How to handle a paper by a reviewer who wants to be paid?

Question

A reviewer declines to review a paper because he wants to be paid. Some time later, this reviewer submits a paper to the journal (or to another journal who's aware of what happened – very possible with today's editorial management systems). How should the journal handle this?

Possible options:

1. Pretend we didn't notice and review as normal.
2. Write him an email to tell him we're aware of it, but are reviewing the paper anyway because we're a magnanimous journal.
3. Charge him a submission fee which we then use to pay the reviewers for that paper only.
4. Charge him a submission fee which we then use to pay the reviewers for that paper only, plus some extras which we use to pay the editor.
5. Desk reject because "our reviewers are on strike because they're not paid so we can't find reviewers for your paper".

I'm concerned taking retributive action will come across as petty and / or lead to a lose–lose situation. However, not taking retributive action doesn't feel right either – if the reviewer is not willing to review unless paid, then it's hard to expect other people to review (or handle) his paper unless paid either.

If it matters, only the first part really happened: The reviewer used the "decline to review" button with a reason that went something like: “Sorry, I don't review unless I'm paid. Feel free to contact me again to discuss rates”. Still, this decline reason is logged in the EMS, so it can happen in the future.

Answer 1

The editors of a journal should be professional at all times. Like in any part of life, in academia there will also from time to time be annoying individuals. Don't get down to their level.

Your point 5. would be simply acting out of vengeance. Regarding points 3. & 4. – is a fee a regular thing for this journal? Because if not, it would be a vengeful misconduct. If there is a fee, is it usually used to pay the reviewers? If yes, why wasn't this author paid for his review? If not, why are you considering an exception? This won't be a one-time incident: if you write again to those reviewers, they will want to be paid again, because you set a precedent. If they tell colleagues they were paid, you will be short of reviewers because everyone will want to be paid and will refuse to review otherwise.

Point 1. is the only right thing to do; if you want to be malicious, maybe also 2., but that's still a bit unprofessional to me.

In general, the author's and reviewer's role (even for the same person) should be separated. Being a reviewer is mostly voluntary, and it's just agreed/expected in the community to act as a reviewer from time to time. You cannot force anyone to do it. But you are obliged (as an editor of a publisher's journal) to consider for publication papers that you receive. Just get over this, and maybe consider avoiding working with this person as a reviewer or other such roles in the future. But don't dismiss him as an author. Don't be vengeful.

Answer 2

First of all: Is there a rule that you need to be available as reviewer if you want to publish in that specific journal? People decline reviews for all sorts of reasons (often lack of time, which may or may not be the case), and I never heard that somebody got "punished" for that.

Your reviewer wanted to get paid. It is very unusual to pay reviewers, but on the other hand, it is not per se unreasonable or offensive to ask for compensation for work.

I would see it this way: Either you establish a general rule that authors must be available as reviewers or you accept that some people do not review papers (although they publish).

Answer 3

Any potential reviewer with appropriate expertise who declines to review for a journal is effectively saying "my time is worth more than that". This individual is trying to find an equitable middle ground. Sure, paid reviewership very uncommon and totally outside the norms of academic review, but it's completely indefensible to take vengeance on this person because he feels that journals don't appropriately value reviewers' time.

Anything other than accepting the submission and reviewing it like any other is petty, discriminative, and potentially damaging for your journal's reputation. I know I would have serious reservations about submitting or subscribing to a journal that rejected papers irrespective of their content and based solely on personal vendettas with the author (option #5).

Peer review isn't a mechanism to get back at people.

Answer 4

I'll go a little outside the box here and say:
You should pay him and all the other reviewers for reviews.

While certainly paying the reviewers is not a common practice nowadays does not mean it should not be.

In the current world, where each and every scientists is needlessly overloaded with bureaucracy, the amount of students in classes, numbers of those classes and students one has to mentor grows bigger and bigger, and the competition for the very survival - the grant money, requires more and more effort and submissions and work - time is a very precious resource.
It therefore is completely reasonable that a person is not willing to give that resource away for free.

Academic publishing is already one of the best ratios of income to money invested of all businesses in the world.

Maybe the journals could do the right thing here, and give something back to the scientific community. Community which produces the product they sell and give it to them for free.

Answer 5

All options except 1) and 2) seem completely unprofessional to me. 5) is, strictly speaking, a terrible lie. You imagine that the author will figure out that you are being sarcastic rather than actually dishonest, but they may not. 4) is perhaps yet more unethical: as an editor of the journal you punish the author by paying...yourself??

As for 3), you are offering a selected individual author the right to pay for their refereeing -- what if they take you up on the offer now and in the future? What if you get other offers by authors to pay for their refereeing? How will you maintain fairness and prevent conflicts of interest? What a mess.

Lots of people turn down referee requests all the time, generally without giving reasons or giving reasons that don't really explain anything ("Sorry, I'm too busy.") This particular academic seems a bit naive about how the refereeing process works and that came out in their reply. But they'll learn if they stick around. You could take it upon yourself to offer friendly advice -- i.e., some version of 2), although the text you give reads as pretty snarky to me -- or just assume that the data point of your experience will be filed away.

