One of the most criticized aspects of the current publishing scheme, is that academics do pretty much all the work for free and publishers get the money.
Why don't people just charge a fee when contacted by a publisher to referee an article?
I know why do academics write peer reviews?, that's not the question. The issue is why do it requesting no monetary compensation when the publisher is getting (for doing next to nothing) an extraordinary monetary compensation.
Academics aren't upset about not getting paid for refereeing/reviewing - they're upset because journals charge too much.
There's really four points in the statement "academics do pretty much all the work for free and publishers get the money"
Just because people might object to some of the four points, that doesn't mean they object to all of them.
Academics do most of the work - Most academics wouldn't object to this state of the affairs. Of course academics do most of the work in publishing (especially reviewing) - they're the ones who are qualified to do it. You can't have some bureaucrat take care of reviewing the work, you need someone who knows the field.
Publishers do a comparatively small amount of work - Academics might grumble at this, but there's a comparatively little that the publishers are qualified to do. Typesetting, printing, maintaining the journal website, administration in the reviewing process ... and that's about it. All the actual content decisions have to be done by knowledgeable people (academics). There's certainly some journals which try to offload things like typesetting onto the authors, but in part that's financially driven ...
Publishers get the money - This is the main point of upset. Publishers charge what is viewed as an excessive amount. ... but it's not that they're charging money per se, it's more that academics lose access to the content due to expense. Most academics were completely satisfied when they had access through (paid) library subscriptions. It's only when budget cuts (and publisher price increases) caused libraries to cut subscriptions that academics got upset. But again, it's less having to pay for things and more not being able to access everything they need.
Academics don't get any money - This is the point you're addressing. However, I'd say most academics don't have a problem with it. Refereeing for a journal is considered by most to be community service - it's something that needs to happen, and they're the only ones qualified to do it. It's quid-pro-quo: others review your articles, and you review other people's. Attempting to make it a paid-for enterprise makes the person asking for the money seem greedy.
So where does that leave you? Academics (mostly) don't have a problem doing most of the work - and doing it for free. The complaints are on the publisher's side: they're charging too much for what little they do. Demanding that publishers pay academics for reviewing isn't going to change that. If anything, it will make journal access more expensive, as they now need to pay for reviewers.
So charging a fee when reviewing isn't going to fix the problem, and as Mark Meckes mentions in his answer, asking for one is only going to make you look naive and greedy to the (academic) editor who you're in contact with. Note that there's a very big difference between "Decline to review based on principles" and "Decline to review ... unless you pay me".
Leaving aside arguments for and against the current system, here's what will happen if you --- as an individual academic --- are contacted by a publisher and attempt to charge a fee:
You will most likely be contacted, not by a "publisher" per se, but by an editor, who is another hard-working academic getting little or no monetary compensation for their job.
You say something like, "This is my fee for refereeing an article."
The editor responds, "Sorry, we have no budget to pay for refereeing," and goes to look for another referee.
In the best case scenario, the editor --- who is most likely a well-regarded senior researcher in your field, the sort of person who may make or influence decisions over your hiring, promotion, grants, and the publication of your own papers --- now has the impression that you're deplorably ignorant about how the field operates. In the worst case, the editor thinks you're a jerk who's actively seeking to make life harder for other people working in the field.
In some fields, for some journals, they are paid a fee. [File this as yet another example of "academia varies more than you think"...] This approach seems to be most popular with economics journals - as they are heavily into studying the way people can be motivated by money, I suppose this makes sense!
An exceptional example is the Journal of Financial Economics - most articles have a single reviewer, who is paid $275 cash (and a ~$200 discount off their next submission), contingent on a timely review. Lower down the scale, the Journal of Banking and Finance talks about offering "tokens of appreciation" for reviewers; there's no cash value given but the phrasing suggests it's probably a good bit lower.
Now, why do these journals do it? Probably because they always have done, an explanation which applies to a lot of strange quirks of the academic system. But is it a good idea? The recent proposal by Scientific Reports to have a two-track paid- and unpaid-peer-review system was incredibly contentious, after all...
The Journal of Public Economics recently tested the system out - they took 1500 review requests for their papers, and divided them into four groups:
All variants worked well. The group with a four-week deadline had an average turnaround time of twelve days less than the six-week deadline group. Payments took another eight days off the turnaround time, and "public credit" another 2.5 days. The money/credit groups wrote slightly shorter reports, presumably as they were more motivated to make a hard deadline, but the editors did not see them as of noticeably lower quality.
So... yes, payment can work. But it relies on the journal having the money (two reviewers is $200/paper), and - intriguingly - it's not quite as effective as the no-money-needed option of just giving a shorter deadline. And even when it does work, it only makes sense if done systematically by the journal. Individuals asking to negotiate their own review payments is unlikely to work in the same way.
