Money for peer review?

The issue of providing monetary reimbursements for peer review has been discussed broadly (Lancet, Science, Scholarly Kitchen, Editage, etc.). PeerPremier, a journal independent professional peer review service for authors, introduced a for pay model for peer review and I would like to briefly explain our reasoning.

Traditionally, every manuscript that is submitted to a journal requires a minimum of three peer reviews. This is not a magic number and more would be better but I would argue it is the absolute minimum. If three reviewers spend their time to review this manuscript, it would be fair to expect the author to review three manuscripts for every manuscript they submit. Afterall, peer review is considered a service to the community and scientific progress and an essential pillar for scientific integrity. So if you submit two manuscripts per year you should review six and if you submit three manuscripts you should review nine, and so on.

PeerPremier charges authors $1,100 USD for every manuscript they get professionally peer reviewed and pays reviewers $300 USD for every review they provide. In other words, if you follow the logical outlined above, you will earn $900 in review fees for three manuscripts you review, which you should do for every manuscript you submit. Therefore, the actual out of pocket cost for every ma manuscript is $200 USD, which PeerPremier uses to administer the process. More importantly, you don’t pay money to a for-profit journal or publisher, and which will also charge you thousands of dollars in open access and administrations fees for every single manuscripts that they processed. Importantly, PeerPremier works with bioRxiv and you can have your peer reviewed manuscript hosted at no additional cost.

In summary, PeerPremier offers a more equitable mechanism of peer review and dissemination of scientific data than any journal or publisher.