When charity is outrage: The benefits and pitfalls of incentivized peer review
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Science and Medical Education, Science Policy
- Keywords
- publishing, peer review, ethics
- Copyright
- © 2015 Chatterjee et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2015. When charity is outrage: The benefits and pitfalls of incentivized peer review. PeerJ PrePrints 3:e1585v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1585v1
Abstract
Peer review remains the standard method to vet scholarly work and to assess their suitability for publication in academic journals. As the debate about the effectiveness of peer review has taken center stage, it has pushed the peer reviewers out of the limelight. In this article, the authors take a look at the various endeavors undertaken to incentivize the process of peer review. This gives rise to another debate, whether peer review should be incentivized at all, and if it is, then what is the most appropriate method. This article mentions the emerging trends of “pay for peer review” and the moral and ethical implications of this method. The authors also provide possible processes in which a journal, supported by an academic or professional body, may undertake the issue of incentivizing the largely anonymous and un‑credited work of peer reviewers who remain the sentinels of the world of published evidence.
Author Comment
A brief article focusing on the pro's and con's of incentivized peer review. This is a pre-print version of a paper submitted for publication in the journal, Journal of Family Medicine and Primary Care.