Because that's not how it works.
That may seem unsatisfying, but it's the answer. It's part of scientific culture that peer reviewing is done without charging, just as it's part of business culture that you don't wear sagging shorts and torn t-shirts to work.
Is it something that might change? Sure; it's not a formal contract, it's a cultural thing, and cultures change. But most scientists feel that peer review is a good thing, and most scientists feel that it should be free, so it's unlikely that it will change soon.
Keep in mind that, while there's a lively on-line debate about the merits of peer review and open-access publication and so on, this is a debate among tiny and non-representative populations of scientists. Don't confuse the passion and attitudes that you see on-line with how most scientists actually feel.
If you do this on an individual scale, as Mark Meckes says, it's basically the same as just declining to review the paper. The journal is not going to pay you; they will find someone else.
You could ask "What if everyone started demanding money?" That's essentially a proposal that researchers as a group should strike for higher wages. Like any labor action, it'll only work if a large majority of the labor force participates and is well organized. Anybody who's served as a department chair can tell you that organizing any significant number of academics to agree on anything is, well, challenging. Here you are talking about organizing all the academics in the world.
If somehow a strike were to be effective, large commercial publishers might eventually knuckle under and start paying; small publishers might not have the resources, and might go out of business. At least in the short term, it would be very disruptive to the academic community: initially, publishers would probably just look for referees who weren't on strike ("scabs") and the review process would be greatly delayed. Some journals might suspend publication. Ultimately, the people most harmed would probably be junior researchers who need to publish in a timely manner in order to maintain or advance their careers. So you'd have to have a consensus that the long-term gain outweighs the short-term harm.
To use a physics analogy, we're in a potential well; there might be a lower-energy state (one in which reviewers get paid), but the activation energy to get from here to there is extremely high.
Because keeping money out of the publisher-reviewer relationship is a very good feature of the current dominant publishing model.
Some of the unwanted things that paying reviewers would result in:
Summary:
First of all let me say that from my experience
academics do pretty much all the work for free
I think this is true at best for a very small minority of academics. My work contract says that (among other things) I'm paid for "publication activities" and that clearly includes reviews. Clearly as in administration asks me to report for yearly statistics number of reviews done for which journals just like they ask for manuscripts, oral presentations and posters.
So while I'm not paid by the publisher, I am paid by my employer for the reviews. And I know very few academics who go on publishing and reviewing after the academic job ends - few people put that much effort into a hobby.
(I'm thinking here more of graduates/post-docs without job than of retired professors because I think the out-of-job-academics are the better control group for this discussion)
For me this makes the question very similar to why does a car mechanic work who is employed by a workshop not charge the customer directly? Answer: it's the employer who charges the customer (via their administration), the mechanic is paid by their wage.
We now may ask why doesn't the employer (research institute, university) charge the publisher for services received? IMHO this is a sensible question and one that actually should be asked. Edit: However, to me this is not the same as the question asked why a single researcher doesn't charge the publisher. The standing and the aims in these negotiations are IMHO totally different of a single researcher compared to a university/research institute.
[slightly off topic: one answer to this may be that for academic institutions of a certain size the number of reviews done by the staff comes close enough to the number of reviews needed for the publications of the same staff - so introducing payment for reviews (including the institution needs to pay for the reviews they receive) just means that more VAT needs to be paid, and thus generates a net loss.]
Edit: Why do I think that charging for review will lead to charges for having your paper reviewed? For one thing, of course commercial publishers won't like to diminish their profits if they can avoid it. But even then: assuming an open source source publication fee of, say, 1500 EUR/US$ leads to 500 EUR/US$ profit (that's 33 %) for the publisher means that 500 EUR/US$ could theoretically be spent for the review before the publisher will enter the loss zone. That pays (see below) for maybe 5 - 10 h of professional academic review time. I often spend considerably more on a single review (see e.g. https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/5799/725 where @JeffE cites a rule of thumb of about 1 h/manuscript page - we often have 15 - 25 manuscript pages). I don't know what the average number of reviews is per published paper, but I'd guess that it is somewhere near 10. But even a low guesstimate of 3 for the first round + 2 for the second (that doesn't even include that papers are declined!) means that 5 x 20 h = 100 h of review time per published paper. That's something like 5000 - 10000 EUR/US$, or 10 - 20x the huge profit of the publisher.
So, yes, the reviewing is a huge amount of work and it needs to be compensated, like writing the papers needs to be compensated. And yes, it is the researchers who do this. But even the most evil shark publishers with 40 % profit of a 1500 EUR fee for an open access publication would be able to pay for that.
