the articles to the hands of reviewers, and I am sure that if the money enters within this framework much bad news would be published.

Hnid
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Peer-review journals do indeed levy "page charges", and even today some electronic publishers (who do not consume any ink or paper, per se) have found that a difficult tradition to let go. As these "article processing charges" at electronic publishers have increased, protests among independent editors at BMC journals have been recently voiced. To be sure, such charges may be waived, but only if a suitable hardship case is made by the submitting author. However, when decisions about waivers are determined by the publisher rather than the editor, still other concerns are raised.

Es Sills
Editor, J Exp Clin Assist Reprod
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At BioMed Central we don't charge submission fees (we charge article processing charges on accepted manuscripts), but submission fees are an idea I personally think has some merit (to discourage poor submissions and salami slicing), although I can see the downside of it, with added hassle for authors and the inability of some to pay. Submission fees have no connection at all to vanity publishing; this insinuation is baseless. Vanity publishing is when a publisher only requires money to publish, with no other considerations taken into account—if there is rigorous peer review and editorial processes, it is slander to accuse journals that charge article processing charges or submission fees of being vanity publishers. Are journals that charge page charges or colour figures charges accused of vanity publishing?

I also fail entirely to see the connection between submission fees and having an obligation to pay reviewers—it's not a hypothecated tax. There is simply no logical connection. Where a journal gets its revenue and whether it should pay reviewers are totally independent. Journals usually ask readers to pay, and reviewers are usually also readers; does that mean all traditional journals should pay their reviewers? No, of course not.

My views on paying reviewers can be seen in my recent blog post at: http://journalology.blogspot.com/2007/01/why-reviewers-decline-and-paying-for.html

Excerpt: Those journals that do pay reviewers, such as the Lancet sometimes does, find it easier to get people to agree than those that don't. This is confounded by the prestige of the Lancet, but the extra cash can't harm their chances...every reviewer is asked to review by several journals on a regular basis. If one routinely offers financial compensation, and the others don't, the paying journal will be the more attractive choice. Once enough journals pay reviewers, those that didn't would begin to notice their declining success rate and feel the need to switch to paying (this is classic Game Theory). Payment would no longer help journals to obtain reviewers more easily than their competitors, but no journal could opt out for fear of losing reviewers.

Another issue with paying reviewers is that quite often reports are returned late, and may be of low quality. Payment could be tied to the report being delivered on time, but if reviewers were used to receiving payment, the incentive to then return the report once already late and without payment would be diminished. Payment could be tied to review quality, but using the Review Quality Instrument on every report would be laborious, and from speaking to someone who has used this rating tool it appears to be less than perfect. Currently editors send invitations to some reviewers who reply that they are off-topic or not qualified to review. Would the promise of payment fog the memory of some as to whether they were a suitable reviewer?

Matt Hodgkinson
Senior Editor, BMC-series Journals
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I propose that WAME takes a vote!

Hnid
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Nancy would accept payment for a book review because the publisher makes an investment decision, for which he should pay. Moreover, the payment can be substantial. She would not accept payment for a journal review because it's service to science, journal advancement, patient welfare etc, and in any case she gets intangible benefits doing it. And it's the intangible benefits she finds more attractive.

I would do both reviews gratis because I consider both to be service to science, etc, for which I take a personal decision not to accept payment. It's the feeling of doing something worthwhile for a sister journal, or a brother researcher, or a brother writer, that is enough to keep me going, irrespective of tangible/intangible benefits.

But again, it's a personal decision, difficult to generalise over. Moreover, if the payments were substantial, and a major source of my income, maybe I would be forced to reconsider my stand.

Reviewers maybe calculating similarly. If they do many reviews, and spend a lot of their time, they may initially like the thank you notes and acknowledgement in journal columns, but at a certain stage may want to be monetarily compensated. And if they are quality reviewers, their demand maybe difficult to refuse. Or they would simply refuse, or dilly dally.

If a journal can afford the expense, and has a major chunk of reviewers who demand/expect payment, it may make good practical sense to offer some monetary compensation to reviewers. It also makes good practical sense since it also may help to get new quality reviewers into the pool.

Ajai
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I was not insinuating that this practice was vanity publishing—if you read my post, I just posed  a question. How one arrives at the conclusion that this is slanderous is perplexing. I merely asked a question because authors paying to submit their articles is not a concept I have come across before and it is not something I personally would necessarily agree with. I was also unaware that charges were made for colour pages. Clearly this shows a degree of ignorance on my part, but I haven't worked for a company that does this.

Deborah
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The Public Library of Science journals (including PLoS Medicine and PLoS Clinical Trials) charge a publication fee to authors of accepted papers, but no submission fee. Authors who don't have the funds to pay publication fees can request to have this charge waived or reduced to whatever they can afford, and the knowledge about whether an author can afford to pay or not is never known to the editors or reviewers of the journal. In this way there is a firewall between editorial decision making and the payment status of particular papers.

