Paying reviewers not only led to faster first editorial decisions ' an average of 5.5 working days, down from nearly 38 for unpaid reviews (see 'Paying peer reviewers speeds up editorial decision time) ' but review quality, as judged by handling editors on the basis of helpfulness in making an editorial decision, went up (see 'Fast and paid peer review did not affect editorial decisions'). And I thought that one way to fix that would be to pay peer reviewers because, honestly, it seemed obvious. People get paid to do a job, and there's evidence3 from economic studies showing that incentives like money can improve performance. So, I figured, why not try this with peer review' It's easy to have the idea of paying peer reviewers. The hard part was the execution. First, we designed an experiment that would test the hypothesis that paying peer reviewers would work ' without pulling out our hair, losing a ton of money or going bankrupt. One key thing was having a database of...
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