Can a paid model for peer review be sustainable when the author can decide whether to pay or not?
Metadatos
Mostrar el registro completo del ítemEditorial
Springer
Materia
Peer review Paid peer review Hybrid peer review Altruistic author Peer review theory
Fecha
2021-12-31Referencia bibliográfica
García, J.A., Rodriguez-Sánchez, R. & Fdez-Valdivia, J. Can a paid model for peer review be sustainable when the author can decide whether to pay or not?. Scientometrics (2021). [https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-021-04248-8]
Patrocinador
Spanish Board for Science, Technology, and Innovation PID2021-122371NB-I00; European Commission; Universidad de Granada/CBUAResumen
Given how hard it is to recruit good reviewers who are aligned with authors in their functions,
journal editors could consider the use of better incentives, such as paying reviewers
for their time. In order to facilitate a speedy turn-around when a rapid decision is required,
the peer-reviewed journal can also offer a review model in which selected peer reviewers
are compensated to deliver high-quality and timely peer-review reports. In this paper, we
consider a peer-reviewed journal in which the manuscript’s evaluation consists of a necessary
peer review component and an optional speedy peer review component. We model
and study that journal under two different scenarios to be compared: a paid peer-reviewing
scenario that is considered as the benchmark; and a hybrid peer-review scenario where
the manuscript’s author can decide whether to pay or not. In the benchmark scenario of
paid peer-reviewing, the scholarly journal expects all authors to pay for the peer review
and charges separately for the necessary and the optional speedy peer-review components.
Alternatively, in a hybrid peer-review scenario, the peer-reviewed journal gives the option
to the authors to not pay for the necessary peer review if they are not able to pay. This
will determine an altruistic amplification of pay utility. However, the no-pay authors cannot
avail of the optional speedy peer review, which determines a restriction-induced no-pay
utility reduction. In this paper, we find that under the hybrid setting of compensated peer
review where the author can decide whether to pay or not, the optimal price and review
quality of the optional speedy peer review are always higher than under the benchmark scenario
of paid peer-reviewing, due to the altruistic amplification of pay utility. Our results
show that when the advantage of adopting the hybrid mode of compensated peer review is
higher due to the higher difference between the altruistic author utility amplification and
the restriction-induced no-pay utility reduction, the journal can increase its profitability by
increasing the price for the necessary peer review above that in the benchmark scenario of
paid peer review. A key insight from our results is the journal’s capability to increase the
number of paying authors by giving the option to the authors to not pay for the necessary
peer review if they are not able to pay.
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