Would You Review More Papers for $250? A Study on Incentivizing Peer Review
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Peer review is the backbone of academic publishing, yet it’s increasingly difficult to find reviewers willing to contribute their time. Delays in paper handling, superficial reviews, and reviewer fatigue are persistent issues — especially in fast-paced fields like computer science. Could monetary incentives help? A new study in Critical Care Medicine suggests that paying reviewers might be part of the solution.
The Experiment: Cash for Reviews
Researchers conducted a quasi-randomized, blinded trial to measure the impact of financial incentives on peer review completion rates. Over a six-month period, invitations to review were sent to researchers in two alternating conditions:
- Control Group: Standard invitation, no compensation.
- Treatment Group: Invitation offering $250 for a completed review.
What They Found
- Offering $250 increased the proportion of reviewers who accepted the request (52.7% vs. 47.8%).
- More invited reviewers completed their assignments in the incentivized group (49.8% vs. 42.2%).
- Reviews were submitted about a day faster on average.
- The quality of reviews, as assessed by journal editors, remained unchanged between the two groups.
Implications for Computer Science Peer Review
The study suggests that modest financial incentives can improve reviewer engagement without sacrificing quality. In computer science, where the pressure to publish is high and reviewing is often seen as an unpaid burden, this raises important questions:
- Would top-tier CS conferences benefit from compensating reviewers?
- Could financial incentives help reduce review backlogs in journals?
- Would an incentive system encourage more thoughtful and thorough reviews?
With AI-generated submissions on the rise and conferences struggling to secure qualified reviewers, experimenting with financial incentives might be worth considering.
Would you be more willing to review papers if offered compensation? Or would this compromise the integrity of the system? Join the discussion below!
Related reading: The $450 question: Should journals pay peer reviewers? -- Science
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R root shared this topic
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Really interesting thought experiment! Compared to other fields such as medicine, I think it is a very good thing that there are usually no or very low processing feels for getting an article published. This really opens up the research to everyone. Compensating the reviewers would make it difficult to keep the fees low. Plus, the improvements in review quality seem to be rather marginal!
What do you thing universities/research departments could do to incentivise better reviews?
