Can a paid model for peer review be sustainable when the author can decide whether to pay or not?

Given how hard it is to recruit good reviewers who are aligned with authors in their functions, journal editors could consider the use of better incentives, such as paying reviewers for their time. In order to facilitate a speedy turn-around when a rapid decision is required, the peer-reviewed journal can also offer a review model in which selected peer reviewers are compensated to deliver high-quality and timely peer-review reports. In this paper, we consider a peer-reviewed journal in which the manuscript’s evaluation consists of a necessary peer review component and an optional speedy peer review component. We model and study that journal under two different scenarios to be compared: a paid peer-reviewing scenario that is considered as the benchmark; and a hybrid peer-review scenario where the manuscript’s author can decide whether to pay or not. In the benchmark scenario of paid peer-reviewing, the scholarly journal expects all authors to pay for the peer review and charges separately for the necessary and the optional speedy peer-review components. Alternatively, in a hybrid peer-review scenario, the peer-reviewed journal gives the option to the authors to not pay for the necessary peer review if they are not able to pay. This will determine an altruistic amplification of pay utility. However, the no-pay authors cannot avail of the optional speedy peer review, which determines a restriction-induced no-pay utility reduction. In this paper, we find that under the hybrid setting of compensated peer review where the author can decide whether to pay or not, the optimal price and review quality of the optional speedy peer review are always higher than under the benchmark scenario of paid peer-reviewing, due to the altruistic amplification of pay utility. Our results show that when the advantage of adopting the hybrid mode of compensated peer review is higher due to the higher difference between the altruistic author utility amplification and the restriction-induced no-pay utility reduction, the journal can increase its profitability by increasing the price for the necessary peer review above that in the benchmark scenario of paid peer review. A key insight from our results is the journal’s capability to increase the number of paying authors by giving the option to the authors to not pay for the necessary peer review if they are not able to pay.

Acknowledgement

We sincerely thank to the journal Editors and Invited Reviewers of our open access volumes No 50, 51 and 52. They are the people who make an internationally peer reviewed, open access journal. Reviewer’s helpful and constructive comments led to improvement in each manuscript and successful volumes.

How to Publish: Guidance From GSA’s Journal Editors

Each year he GSA publications team sponsors a symposium to assist authors who wish to publish in GSA’s high impact and influential journals. The first part of the session will include five brief presentations from the editors of The Gerontologist, Innovation and Aging, and the Journals of Gerontology Series A and B plus GSA’s managing editors. We will integrate practical tips with principles of publication ethics and scholarly integrity. The topics will be as follows: (1) Preparing your manuscript: strong and ethical scholarly writing for multidisciplinary audiences, (2) common problems that affect peer review, (3) addressing translational significance and fit to journal expectations, (4) transparency, documentation, and Open Science; and (5) working with Scholar One. Following these presentations, we will hold round table discussions with editors from the GSA journals portfolio. At these round tables, editors will answer questions related to the podium presentations and other questions specific to each journal. Intended audiences include emerging and international scholars, and authors interested in learning more about best practices and tips for getting their scholarly work published.

Pelatihan Menulis Artikel Ilmiah dan Mengirimkannya ke Jurnal Ilmiah

The community service activity was conducted in the form of online training on Zoom and Youtube platforms. The participants were 80 lecturers, teachers, and university students from 28 different institutions. It aimed to facilitate the participants to be able to improve the quality of their scientific articles and to submit their articles to ‘carefully chosen’ journals. It lasted for 100 minutes. There were six important points regarding how the quality of research articles could be maintained and improved. Firstly, the participants should do a lot of reading before writing. Secondly, they should have strong rationales of conducting their studies. Thirdly, they needed to use combination of descriptive and analytical expressions. Fourth, they should write or review only relevant literature in meaty way. Next, they should ensure that all of the in-text citations correspond to the references. Last but not least, they should implement ethical principles in research. Furthermore, regarding how the participants could choose which journal was ‘best’ for their articles, four important points were discussed: choosing a journal which ‘matched’ the quality of the article, choosing a journal with regular publication, adhering to the chosen journal’s template, and asking the journal editors about the duration of the review process.