[Moderator's Note: This thread has branched from: Re: The True Cost of the Essentials (Implementing Peer Review) http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0303.html ]
On the subject of referee payments, they are not frequent, but they do occur occasionally even in disciplines other than economics. I don't have any references to add to those that Stevan assembled, but as another tidbit, let me mention that the IBM Systems Journal, which publishes articles by IBM authors, does use a conventional peer review system, relying extensively (possibly even exclusively) on outside referees. The outside referees are paid, but I am not sure what the rationale or incentives of this are. In the two cases where I refereed papers for them, the letter asking me to review a submission did not state that a payment would be coming, that was only mentioned after I submitted my report. (The second instance occurred so long after the first one that I did not assume that a payment would be forthcoming, since more than enough time had passed for a policy change. The fee in the second instance was $200, and I don't recall if that was the same as in the first case.) Another piece of anectodal evidence, supporting what Hal said: One editor, in a biomedical area, told me of a practice at one of her journals of sending a small trinket as a token appreciation to referees who sent in reviews on time. She noted that some referees would spend $20 (but usually of their employers' money!) for a FedEx delivery of the report, in order to meet the deadline, to get something that cost around $10 to provide. Andrew -----Please note new address----- Andrew Odlyzko University of Minnesota Digital Technology Center 499 Walter Library 117 Pleasant St. SE Minneapolis, MN 55455 odly...@umn.edu email 612-624-9510 voice phone 612-625-2002 fax http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko
