Couldn’t a widely read Open Access Journal pay its referees for timely reports with advertising revenues? (Yes, I’m back to thinking about this issue again.)

Imagine you’re an editor and you manage to get your open access journal into the top tier. Suppose you get 500 submissions a year that you deem are worth having an external referee look at. Suppose you offer to pay your referee $50 if the referee gets the paper back to you with substantive comments within 1 month. The referee gets nothing otherwise. If the referee fails to get the comments back within say 2 months, they are not asked to referee again. To pull this off a journal would need to pull in $10,000 a year annually.

A top-tier open access journal could probably do that. Assume a top tier journal could charge what Brian Leiter charges for advertisements on his blog. If Leiter gets his asking price for every month out of the year, then the two tiny ads in the left and right hand column of his blog could generate $9,400 a year. (Note: Leiter appears to be filling his ad spaces.)

Now, a journal wouldn’t be able to charge Leiter rates until it had a Leiter-sized audience. If an open-access journal were at the top, it might get there, and that journal could provide incentives to resolve its peer review issues. The operating costs of an open-access journal would be so low that most of the ad revenue could go directly to the referees.

Note: There may be some objection to providing referees with monetary incentives. One possible objection is that this might encourage hasty reviews that are not well thought out because the reviewer is just trying to get the review in time to get the money. But I think I’d rather take my chances on a hasty review than a risk a 12 month hold up on the paper.

Another Note: I was going to add this to the list of pros under The Case for Open Access Journals, but it’s highly speculative. I’m going to think more about it before I add it to the list. For one, I’m a little doubtful that even a top-tier journal would acheive Leiter-sized audiences. I’d be interested to see what Philosophers’ Imprint web stats are.