Selectively enforcing what you perceive to be ungenerous refereeing practices just doesn't make sense to me because you have so little information about who the good and bad referees actually are. Don't you think there are much more senior academics that refuse most or all requests because they are "too busy" or pawn them off on their students (possibly without giving credit, which I feel is really problematic) or spend way too long with requests gumming up the works or contribute totally superficial, unhelpful reports or only contribute reports to settle their own scores or......There is way too much here for any one editor or journal to wade into, I think.

Answer 6

Follow the journal’s publicly advertised policies.

I assume that the journal has a web page with a text titled “Instructions for authors” or “Journal policies” or something similar. This is the place where the journal indicates that the journal will not accept already published papers, double submissions, papers that aren’t typeset in Comic Sans font, or whatever. The journal is free to make its own rules about what papers it is willing to consider, but needs to advertise them to prospective authors, since it is unprofessional to waste people’s time.

If the journal’s advertised policy is to refuse to review papers from authors who previously asked for money to do a review for the journal (or something more general that includes that situation as a special case), then you not only can, but in fact you must follow that policy and let the author know you cannot consider their submission.

Otherwise, you have no legitimate reason to treat the submission any differently from any other one.

As for whether it would make sense for the journal to have such a policy: well, no. Like others who posted answers this seems terribly pointless and petty to me.

Answer 7

I agree with the answers that say that it's unethical to single out a submitter for retaliation because they annoyed you when you asked them to review. If you want reviewing papers to be a requirement for submitting papers, then you need to have a clearly articulated policy that says so up front. This is the case irrespective of whether they refuse because they want to be paid, or for some other reason.

The question you need to ask yourself is, are you sure you want such a policy? Crafting such a policy in a way that would be fair to all people involved would be hard. You have to answer questions like, how many review requests can you refuse and still remain in good standing? Are there valid reasons that might excuse a refusal? How do you verify them? How do you ensure a fair distribution of review requests? What do you do about people who want to submit but have never been asked to review? The list goes on and on.

Equally importantly, are you sure you want people writing reviews grudgingly? Reviewers who are only doing the review because it's a requirement for getting published are likely to do a mediocre job. You can expect such people to put forth the minimal effort required to meet whatever standard you set. Some won't do even that, and so now you have to find a way to review the reviews. The end result is likely to be that the quality of peer review in your journal will go down because poor reviewers will no longer be self-selecting out of the reviewing pool.

It stinks that some people free-ride on the peer review system, but any effort to punish them or force them to participate is likely to backfire. The best thing you can do is to treat them like any other author and leave it to community norms to encourage people to do their share of reviewing.

Answer 8

As a reviewer, I would be happy to treat this paper just like any other.

I consider that I do get paid to review papers, in the sense that my employer expects that I do a small amount of reviewing. If this person is refusing to review on the grounds that reviewers don't get paid, perhaps they don't currently have a position where reviewing is encouraged.

People who can't use work time to review (perhaps because they are outside of academia) should still be able to publish papers, and IMO they shouldn't be expected to review in return - though of course they can still be asked!

Answer 9

I think it's tremendously hypocritical of the author to submit to a journal knowing other reviewers will do uncompensated labor for his work, but not to do the same for theirs.

That being said, "being a good person" is not typically a submission requirement.

Option 1 is really the only appropriate option. All of the others seem vindictive and petty, and if I found out a journal was doing that, even if it wasn't to me, I would be much less likely to submit to that journal in the future, consider reviewing/joining the editorial board, etc.

The potential damage to your journal's reputation isn't worth it.

Answer 10

A journal accepts articles because it depends on publishing articles.

People don't pay for publishing by reviewing.

People review for whatever reasons and are paid with fame or a good feeling.

There is no connection between reviewing a paper and submitting one.

Answer 11

The policies of any journal should be public and consistently applied. Having a policy that you have to be a reviewer before you can be reviewed is irrational, I think. There are many rational reasons to refuse any particular paper for review. But if you have a policy that the complete refusal to review for any reason, including that you want to be paid, could lead to desk rejection is a different matter.

One large problem here is how to state such a policy so that it isn't too narrow. A policy that complete or consistent refusal is not acceptable is difficult to state specifically. It needs, in my view, to be stated as an expectation. We expect that our authors are available to review the works of others. That is (approximately) what you want, but applying it too rigidly is a mistake.

But then, the question arises about how to handle such situations in practice.

Actually, the journal should handle a problem like this much earlier than the situation described. It may be that the "reviewer" just doesn't know how the game is played and that reviewing is seen as a contribution to one's peers. To be a professional is to offer this service and, by cooperating, others will, hopefully, do the same.

Therefore, send a letter to the person when they first refuse for this reason, explaining the process and the fact that reviewers are never paid and that paying them would increase the costs to readers as well, given that there are more reviews done than articles published.

At that time, let them know that, while it is possible to refuse any given paper for review, if they refuse to participate in the process at all, then their future work won't be accepted as a matter of policy.