(this is for Germany, other legislations will differ)
On the other hand, well, yes: why not charge the publisher?
Scientific reviewieng is a classic professional service of freelancers (German: freiberufliche Tätigkeit). In order to do such freelancing, you first of all need to make sure that there is no conflict with any employment. This is best done by exchanging a couple of letters with your professor/director/administration. Unless they actually have some deal with the publisher, they probably wish you good luck and are happy with that.
You then go to the tax office and ask for a freelancing tax number. If this is just for the few reviews you do, you'd also ask for exemption of VAT, otherwise you'd need to do VAT declarations (if dealing with a publisher in a EU foreign country, things are more complicated). But at the very least, the freelancing tax number means that your income tax declaration becomes mandatory, gets an additional set of forms for the freelancing and you have a shorter deadline to hand it in.
You'll need to put in this effort regardless of whether you are actually able to convince a publisher to pay you or not.
I guess most researchers I know think that compared to doing the review for the academic salary this extra money is not worth the extra burocracy. (I know of one colleague who told of his burocratic experience where an extra payment < 1000 EUR for a seminar was concerned)
Now, I anyways do freelancing, so the marginal effort for me is low (as it is for people who anyways do vocational tax declaration and do it early). However, so far I have to say that the market price of reviewing is rather unattractive. I've been offered 100 US$ to do a quick "review" within a couple of days (no full review was asked but rather something like an opinion on the manuscript and pointing out which points I'd recommend should be addressed before actual submission).
Some comparisons:
I estimate that I cost my employer about 75 - 100 US$ / h (of which 22 US$ / h actually arrive at my bank account after taxes + social insurance for me have been paid). Thus, the offered market price for the review service boils down to the cost of 1 - 1:10 h for my employer. Even though my freelancing doesn't have as much overhead (e.g. because small-scale freelancing on the side is covered by the social insurance of the employment contract), I'd need to finish that review within ca. 2 h to get the same hourly wage I get for my employment contract. Also as it is very much on-demand of the journal, it cannot even be used too well for filling up time when I don't have a customer. So all in all, even though my marginal burocracy for doing this is low, it is not super-attractive. In fact, I'm better off if I can put the time onto my academic time sheet. You may decide differently, particularly if your employer does not accept a time sheet.
Another comparison: for me, the hourly wage for such a review is close to filing VG Wort claims - though the hourly wage there would be better if I had more papers to file, as there's quite an offset of remembering how to do things that need to be done just once per year.
[Caveat: I agree that the publishing system is quite flawed. Meanwhile, let us have another look]
While cash has become the most common payment method, it is not the only one. Let us talk about barter:
[...] a system of exchange where goods or services are directly exchanged for other goods or services without using a medium of exchange, such as money.
In some countries, academia is not the best paid occupation, for instance young researchers. So the reward of researchers is not only money. Let us call the other reward: "knowledge". Knowledge is not a standard good. You cannot say:
You can learn by yourself, for yourself, but except for rare beautiful minds, one needs evaluation. As for many creative works, evaluation is difficult without peers, science is a cumulative progress of unassigned tasks. Evaluations are legion: peer-review, seminars, collaborations, teaching.
The first time I submitted a paper, I had almost no idea about peer-review. The first return was an shot in the head. Teached me a lot. I got reward from being peer-reviewed. I learned that the anonymous guys did that for free. So I reviewed. For free.
Wait, no really.
For these several reasons, and some more, I do reviewing in a barter mind. What is troublesome is that somebody else draws actual money from that. We might be at the verge of a Ponzi pyramid of scientific publishing.
My personal view on the matter is that journal / refereed venue publication should be a collaborative non-pecuniary effort of scientific communities in different fields, in which nobody gets paid for doing specific tasks like reviewing a paper but it is acknowledged that as an academic, some of your time is spent doing that, and as a university, research institute or other entity which garners benefit from scientific research - you would be obliged (morally? socially? legally?) to "contribute reasonably" to this effort.
Of course, this leaves the open question of what would be fair for people who are not employed as researchers. It's not about whether they get compensated, but rather how they can spend time on non-affiliated research activity and not go bankrupt, or work "two jobs", their "day job" and unpaid research-related work. This problem is especially accute for people employed in precarious teaching-only positions in Academia, and for that I might agree some compensation-per-review might be in order - although it's a matter for the academic labor unions to struggle for.
I agree that reviewers provide a valuable and uncompensated service.
I believe most academics, however, are sadly misinformed about the work that goes into publishing an article after the reviewers approve it.
