[Version anglaise de l’article « Et si nous étions payé·e·s pour faire du peer review ? »]
The scientific publishing world is unique: to my knowledge, it is the only sector in which very lucrative businesses solicit highly trained experts to perform pro bono work in repetition – a.k.a. peer review. Most researchers accept this work willingly: reading and evaluating scientific articles is considered an integral part of the job, essential for preserving scientific rigor, and an opportunity to deepen their own knowledge. But what if, for once, you were offered payment for your review work? This is precisely the proposal of the open-access journal, Biology Open.
Beginning in July 2024, Biology Open have been experimenting with a publishing model they call “Fast & Fair Review”. The editorial group first created a database of scientific experts to contact as potential reviewers (if you are interested, applications may be found here). When an editor moves an article into the review process, contacted experts have one business day to accept their peer review invitation, and then four business days to return their reviews (following this rubric and these guidelines). Assuming the review is of satisfactory quality and submitted on time, reviewers are then paid £ 220 per manuscript. Peer reviews are obligatorily published in open access alongside the final article, though they are kept anonymous unless reviewers choose otherwise. Following a favorable six-month pilot study involving two editors, Biology Open extended their Fast & Fair program to all submissions last year.
A new preprint summarizes the findings: with Fast & Fair, the average time for initial responses to authors dropped to just 5.7 days, in comparison with 37.7 days previously. This statistic is even more impressive considering certain journals took up to 313 days to send an initial response in 2025. Part of this jump in efficiency is due to the increased review uptake: 67% of reviewers accepted versus 23% in traditional review processes. These figures translate directly into saved time for the editors, who sent only 3.05 invitations on average, in comparison to 8.9 previously. The reduction in article processing time is particularly valuable for early-career researchers, whose careers are disproportionately affected by long publication delays.
Despite the shorter review time, Biology Open editors observe no reduction in review quality. When evaluated on a scale of 0-100 for utility, the 210 traditional reviews averaged 91.1, whereas Fast & Fair averaged 97.2. Furthermore, the lowest scores (below 50) were only found among traditional reviews. Still, I would note that this comparison is subject to the editors’ personal biases, as they did not conduct blind evaluations.
Ultimately, what will paying reviewers cost? Is the model sustainable in the long term? According to Biology Open, Fast & Fair cost between £ 693-760 per article in 2025, totalling £104,000-114,000, of which £66,000 were reviewer payments. Consequently, the journal plans to adjust its APCs (article processing charges) in light of this new expense. Currently, as a non-profit journal published by the non-profit The Company of Biologists, Biology Open’s APCs are listed as up to 2500 USD for all “high-income” countries without “Read & Publish” agreements. (If you are curious, in France at present, the only partner is the EMBL division in Grenoble).
Taking a step back, if reviewer payments are downloaded to authors in the form of APCs, it is the scientific community and its intitutions, not the journals, who will fund these reviews. Yet, the same scientific community already pays the salaries of the expert researchers, as well as the subscriptions to all non-open-access journals. We might therefore ask ourselves if this compensation will not primarily serve to increase the journal’s efficeincy and image. For non-profit journals such as Biology Open, I understand there is no miracle solution to offset increased publishing costs. However, for those journals with sizable profit margins, surely a ‘fair’ recognition of reviewers’ work should come out of the journal’s budget, rather than as yet another cost to authors (and taxpayers who fund public research)? Whether Biology Open’s APCs will increase in 2027 (and by how much) remains to be seen, as does the potential effect on their submission rates.
As an early-career researcher, I welcome the idea of faster and more valorised peer review. Moreover, with precise deadlines for accepting and submitting peer reviews, the Fast & Fair model may reduce disparities observed in article processing time as a function of authors’ genders or country of origin. Whether Fast & Fair will mitigate these inequities remains to be seen; this hypothesis was not yet directly tested in the preprint, nor is review turnaround time necessarily the principle cause of the observed inequalities. Nevertheless, Biology Open has demonstrated that its Fast & Fair model yields advantages for authors, editors, and reviewers alike. I hope their success will encourage other journals to reconsider their own peer review systems- especially if the process proves to be not only more efficeint, but truly fairer to all submitting authors.
Caitlin Martin, postdoctoral researcher at the Institut Pasteur
References:
- Gorelick DA, Clark A. Expanded implementation of Fast & Fair paid peer review reduces time to first decision without reducing review quality in a biology journal. bioRxiv. 2026. doi:10.64898/2026.06.02.729548
- Phillips KA, Horn DM. Review and Publication Times and Reporting Across Journals on Health Policy. JAMA Netw Open. 2025 May 27;8(5):e2512545. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.12545
- Felisi N, Vecchio R, Odone A. When peer review drags on: the harm to early career researchers. Front Res Metr Anal. 2026 Feb 4;11. doi:10.3389/frma.2026.1740381
- Alvarez-Ponce D, Batz G, Torres LR. Biomedical and life science articles by female researchers spend longer under review. PLOS Biol. 2026 Jan 20;24(1):e3003574. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.3003574
