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Supply and demand

Apply market forces to peer review

Nature volume 506, page 295 (2014)Cite this article

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Dan Graur suggests that journals should devise a system to tie in the number of papers they publish from senior researchers with the reviewing record of those authors (Nature 505, 483; 2014). This is comparable to linking the amount of milk you drink to the number of cows you milked.

In a market economy, the monetary value of services is determined by the laws of supply and demand. When it comes to the highly skilled service of peer reviewing, the supply is sufficiently high to keep the monetary value at zero.

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  1. University of Warwick, UK

    Sascha Ott & Daniel Hebenstreit

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  1. Sascha Ott
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  2. Daniel Hebenstreit
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Correspondence to Sascha Ott.

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Ott, S., Hebenstreit, D. Apply market forces to peer review. Nature 506, 295 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/506295b

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  1. Thomas Dent

    The authors have evidently never considered whether the refereeing of scientific papers is actually a 'market economy', or should ever be one.

    Just on the facts they are wrong: as a referee for a physics journal I have received compensation in the form of a book voucher &#8211 evidently the 'monetary value' of refereeing was not. As a referee of hundreds of papers I can also include the fact on my CV, which has a potential future monetary value.

    Some scientists might even be motivated by non-monetary values. I doubt the authors made any money by writing this note; then, why did they bother?

    'Allowing market forces to exert their natural effect' - meaning, apparently, offering considerable payments to referees &#8211 would not even begin to address the problem that senior scientists are free-riding the system by publishing but refusing to review. Tenured professors don't need to supplement their salaries, the result of financial incentives would be to shift refereeing work even further towards young postdocs or non-tenured faculty.

    This would have two undesirable effects: the referees would be on average less experienced, and they would be hindered in their future career by spending disproportionate amounts of time refereeing rather than doing research. The cow analogy is fatally flawed because, unlike dairy farming, being a 'professional referee' is not a viable career: the more (fewer) papers you write the better (worse) a referee you are likely to be. Everyone who publishes should referee, and vice versa.

    Rather than flows of money (or milk), how about paying attention to flows of knowledge and expertise?

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