Can journals that pay peer reviewers succeed?

Four years ago, Jonas R. Kunst founded an academic publisher with a novel concept: pay the academics who do the peer reviewing and editing. It’s a model that remains vanishingly rare in a sector dominated by for-profit publishers that generally rely on the goodwill of researchers to function.

Advances.in was born out of a desire to close the gap between who does the work and who reaps the financial awards, said Kunst, professor of cultural and community psychology at the University of Oslo who launched the publisher after 15 years working as an academic. It currently has one open-access journal that publishes work in the field of psychology.

“We wanted to stop complaining about this issue and build an alternative and demonstrate that this model is viable,” Kunst said. 

The peer review system has been around since the 17th century, and yet the fundamental economics of it have not changed much.

“The profits generated by the free labour of academics is staggering. Big publishers generate billions in revenue,” Kunst said. “At the same time, academics are often doing this work outside paid hours, on top of teaching, grant applications, administration and their own research. Our model simply redirects revenues that would otherwise flow to publisher profits back to the researchers who do the quality control work.”

The model is straightforward – the journal charges authors an Article Processing Charge (APC) of £1,950, paid after acceptance, typically covered by funders, institutions or grant money. That revenue funds compensation for both editors and peer reviewers, who receive $100 (£75) per review. The journal has a rejection rate of roughly 60 per cent. 

Since its launch, the platform has published 50 papers and attracted more than 500 registered reviewers, without paid advertising. Kunst says although the reaction in the academic community has mostly been positive, establishing the journal has been an “uphill battle”. 

The biggest challenge has not been attracting reviewers. It’s convincing authors to take the risk. Academic careers are still heavily shaped by prestige and metrics. New journals start without an impact factor, an indicator that measures citation rates, making them a harder sell, especially for early career academics trying to build a track record.

“It’s a bit risky for researchers who are not tenured, who need to build a track record, to publish in journals that are not known among their colleagues yet,” he explained. “We now have both more established researchers such as tenured ones and also younger, idealistic ones who felt this was the right thing to do have taken the risk.”

The criticism has also been persistent. Critics of paid review have argued that introducing money into the process could distort incentives, encouraging speed over scrutiny or making peer review feel transactional.

“The current system of unpaid reviews is what undermines standards,” Kunst argues. “It produces late reviews, thin reviews, low-quality work, and it excludes large segments of the research community who simply can’t afford to work for free, particularly those in less privileged countries.”

Kunst also sees it as an equity issue. Scholars in less privileged regions might be less able to absorb unpaid academic labour, meaning the current system risks excluding voices from outside the West. 

“The forces against us are very large,” Kunst acknowledges. “We’re talking about a profitable, well-positioned industry that has no interest in changing.”

seher.asaf@timeshighereducation.com