As editor in chief of the journal Biology Open, I, together with the magnificent managing editor Dr. Alejandra Clark, and with the steadfast support of The Company of Biologists staff and board of directors, established Fast & Fair peer review, where reviewers are pre-contracted and paid £220 per manuscript. Reviewers are only paid if reviews are high quality and turned in on time. Paying reviewers and holding them accountable for quality and speed allows Biology Open to provide authors a decision, with reviews, within 7 working days of submission. Biology Open also publishes reviews of accepted manuscripts, so readers can assess review quality for themselves*. See here for a list of every article published using Fast & Fair peer review.

I think that paying peer reviewers should be evaluated on the same empirical footing as other incentive models rather than treated as less practical or less ethical by default. I also think that publishers have an incentive to downplay, ignore and disparage the idea of paying peer reviewers, because it will increase costs for publishers. There is a tendency of some scientists to focus on non-monetary approaches to improve peer review (for an example, see here), despite the fact that peer review is a commercial endeavor, with publishers like Elsevier and SpringerNature reporting high profit margins and failing to compensate reviewers. I stopped reviewing manuscripts, for free, for for-profit publishers (see below for why). I continue to review for free for nonprofit publishers & scientific societies. I consider this a charitable contribution of my time and talent.

*For manuscripts submitted to Biology Open, the default is for reviews to be published, but authors can opt out. When manuscripts are transferred to Biology Open with reviews from other journals, if the manuscript is accepted then we are not yet able to publish those reviews.

Learn more about Fast & Fair

Editorial & funky animation describing how Fast & Fair works

Preprint & editorial reporting data from the Fast & Fair pilot experiment, July-December 2024

Preprint & editorial reporting data from the expanded Fast & Fair, Jan-December 2025

Learn more about paying peer reviewers

Why Paying Peer Reviewers Works [Nature News, July 2026, PDF]

Will Paying Peer Reviewers Ease the Peer Review Crisis? [InsideHigherEd, May 2026, PDF]

‘The era of norms is dead,’ so should peer reviewers be paid? [Research Professional News, May 2026, PDF]

Jonas Kunst, editor in chief of the for-profit journal advances.in/psychology, shares his vision for paying peer reviewers. Together with Biology Open, this demonstrates that compensating reviewers is effective at journals that use different business models and cover different disciplines.

Publishers trial paying peer reviewers — what did they find? [Nature News, March 2025, PDF, highlighting Fast & Fair and David Maslove’s paying reviewer experiment for the journal Critical Care Medicine. In contrast to Fast & Fair, CCM paid reviewers regardless of review quality or turnaround time. Not surprisingly, this type of financial compensation failed to substantially improve the speed of peer review. Nature also spelled Alejandra’s name incorrectly, and still has not corrected their mistake.]

Paying reviewers in cryptocurrency. [Nature News, Dec 2024, PDF, crypto adds more issues to the already controversial notion of compensating reviewers; I personally prefer to be paid in USD (my home currency) or in GBP, EURO or a similarly stable currency that is easily exchanged for USD]

Why I stopped reviewing manuscripts for for-profit journals

Time is the most precious commodity. I’m not comfortable spending my time helping a business make money when I’m not being compensated. In 2016, I read the American Society of Cell Biology President’s Column ‘On Publishing and the Sneetches: A Wake-up Call?’ (and related commentary in MBoC by Peter Walter and Dyche Mullins). The article describes the practices of for-profit scientific publishers generating profits using the work of uncompensated reviewers. Nothing new there. What was new to me was the idea that we as individuals can promote change by declining to provide our labor for free. “You could either review a paper and put money into the pockets of canny investors, or you could spend some quality time with your family, go for a walk, or perform some unpaid community service that actually makes the world a better place.” This idea resonated with me, and I stopped reviewing manuscripts, for free, on behalf of for-profit publishers. I have no animus against for-profit publishing companies. I’m happy to review manuscripts on behalf of for-profit publishers if they pay me a reasonable hourly fee. So far, nobody has taken me up on my offer. If a Nature journal offered to pay me $1000 to review a manuscript, I’d probably say yes. Without such payment, I have little incentive to perform peer review for a company that will profit from my free labor. If every scientist adopted this philosophy and stopped reviewing manuscripts, for free, for for profit publishers, then we probably would not need to pay reviewers. Why aren’t scientists angry about being exploited by for profit publishers? Scott Aaronson asks this question in a piercing way.

One argument is that universities are paying professors to perform peer review, that reviewing manuscripts is part of a professor’s job description. Perhaps this is true in some fields, or at some universities, but it is not true for me (tenured associate professor at Baylor College of Medicine). Peer review is not mentioned anywhere in my job description or employment contract. I am paid to earn grants, publish papers, teach, and perform some limited administrative duties. My annual performance evaluations have never mentioned, discussed or evaluated performing peer review. Whether I perform peer review is not a factor in my promotion. Having served on several search committees for junior and senior faculty, I can unequivocally say that whether the candidate performed peer review never once came up in any discussion or application review. Note that serving on a journal’s editorial board could be, depending on the journal, evidence of an international reputation, which could help in tenure and/or promotion to full professor. But this is distinct from performing peer review (eg, the place on a CV were people say ‘I reviewed for journals X, Y and Z’).

Another common reason I hear for performing peer review is to get in good with the journal’s editorial staff. The reasoning goes that if I review a manuscript for Nature, then Nature will be more likely to send a manuscript from my lab out for review. I’ve asked editors from multiple Nature journals, include the editor in chief of Nature itself, Magdalena Skipper, about this (I even took a selfie with her to prove it). The answer is always the same: We don’t do this because people have all sorts of reasons for not performing peer review (on vacation, grant deadline, etc) for which we have no desire to penalize. Even if we wanted to play favorites, we don’t have a peer review database system set up to monitor who performed review and who is submitting to our journal. I have no way to validate the veracity of these claims, and we can concoct many reasons why publishers would obfuscate about this. Regardless, the desire on the part of biomedical scientists is so strong to publish in glam journals like Nature that this is unlikely to convince anybody to stop reviewing for glam journals for free.

The views on this page represent my personal views and not those of any of my employers.