In a shocking discovery, scientific #journal finds that people work better when actually paid for it.

In the six-month experiment, reviewers who within four working days delivered a report that their handling editor considered good quality were paid £220 per manuscript.

Paying reviewers not only led to faster first editorial decisions — an average of 5.5 working days, down from nearly 38 for unpaid reviews — but review quality, as judged by handling editors on the basis of helpfulness in making an editorial decision, went up.

#science
nature.com/articles/d41586-026…

Why paying peer reviewers works, according to a journal’s editor-in-chief

A biology journal that paid peer reviewers found that the approach cut the time to a first editorial decision by 85% and maintained high-quality reviews.

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