Thumbs Down for the Freemium Model? Researchers Reject Nature’s Fast Track Peer Review Experiment

Why does peer review take so long? This is a common complaint publishers hear from authors. There are many answers; most commonly papers are delayed because it is difficult to get enough people to agree to perform the review or reviewers fail to get their reviews done in a timely manner. There remains something of a disconnect for researchers between their expectations as authors and their behavior as reviewers (see also: complaints about reviewers asking for additional experiments). A fast review process provides a competitive advantage for a journal, and the Nature Publishing Group (NPG) recently performed an experiment in outsourced, fast track peer review to try to address the problem. The unexpected consequence of this experiment exposed something else entirely: concern from the research community over tiered systems where wealthy authors are favored over those lacking funds.
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