Paid Peer Review Is Becoming a Freelance Market, Preprint Suggests

Should researchers be paid to review scientific papers? The question has long been debated. New research suggests that a clear market for paid peer review exists through third-party companies that provide services to academic publishers.

In a preprint posted on MetaArXiv on September 8, a team of researchers reported identifying nearly 1,000 online advertisements for “freelance” peer-review jobs. The researchers also interviewed five current and retired researchers from India, Spain and the United Kingdom who said they had held such positions.¹

Peer review is considered part of academic work and is often performed voluntarily. But the number of manuscripts submitted to journals has increased rapidly in recent years, adding to the workload. Editors are finding it increasingly difficult to recruit willing reviewers, and the review process can take weeks or months.

How to speed up peer review: Have applicants score each other

Financial incentives could be “a way to speed up peer review so that authors don’t have to wait weeks or months for a decision,” said Daniel Gorelick, the journal’s editor-in-chief. Biology Open currently pays reviewers for solid reports delivered within four business days.

However, Gorelick said paid peer review must be conducted “in a transparent manner” and “in a responsible manner.” The quality of reviews, he added, must remain the top priority.

The MetaArXiv study has not yet been peer-reviewed. It suggests that some journals might be outsourcing peer review to third-party companies that recruit researchers to assess manuscripts. However, it provides no conclusive evidence about which journals use these services or how extensively they do so.

Amna Potaras, a social scientist at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, led the analysis. She said that although third-party companies advertise their services publicly, their websites do not identify the journals that use them. The companies were not named in the investigation.

Publishers already outsource tasks such as copyediting, printing, research-integrity checks and editorial-workflow management, sometimes without explicitly disclosing those arrangements. But if a journal uses an external company for peer review without making that arrangement public, the lack of transparency is concerning, Potaras said.

How the freelance peer-review market works

The researchers manually collected advertisements from LinkedIn, company websites and other recruitment platforms. Many listings required applicants to have at least eight publications in a relevant research field during the previous 10 years, as well as experience reviewing papers.

Some advertisements also stated that applicants would need to disclose their full name and institutional affiliation to the publisher.

The five researchers interviewed by Potaras said they registered with third-party platforms to receive manuscript assignments. The platforms conducted background checks to verify their scientific expertise before enrolling them to review papers in their fields.

Assignments were generally offered on a first-come, first-served basis. Reviewers typically had two to three days to evaluate a manuscript and submit a report, although some had as little as 24 hours.

Most interviewees said they were paid between 30 and 40 euros—approximately 35 to 45 US dollars—for each review.

At one company, payments were based on the quality and speed of reviews, as assessed by editors at the journals receiving them. According to the study, the company’s website listed more than 10,000 freelance reviewers, including 5,669 “active” reviewers. Each of those reviewers was recorded as having reviewed up to 50 manuscripts.

Transparency remains a concern

The findings point to an emerging marketplace for freelance academic peer review, but important questions remain about oversight, reviewer compensation and disclosure. Because the research is based on a preprint and interviews with only five researchers, further evidence is needed to determine how widely third-party peer-review services are used by journals.