The publication fee is necessary because all PLoS journals are open-access: full content is freely available immediately on publication to everyone, worldwide, is deposited in PubMed Central for archiving in perpetuity, and authors keep copyright under a Creative Commons license (allowing anyone to reproduce content providing the author and original source are cited). Thus we have no subscription revenue. 

All research papers are rigorously peer-reviewed (read PLoS Medicine's policy at http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/reviewer_guidelines.php and PLoS Clinical Trials at http://journals.plos.org/plosclinicaltrials/reviewer_guidelines.php). Stringent peer review is in no way incompatible with open-access publication.

Please also read some Myths Debunked about Open Access: http://www.biomedcentral.com/openaccess/inquiry/myths/?myth=all and http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/03-02-04.htm#objreply.

Emma Veitch
Publications Manager, PLoS Clinical Trials
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It would be interesting to separate journals in two main categories as  profit and non-profit journals.

In our case, as an Universitary journal (Salud Uninorte http://www.uninorte.edu.co/publicaciones/secciones.asp?ID=16)

we do not have any charge in our publishing process. Our journal is available for free on the Web. and our mission includes helping in the diffusion of science produced in our country. We don’t pay charges for peer review, but from time to time we receive more questions about that. Sometimes we feel it would be a more professional job, so that we can have better reviewers and better papers. It would be appropriate to continue this tradition of honor in this case of journals.

However, I have problems with profit journals for big publishing companies who profit with the published papers. They work as a business, so I don’t know why they should be exempt from paying honoraria for peer review work.  

Carlo V Caballero-Uribe
Editor, Salud Uninorte
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I think some important points have been raised, but I believe a little focus is necessary.

1) We had a lot of trouble finding a publisher because their rates are astronomical. In order to pay for such things, one must try to attract enough advertising, which has its own ethical considerations regarding objectivity of the journal. What comes out is that we are volunteering our good will for the sake of science, while someone else is making a big profit over our good will.

2) I for one was overjoyed when I heard of the PLoS journal and its innovative concept of free acess and dedication to quality. The fact remains that most socialized medicine countries can not afford the high rates to access even a single article published by the big companies, and this increases the gap in health care delivery between the haves and the have nots. I once tried to buy into a service that gives access to many journals at once, but the $20,000 price tag (more than half the yearly salary of most physicians in the world) scared me off.

The use of medical libraries is often impractical as they may be far from practitioners and limited in budgets as well.

We need a solution to this second problem as well.

Yosef Leibman
Founding Editor, Israeli Journal of EM
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Carlo makes an important point about for-profit and non-profit journals.

Reviewers may do gratis work for non-profit journals and accept, even insist on, payment from for-profit ones.

Does that appear a good resolution of the issue?

Any thoughts?

Ajai
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I seek a clarification, Emma.

It is admirable to keep sponsors and their unreasonable demands and influence out by not taking their funds. I think that's why your journal has to depend on publication fees. But does it burden the authors? I mean, first of all, you do research, then work over it, and then also pay to get it published. It's not enough to say it can be waived, or reduced. Some authors may not be able to ask for it, since they are funded. (And if you were to waive all who asked, you may find it unsustainable.) That extra amount they would have to get from their funding source, or factor into their proposal itself, which potentially increases their due/undue commitment to their sponsors. So you avoid undue influence on yourself by distributing it amongst the authors who agree to your publication fee. Is that not also a cause for concern? That's for the authors, you may say. But also for you?

I am sure your publication must have gone into detailed discussion on this and related issues. You could share some of it for the benefit of those others who may similarly want to avoid the undue influence of sponsors and yet make their journal economically viable.

Ajai
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Yes, publication fee burdens the authors. Agreed with Ajai, and some more words for the authors!

All over the world and all over the publishing industry, it is the author who benefits from publishing a work (in the form of royalty). It is the reader who pays for gaining access to this work. However, in biomedical publications, the idea is open access; wherein authors are charged a publication/submission fee and the readers get it for free! Well, I am not against readers getting free benefit of the dissemination of a scientific breakthrough, but why should the author be charged? An open access needs to be open to readers and authors, both. It might be debated that authors are being charged because they are funded. This may be true for the western world, but it is not the case in limited resources nations, where the authors (including postgraduate students) carry out a work on their own without any external or even institutional support. The waiver of publication fee should be for all those papers which are not funded by an external source.

Piyush Gupta
Associate Editor, Indian Pediatrics
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I personally feel that payment in return for peer-reviewing of articles/manuscripts may, in occasional cases, challenge the editorial independence and accountability that peer-reviewing is meant to display. Not a nice thought, but I suspect a realistic one.

Vivienne Miller