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Paid to peer review: firms are paying researchers to assess manuscripts for journals
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Welcome to the peer-review market, where third-party companies are advertising freelance reviewing jobs. Credit: Kseniya Ovchinnikova/Getty
Should researchers be paid to review papers? The question has long been fiercely debated. Now, a study has uncovered an apparent market for peer review, operating through third-party firms that offer services to scholarly publishers.
In a preprint posted on MetaArXiv on 8 September, a team of researchers identified some 1,000 online advertisements for ‘freelance’ peer-reviewer jobs and report how they interviewed five working and retired researchers in India, Spain and the United Kingdom who say they have taken up such gigs1.
Reviewing manuscripts for journals is often considered a part of academic work, and done on a voluntary basis. But with a massive surge in manuscript submissions in recent years, it is becoming increasingly taxing. Journal editors are struggling to find willing reviewers, and the process often drags.
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For some journals, a financial incentive is “a way to accelerate peer review so authors aren’t waiting weeks or months for a decision”, says Daniel Gorelick, editor-in-chief of Biology Open, which now pays peer reviewers for solid reports delivered within 4 business days. But “it has to be done in a transparent [and] accountable way", and the quality of the review must always be the number one priority, he adds.
The MetaArXiv study, which hasn't yet been peer reviewed, suggests that some journals are outsourcing their peer-review process to third-party firms that hire researchers to review manuscripts, but does not provide conclusive evidence about which journals are doing so or the extent to which this is happening. Amna Pottarath, a social scientist at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, who led the analysis, says that these third-party firms advertise publicly but don’t list on their websites which journals are using their services. The study does not disclose the names of the firms.
Some publishers outsource operations such as copy editing, printing, doing integrity checks or managing editorial workflows, sometimes without explicit disclosure. But if journals are using third-party firms to do peer review and not disclosing them, then this “lack of transparency is concerning”, says Pottarath.
The team manually scraped advertisements from LinkedIn, company websites and other job recruitment platforms. They found that the requirements listed for the applicants included having more than eight publications in a relevant area of research in the past 10 years and previous experience in peer review. Some of the ads also mentioned that applicants must disclose their full name and institutional affiliations to the publishers.