I have refused to review papers for a variety of reasons, often because I felt I didn't know enough of the subject to do it justice. No one should have to make reviewing their first priority. But if they refuse to participate in a society as constituted they won't be welcome in it.

They are, of course, welcome to work for a more rational system if they like. The current system has many practices that should be addressed, but we have, so far, presented only partial solutions, and most have their own negative consequences.

Answer 12

I don't know that an editorial decision to not accept the paper is necessary here. I also don't think sarcasm is appropriate.

I would accept this paper for review, and send the author a strong email suggesting that future submissions will not be welcome if he or she agrees to participate in the publishing model of this particular journal.

This way at least the author will shut up about reasons for turning down a review request, and just say "I'm too busy".

Alternatively, if this seems too harsh, I wouldn't say the papers are unwelcome, but I would clearly let the author know that to submit a paper to a journal for which he has philosophical objection to reviewing for seems like hypocrisy.

Answer 13

Variation of #2? Wouldn't go any further than that.

Deviating from your normal review guidelines is unprofessional, and it's possibly an ethical issue if it ends up affecting the published content. If the paper is good enough for review and there is normally no fee, then send it for review.

However, given his qualms about unpaid reviewers, it might be reasonable to warn him that he's submitting to a journal that does not pay its reviewers. It is entirely possible he may want to withdraw his paper due to ethical concerns over your practices.

This may be unprofessional in some eyes, but it's the only ethical way to needle him over his hypocrisy (he's essentially demanding a service he refuses to provide)---and the communication should remain entirely confidential regardless of his response.

Answer 14

I agree with the many other who think #1 is the way to go. Or rather, a variant that I'd call #0: there shouldn't be any pretending you didn't notice. Acceptance of a paper should IMHO solely depend on scientific merits and content (includes whether the subject fits scope of the journal) plus possibly pre-specified fees. Pre-specified fees could also be a payment in kind, i.e. saying that for every manuscript you submit, you have to do so many reviews.

As for reasons not to review, I don't see how "I cannot afford to put in the time" is worse than saying "I don't have the time" or just not giving any reason. If you consider "I cannot put in the time without being paid" not a good reason, then surely neither is no reason a good reason.

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In my field, academics are usually employed. And the employment contracts I had in academia always considered not only writing up research into manuscript form but also reviewing as part of the professional duties. In that sense, I've been paid for the vast majority of reviews I've done. Just not by the journal. BTW, there are macro-economic estimates of these costs (STM report 2012, p. 21 last paragraph

If I were journal editor receiving such a request, I'd be tempted to say "Please send us your/your employer's billing address and VAT number otherwise we cannot prepare a reverse invoice. If you act self-employed, we'll need your VAT number or VAT exemption and tax number. We'll then be considering what we can offer."

And I do see the point that a publication system that pays reviewers, collects fees for submission and reading and pays out royalties to the authors (or their employer, in case of employment contracts) may result in almost a zero-sum game in terms of money (even if we'd divide all the profits of Elsevier, Springer and Wiley) - at the additional cost of huge burocracy. But it would lead to an immense increase in common academic knowledge about international tax rules... Even though you can count me as one of the very few people who are not immediately scared off by the fact that receiving fees does cause tax payment and reporting duties, I'm not sure the gain in fairness of even an ideally fair system of those fees is worth the hassle.

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I'm freelancer now, but still have some projects that are very close to academia, and still do some research. Let me add a point of view from that perspective, because that's where I can see me being the reviewer in your question. I'd have explained, though, that as opposed to people being paid by grant money I'm freelancer and do not have any project covering the review of your manuscript - and that at present I cannot afford volunteering the time for the review. Taking the scenario further, as an author getting response #2 I'd answer that I feel at least as magnanimous as I'm not paid by any project for preparing the manuscript*.

I'd like to point out that I'm fine with the current system if there is a project that at least somewhat covers these activities (I do have one such research project right now). And I'm fine with volunteering time even if there is no such project, but within limits.

But I do have to say that I have some disquieting experience with academics on permanent employment contracts who do not see any more the difference between having and not having an employment contract. (If I'm the one in question, that's fine - I can deal with that professionally. But I do get upset if this attitude hits former students who are out of job and are expected to work for free.) And that alarm is triggered by seeing many responses here on academia.sx that claim pretty much noone is paid for reviewing when my estimate is that the vast majority of academia.sx users do have academic employment contracts which include publication duties (please comment that you are not paid by projects if that's the case so I can update my world-view).

* I'd rationalize to myself some of that time as going into marketing. And in fact, I would not try to haggle for payment, but do foresee me haggling with journals whether if I volunteer my time for writing the manuscript, they could throw in open access. Or leave me more rights than usual.

Answer 15

Why not

6. Reject his paper, informing him that your journal's QA process works by having its potential authors do unpaid peer reviews, and hence, willingness to do unpaid peer reviews is a condition for being an author.

Only do this if this is actually your policy, and you uphold it strictly.

Other than that, only your first option seems reasonable. Never make it personal.