> Also, full-time rigorous peer reviewing would be an interesting career prospect for many current scientists. And here is your startup idea..
I don’t know about this. (But I don’t have any answers for the question either).
If you’re a full time peer reviewer, first, are you really a peer? But more importantly, your motivations change. No longer are you looking to try to see if the paper is worthy of publishing or if it is sound; instead, your motivation is to push through as many papers as possible. When getting paid depends on approving papers, the quality will drop.
Maybe the problem is where the money exchange occurs. What about if authors paid to have their paper reviewed, instead of published? Currently, journals only get paid when a paper is published. What about if they got paid to review the paper at all? It would limit the paper submissions to Nature/Science/Cell, but you’d be paying for a high quality review (which often makes a paper better). You might even have luck with decoupling reviewers from journals completely… make the journals compete over the best (already) reviewed papers.
>instead, your motivation is to push through as many papers as possible.
I think this is an assumption that doesn't have to hold true in practice. Maybe it's biased by the 'publish or perish' paradigm that's pervaded academia, but there's no reason to replicate the same problem elsewhere.
I don’t know about this. (But I don’t have any answers for the question either).
If you’re a full time peer reviewer, first, are you really a peer? But more importantly, your motivations change. No longer are you looking to try to see if the paper is worthy of publishing or if it is sound; instead, your motivation is to push through as many papers as possible. When getting paid depends on approving papers, the quality will drop.
Maybe the problem is where the money exchange occurs. What about if authors paid to have their paper reviewed, instead of published? Currently, journals only get paid when a paper is published. What about if they got paid to review the paper at all? It would limit the paper submissions to Nature/Science/Cell, but you’d be paying for a high quality review (which often makes a paper better). You might even have luck with decoupling reviewers from journals completely… make the journals compete over the best (already) reviewed papers.