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If they are doing work, they should be paid
Adding extrinsic rewards for tasks like this can often introduce dark patterns eg maxing reviews to max rewards. It’s not as simple as “just pay someone to read papers.” As much as I detest academic publishers, it’s also not as simple as just throwing everything into open access (which we should do no matter what) and then having folks do it for the good of the community. There will have to be some experimentation with a balance of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards.
In the US I directly pay for the funding for papers through tuition and taxes. I shouldn’t have to fucking pay a parasitic publisher on top of that just to access that shit. In math at least I don’t mind paying a little here and there for an MAA or AMS journal though.
It should be part of people’s jobs.
As in, they are expected to do it, and get time to do it. And they probably should work within the publisher… that should probably be some consortium of academic institutions.
You could easily implement some sortation between the universities and have the “winners” dedicate a day a month for 6 months to do it.
Paying people to review articles is just going to make things worse. The real problem is open access. In the current system the author of the manuscript has to pay to publish it, and the publisher turns around and asks readers to pay to access it. Its a scam. If research was conducted with any public money the knowledge generated should be public. This is why Elsevier needs to go. If you saw how much money institutions have to pump into these useless publishers to get access to knowledge funded by the public for the public there would be more outrage.
Are there really any people in the middle who aren’t publishers? I find it hard to believe that any of the actual community members feel this way (well, specifically feel that their work should be free but publishers should be able to charge for their journals)
My dad is a chief editor in a scientific journal and rants to me about his day to day. I don’t think reviewers should be necessarily but the publications sure as shit should not be behind a fucking paywall.
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That’s like saying you shouldn’t be paid if you like your job because enjoying work is rewarding enough
Reviewing is on average about reading bad papers that won’t get accepted in great detail to try to figure out what’s actually going on.
At best, it tends to be reading solid work adjacent to your subfield which you can respect but aren’t really that into.
It’s pretty rare for it to be as useful to me as actually choosing something to read.
