How Would You Like to Make £220?

(You don't have to review for free!)

Scientific publishing is increasingly broken. Vast expansion of for-profit publishers, AI-generated papers, and a fragile edifice of volunteer peer review. I’ve often said: don’t review for free!

And, perhaps, we’re seeing a shift – where compensation is provided in some fashion, including cold, hard, GBP. So, here’s another, more successful example of a journal compensating its reviewers.

And, in this case, what happened when they compensated reviewers? 1) more accepted reviews, 2) faster reviews, 3) no apparent decrease in quality or change in acceptance rates:

But, the downside to a journal – at Biology Open, the costs of running the program in 2025 totalled approximately ~£100,000, once reviewer and staff support costs were assessed.

Is this a sustainable financial model? The economics are certainly confronting, but it may ultimately be one part of the puzzle. There is probably a sweet spot of generative AI pre-processing and quality assurance to be combined with reviewer expertise and insight, and these sort of hybrid models will certainly be more widely seen.