A vital and often overlooked aspect of peer review is that in the current system, peer reviewers are normally not paid for their work. Instead, they are rewarded by means of acknowledgment in journals, positions on editorial boards, free journal access, discounts on author fees, etc. This interesting topic came to us from The Scholarly Kitchen in their article, “Let Authors Choose How to Pay for Peer Review and Publication.”
The current rumor mill says the United States Office for Science Technology and Policy (OSTP) is gearing up to release an open access (OA) policy. This isn’t the first go around. Like cOAlition S and Plan S before it, both the funders involved and the researchers affected will need to consider different approaches to covering the costs that the majority of journals will charge to make an article OA.
There has been a longtime apprehension that introducing submission fees will deter authors from submitting to fee-charging journals in favor of those that don’t have such charges. Editorial rejections are a big driver of this concern. It will be interesting to see what happens.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
