Inviting researchers to review papers is considered a potential solution to clearing the review backlog.Credit: UpPiJ/iStock (via Getty)
A new preprint platform is paying researchers to review papers submitted by other scientists, reigniting debate over whether peer reviewers should be compensated. XSci, launched in September, pays reviewers $200 for feedback submitted within five days of accepting an assignment and $100 for reviews submitted within five to 10 days. Authors pay XSci for the service, while the platform does not publish journals itself.
XSci charges $399 for one human peer review or $249 to publish a peer-review report. The system is intended to give authors feedback quickly while compensating reviewers for their time and effort, says Shumiao Ouyang, the founder of XSci, a Delaware-based start-up. Ouyang says the company has received about $500,000 from private investors and is seeking additional funding.
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“Answers to the questions authors are most interested in are usually available within five to 10 days: Does this paper really have a chance of being published in the journal I’m aiming for?” says Ouyang, an economist at the University of Oxford, UK. “Currently, those answers can take months, and in some fields even years.”
XSci also charges authors up to $19 to have their preprints assessed by various artificial-intelligence programs, although access to some AI tools is free.
Researchers interviewed by Nature say that XSci’s business model is interesting, but that its future will depend largely on whether it can persuade authors to pay for human peer-review services.
“Are authors willing to pay such fees? Where will the money come from?” asks Daniel Gorelick, a developmental biologist and toxicologist at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.
Gorelick also says that cash payments are a “strong incentive”. Biology Open, an open-access journal published by The Company of Biologists, has paid reviewers £220, or $280, per manuscript since 2024 through a programme called Fast and Fair. Reviewers receive payment if they submit their work on time and the quality meets the editor’s expectations.
Ouyang expects XSci’s main users to be doctoral and postdoctoral students and other early-career researchers who “often cannot wait more than a year for a journal decision”.
Pay per review
Researchers have traditionally been expected to review manuscripts as a service to the scientific community rather than for a fee. Ouyang says XSci is using payment at the preprint stage to address a growing problem in academic publishing: persuading scholars to review other researchers’ papers, and to do so promptly.
Research1–3 has shown that journal editors are finding it increasingly difficult to recruit reviewers. The number of submitted papers is growing, while academics are facing heavier workloads. These pressures often lead to review times of weeks or months.
XSci says on its website that scholars who are interested can sign up to become paid reviewers. In practice, however, Ouyang says that reviewers must be invited through the website to assess manuscripts. The site includes a “Register Interest” field for practical reasons, he says, “because it tells you how many motivated researchers there are in each field.”
Shumiao Ouyang is an economist at the University of Oxford, UK, and founder of XSci.Credit: Yizhen Zhang
XSci has developed an AI programme to help identify suitable reviewers quickly, Ouyang says. When an author uploads a manuscript and selects human review, the tool creates a list of potential reviewers by screening three groups: scientists who wrote papers cited in the manuscript, the authors’ regular collaborators and researchers who have published work on similar topics in the author’s target journal. The system ranks the candidates and contacts them by email. Each potential reviewer has 12 hours to accept the assignment, Ouyang says.
If reviewers conclude that a manuscript could be suitable for publication in the author’s target journal after reasonable revisions, XSci gives the preprint a badge indicating that it has been peer reviewed and approved by the reviewers.
XSci eventually hopes to work with journal publishers so that editors can use its peer-review reports in their evaluations. This would require both authors and reviewers to agree to share the reports, Ouyang says. Editors could then decide whether to use an XSci review to replace one round of their own review or as an external reference.
However, Ouyang stressed to Nature that the badges are only “useful information for editors”.
“Whether a journal gives weight to them or not is entirely a journal decision,” he added.
Advantages and disadvantages
A preprint co-authored by Gorelick reported that the Fast and Fair programme at Biology Open reduced the time editors took to make an initial decision. In 2025, editors took an average of 5.5 business days under the programme, compared with 37.7 business days through the journal’s unpaid review route.4 The study also found higher acceptance rates for review invitations and higher completion rates for accepted assignments.
Another study found that paying reviewers produced only modest improvements. Editors at Critical Care Medicine, a journal published by Lippincott, Williams & Wilkins, conducted a six-month experiment in which they alternated between sending review invitations with and without financial incentives every two weeks.5
Half of the invitations offering a $250 cash reward resulted in a peer-review report within 14 days, compared with 42% of invitations without a fee. Paid reviewers also completed their work an average of one day faster.
“It didn’t move the needle very much,” says David Maslove, a co-author of the study and a clinician and scientist at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada.
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Researchers warn that paid systems also create challenges. Gorelick says strict quality controls and clear policies are needed to prevent reviewers from abusing the system and publishers from taking advantage of them. “You can’t just pay a reviewer and walk away,” he says.
“XSci currently does not check the quality of reviews performed by peer reviewers before making them available to authors,” says Jeffery Poon, XSci’s publishing and editorial director. Authors who are dissatisfied with a review can file a dispute through XSci, Poon says. The company also plans to develop tools that would allow reviewers to check their own work, although the team is still considering how those tools should be implemented.
Source: www.nature.com