I am a former researcher turned manuscript editor. I have published a first author paper and a second author paper in a biological science. I have worked in medical and scientific publishing for 13 years as an editor and now as a consultant.
Top journals likely have no difficulty getting top reviewers. However, the lesser known journals (some of which I happen to consult for) do not have folks beating down their doors to review articles. They must approach those who may or may not be well-qualified to review an article.
I consider myself the last bastion of reason in the publication process. Just yesterday, I spend 9 hours as a paid consultant on an article that was so illogical, so full of errors, and so ill-referenced that I wondered how the reviewers could have possibly thought it was appropriate for publication. This journal hires me because they know I am capable of critically editing research. I have spoken to them on many occasions about the poor quality of the articles that are approved by reviewers.
My goal as an editor is to prevent embarrassment for the journal and to protect the scholarly literature from garbage. I take this responsibility very seriously.
The first editor spent likely 30 hours researching and rewriting to replace the garbage that was submitted and approved by 3 reviewers, conveying these to the author and then receiving and incorporating the comments from the author. Then the article came to me. I spent another 9 hours editing and pointing out serious errors in fact and consistency. The article needs another rewrite, which the editor will ask the author to do. This process is far from over. The designer will need to craft the illustrations and typeset the article. The production editor will need to manage the final proof process. The publishing process is far from the “nothing” that many scholars believe -- only those who have never seen it from the publishing side would say that.
The time pressure is enormous. The reviewers have approved the article and therefore it was placed in the publication queue. The editors MUST get the article into shape, poor as it is, for publication. We are not the experts, of course, so we have no recourse. I have been stuck on more than one occasion with the task of completely rewriting an illogical, inexpert, poorly referenced article because it was in the queue—the reviewers approved.
The journal pays through the nose for my services and the services of their in-house staff. I despair at the naivete of those who believe that the publisher gets paid for doing "next to nothing."
To force the publishers out of the process will dramatically reduce the quality of the medical and scientific literature. This I cannot abide.
This is the same question that I often think. From your point of view, yes, you are right in your place. Why should not we get money for review? However, main point is who will decide to give money? And how the amount would be fixed? Based on what? Who will judge? Editor-in-chief, or other person? Since we don't have the clear understanding and methodology for these, there is no money for reviewers.
And regarding publishers, apart from reviews, there are Publishing staffs who are responsible for handling the post acceptance process. Thus, money is required for publisher for the salary of these staffs, also for the journal advertising. Conference is another typical issue. Following this way, you can find where money goes.
Another important aspect, sometimes research can't be measured by money, however, research produces a huge amount of money.
The short answer is that the publisher can't afford it (the Cost of Knowledge boycott notwithstanding). If reviewers demanded payment en masse either the system will break down or they'll be paid a pittance per review, and reviewers will complain that they're being made fun of (see this for what happened when the New England Journal of Medicine paid $5 per review).
We can get a sense of how much revenue a journal makes by using OA prices & the number of articles it publishes a year. (This has many potential problems, but I ignore them for simplicity). A moderately large journal might publish 100 articles a year. OA prices vary widely but I'll take $1500 as a baseline. Some publishers can go lower by cutting corners e.g. for copyediting and marketing, but that's clearly less than ideal. So the journal might have a revenue of ~$150,000 per year. Some of the revenue goes towards paying for the editorial management system, marketing, production, possibly the editor-in-chief's honorarium if applicable, and so on. Let's assume a net margin of 10%, i.e. a profit of $15,000 a year.
Next let's assume the journal has a rejection rate of 75% (for comparison the most selective journals have rejection rates of over 90%). Assume the journal requires two reviews per manuscript to make a decision. That means the journal needs a total of ~800 reviews a year. If it paid $10 for each of those reviews, that's over half the net margin gone! Viewed from this perspective, NEJM didn't pay $5 for each review because they were making fun of the reviewers. They did so because it was all they could afford to pay.
Finally let's not forget that this is a reasonably large journal - 100 papers / year. There're many smaller journals around, many of which are not indexed by SCI and therefore don't have an impact factor. These journals are almost always loss-making. They only stay afloat because the publisher subsidizes them using the profit margin from their larger journals. If these journals also had to pay for reviews, they would lose even more money. Publishers would be incentivized to shut them down, which hurts research since the papers published in these journals aren't necessarily bad, they just tend to be boring and low novelty. To top it off even this reasonably large journal is probably facing subscription cuts in the current market (see my answer to a different question).
Having said all this, this applies only to journal articles. The sheer volume of reviews required in journal publishing makes it hard to pay reviewers, but if you're reviewing book proposals, you can expect some compensation. You might not receive cash, but you should be able to e.g. get a free book from the publisher's collection.
