Editors at many reputable journals are having a difficult time finding peers to conduct peer reviews of submitted manuscripts for free. Do you think peer reviewers should get paid for their efforts?

While peer review should remain a cornerstone of academic cooperation, the current free-labor model—especially in commercial publishing—is unsustainable. A hybrid system where some form of compensation or recognition is offered, especially in high-demand or for-profit contexts, is both ethical and practical.

Yes, even a meager honorarium can mean a lot. Many peer reviewers are experts in their field with advanced degrees, and their time is important. A typical peer review process takes 7 days or more depending on the quality of the journal and the length of the article. In my experience of doing peer reviews, I have never been paid to date. Instead, I was given discounts to subscriptions or for future publications in their journal, both of which I am not interested in pursuing. 

1. Reviews for non-profit journals published by certain scientific societies should be conducted for free.
2. All reviews done for commercial, profit-making publishers should be done, only if they offer some reward. This reward need not always be direct cash, but it can be in form of full (and not partial) APC waiver. 
3. Situation can improve only if academicians start declining all review invitations from commercial publishers, where there is no possibility of any reward. (Useless reviewer certificates not counted as reward)

I definitely support the idea of paying reviewers, especially for open access journals. At least, they can receive vouchers for publication discount. What is the motivation to review for an open access journal while they charge authors thousands of dollars to publish their work? Why don't they dedicate a portion of the publication fees to the peer review process, at least to expedite the process?

"Let's be honest: asking experts to donate huge amounts of time for peer review is becoming unrealistic. The current volunteer system is struggling. Journals face delays finding reviewers, experts burn out, and vital specialized knowledge gets missed. Reviewing is demanding work requiring real expertise, often equal to paid tasks. Sure, paying reviewers raises valid worries about bias, costs, or turning scholarship into a transaction. But modest compensation? It's a practical way to show respect for their effort, encourage thorough and timely reviews, and make the system fairer. Recognizing this essential work financially is a crucial step towards keeping research publishing robust and reliable."

I agree with the increasing difficulty that editors face in securing qualified reviewers willing to contribute their time and expertise without compensation. While directly paying reviewers can be difficult for some journals, I believe a more sustainable model is possible. I suggest to establish a reciprocal expectation such that authors who publish in journals for free should commit to reviewing a set number of manuscripts per year for the same journal. This approach creates a fair exchange of academic service and helps elevate the editorial workload. This solution may also reinforce the collaborative spirit of peer-reviewed publishing. 

Yes I think it will be an important step to get the reviewers paid as that will improve the process and make the reviewers work effectively. 

I think so, a reviewer take his time to read and correct paper for journals and their prestige on own professionals. It is right to remunerete this effort. 

I support Vijay Kothari's opinion. As for stimulating reviewers with the possibility of access to paid journals, I disagree with jeltsch. If you work at a rich European university, then he is probably right, but in many countries there is access only to a limited number of scientific journals and this option can be useful.

The incentives for peer reviewing are not great at the moment. What is there? 

1. Free access to the publisher's journals for a limited period of time. This is mostly useless because if you do not have access already, you are probably not the right person to do the peer review. I have received these offers many times and never needed to use them, because I have access via my institution.

2. Discounts on future APCs or similar. Since our university has dedicated funding for APC charges, this is also useless for me personally. In addition, these vouchers expire so fast that it is impossible to make use of them unless you are publishing dozens of papers every year. What are the chances that your research topic happens to be a good fit for the journal for which you got the voucher? Again, I have received many of these and never used a single one. However, if these vouchers were permanent (or at least valid for 5-10 years), this could be a win-win. Absent other resources, researchers would perhaps start working purposefully towards publishing in journals where they do not need to shell out 1000-10000€ for the APC. With the current expiry policy, the journals shot themselves in their own leg, because there is no reason for an author to prefer a certain journal over another if there is no financial difference for the author. 

3. Public recognition. If you bother to go through the trouble (since it is not automatic as it is with publications), you can get public recognition for your reviewing work via WoS or ORCID. However, reviewing work is not really important when somebody needs to decide about your tenure.

4. Since you need for each of your manuscripts 2-4 reviewers (with exceptions in both directions), I try to review about 2-4 times as many articles as I am submitting. This is just fair imho. However, I have recently become more selective, especially since there is now zero incentive to review for MDPI, Frontier, or Hindawi. All publications in journals from these publishers have been made worthless by a recent "manual downgrading" by several Scandinavian journal assessment boards, including our own JuFo Panel.

5. Money is probably not a good incentive, as this would lead to unequal competition. In low-income countries, a certain amount of money would make a great incentive, whereas for countries with high income/high taxation, the same amount of money would not move the needle at all. And the best reviewers do not reject reviewing because of missing payment, but because of missing time. And to be honest, also often because they want to avoid reading about terrible science in terrible language...

Peer to peer review should be incentivized. This is a means of encouragement for reviewers. 

For small and medium-impact Journals, a reward is needed if you want a real expert in the field to accept multiple revision tasks. I think that significant discounts on future manuscript submissions in open-access journals should be a standard. In the case of a high-impact Journal, the opportunity to participate in the review process should be considered an honour. In such cases, public recognition of the job done in the curricula of the reviewers should be appropriate.

Peer review is a time-consuming process and is required for maintaining scientific quality. To encourage researchers, the publication house or journal should give compensation for their efforts.

It is a question of the way things are expected to happen by people, economically. This international, open system of publishing by editing and peer reviewing used to be completely free in all ends: editors did it for free, reviewers did it for free, and PUBLISHING WAS FOR FREE (ok, perhaps you needed to be a society member, but that came with other advantages too, for both sides). Once the system was nearly completely hijacked by big editing companies and now by anyone with profit in their minds, then it should completely change in the other end as well. Thus, editors and reviewers should be rewarded for such work, which is profiting someone, otherwise it is like exploration of labour.

An honararium should be offered as compensation. Even for experts it's a lot of hours to put a review together, not forgetting subsequent rereviews. 

Editors often lack the time to find free peer reviewers for submitted papers. Similarly, reviewers are too busy to respond to all invitations to review papers free of charge within a week or ten days. Everyone involved is busy. Only publishers directly benefit, either through open-access payments or subscription fees. Reviewers, however, only receive a certificate of recognition for their hard work. This system needs to change. The current situation is vastly different from the past. Previously, reviewers had ample time and received only one or two invitations over a longer period. Today, the volume is much higher. For the sake of fairness, reviewers should receive some form of payment.

A great question, indeed!  This was discussed in various forums and I always vouched for reward points in the form of coupons.  While quality peer-review is still a concern, care must be taken by the journals, executive editors in ensuring the peer-reviewers follow strictest code of ethics/COPE guidelines.

There need not be monetary compensation, but apart from reviewer coupons, some points could be accumulated for amazon gift vouchers


Two cents
Prash  

The reviews should not be paid. The reviewers should put their efforts for the science and for the society.