Peer Review: Solemn Duty or Merely Extra Work?

The other day on Twitter I saw Rolf Zwaan tweeting about Collabra's policy of rewarding reviewers with credit that can be traded in for credit for organisational article processing fees (APC) budgets, into Collabra's fee waiver account, or for cash to the reviewer. This idea, of paying reviewers for reviewing, comes up now and again on Twitter and it always sounds wrong to me. My gut response is that we should not be paying individuals money to review articles.

So I did the normal thing and posted a Twitter poll, with the following results:

Thesis: getting paid for peer review is a bad idea because it's part of our collective duty to improve science

— Andrew & Sabrina (@PsychScientists) April 13, 2016

Turns out I am in the minority! The various discussion I've had around this tweet have been kind of interesting too.