For editors of scientific journals it is quite hard to find referees, leave alone good referees, for peer reviewing their received manuscripts. A good referee is a person that sends in a good referee report and does so in time, and responds quickly to additional requests from the editors. Why don’t peers want to review manuscripts of their colleagues?

There are a number of reasons. Professional scientists are very busy and – perhaps more importantly – they will never get public credit for their review job.

Immaterial rewards
In the journal Science several interesting articles have been published recently about the moral duty for scientists to do regularly review jobs. In In Search of Peer Reviewer editor William Perrin, from Southwest Fisheries Science Center, complains and does a simple calculation. He proves that for every manuscript that you submit you should do at least four review jobs. Perrin’s paper has provoked a number of comments (the above link will also show these reactions). It boils down to the suggestion that, by rewarding a reviewer in a way that will boost his career, more workers will accept to perform review tasks. An interesting action in the respect was recently announced by the American Physical Society(APS). The APS has published a list of their best referees for their journals. And indeed non-anonymous credit for a referee can only come from editors. But in my opinion this will not be incentive enough to convince scientists to do more and better review jobs.

Structured referee reports
There is an additional problem with writing referee reports and that complication is related to the development of the web. It becomes more and more involved to accept a referee job and to send in referee reports. To cut down on costs journals have decided to automate the communication with the referees (and authors). Editors like to classify, edit, and compile referee reports in a relational database like MySql. Referees now have to login to the journal’s website. The report has to be submitted through more and more involved web forms. Basically the burden of administration of manuscripts is taken away from the journals and put on the back of the referee. Fortunately many referees are stubborn and keep on sending in their referee reports as flat ascii files.

Solution
The solution is simple: pay the referee, with real money. I have suggested this over and over again to publishers. They always find other reasons for explaining to me that this will not work. I am still not convinced. Commercial publishers fear that financially rewarding referees will erode their profits and not-for-profit publishers have already a hard time surviving financially. But I will explain why it will work.

Authors pay
In the 1970’s and 1980’s respectable journals requested page charges for a paper to be published after its acceptance. Scientists from developing countries could be exempted from the charges if they would sign that their institute could not afford the money. The only penalty was a publication delay of a couple of months. To my great shame I must admit that scientists from rich countries like The Netherlands signed that waiver without having any problem with their conscience.

Nowadays page charges are back. Journals request extra money for publishing colored material and they ask money for putting the paper online. The OSA journal Optics Express does not do any editing anymore. They just make your article available online (there is no print issue). Authors (including myself) are very willing to pay the charges the journal requests from them. And rightly so. Research equipment, postdoc and PhD salaries, institutional overhead, etc., amount to so much money that the couple of thousand dollars to get the results publicized can almost be neglected. And if no paper was to be published all the invested money would have been wasted.

So I suggest journals to ask a submission fee from the authors in order for the referees to be paid. Let us say 600$ (300$ per referee). Advantages are plenty. Bogus submissions will be absent. Referees only get paid when they play according to the rules. Editor response times will be much shorter. If an author appeals an editorial decision and wants a new referee he has to come up with an extra 300$. The payment for each referee will be effected when the whole review process has come to an end, either until acceptance or rejection of the submitted manuscript.

Implementation
Paying a person anywhere in the world is very simple nowadays. For instance through PayPal. Referees that refuse to participate in this scheme will be sent a Amazon gift card. Or they can point out a charity that is to receive their fee. Some sales-tax problems have to be solved, but that cannot be unsurmountable.

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