Ending the Peer Review Crisis: Sharing Revenues with Reviewers

The main avenue to resolving the ongoing peer review crisis in today’s overloaded academic publishing system requires journals (i.e. publishers) to pay reviewers. Otherwise, scholars will continue to increasingly abstain from peer reviewing, and academic journals will publish peer-reviewed papers that do not add value to the scholarly literature. Aware that paying reviewers is the solution to said crisis, pioneering journals and publishers have started to pay reviewers, including statisticians asked to verify the statistical methods of manuscripts sent for publication. Currently in its infant stage, the ‘pay to review’ model will progressively become ubiquitous, eventually driving the $25 billion academic publishing industry to share a part of its revenues with the research community. This study provides arguments supporting this prediction.