Considering that we have a surplus of highly qualified scholars seeking positions, imagine if major journals and presses (or maybe better, a non-profit consortium funded by fees from the biggest possible network of universities and colleges) employed full-time peer reviewers at competitive salaries (70-75k/year) who worked with approx. 10 publications relevant to their expertise. There are some drawbacks to the idea, sure, but it could centrally respond to the biggest source of delay in the whole process, which is time lag involved in finding reviewers, waiting for them to find time to review, and then seeking revisions from the original author as necessary, potentially leading to an additional review.
The crisis in reviewing right now is just that people who've been doing it all along are sick of it. It happens behind closed doors; presses and journals forget that you've done it for them, no one else knows that you do, and nobody really knows the difference between diligent reviewers, gatekeeping assholes, and people who toss off three careless sentences in terms of public reputation. You get credit for what you publish under your own name and no credit at all in any way for what you do as a reviewer. Younger faculty who haven't gotten sucked into that system have wised up (partly because so many people talk about this on social media now) and so the cupboard is bare. And yet there are still big companies making big money selling peer-reviewed scholarship back to the institutions which subsidized it and gave it away for free, so I think there's money in the loop somewhere to start paying for that labor--and thus maybe making a distinction between doing it badly and doing it well (as well as doing it at all), where "speed of delivery" becomes part of what you're paying for.
Considering that we have a surplus of highly qualified scholars seeking positions, imagine if major journals and presses (or maybe better, a non-profit consortium funded by fees from the biggest possible network of universities and colleges) employed full-time peer reviewers at competitive salaries (70-75k/year) who worked with approx. 10 publications relevant to their expertise. There are some drawbacks to the idea, sure, but it could centrally respond to the biggest source of delay in the whole process, which is time lag involved in finding reviewers, waiting for them to find time to review, and then seeking revisions from the original author as necessary, potentially leading to an additional review.
The crisis in reviewing right now is just that people who've been doing it all along are sick of it. It happens behind closed doors; presses and journals forget that you've done it for them, no one else knows that you do, and nobody really knows the difference between diligent reviewers, gatekeeping assholes, and people who toss off three careless sentences in terms of public reputation. You get credit for what you publish under your own name and no credit at all in any way for what you do as a reviewer. Younger faculty who haven't gotten sucked into that system have wised up (partly because so many people talk about this on social media now) and so the cupboard is bare. And yet there are still big companies making big money selling peer-reviewed scholarship back to the institutions which subsidized it and gave it away for free, so I think there's money in the loop somewhere to start paying for that labor--and thus maybe making a distinction between doing it badly and doing it well (as well as doing it at all), where "speed of delivery" becomes part of what you're paying for.
I read the Arizona ed article and agree – very much worth reading.