Offering career credit to researchers for performing peer review seems like a no-brainer, right? Peer review is essential for our system of research, and study after study confirms that researchers consider it tremendously important. Funding agencies and journal publishers alike rely on researchers to provide rigorous review to aid in making decisions about who to fund and which papers to publish. On the surface it would seem to make sense to formalize this activity as a part of the career responsibilities of an academic researcher. But as one delves into the specifics of creating such a system, some major roadblocks arise.
One such problem falls into the realm of volunteerism and motivation. Right now, most academics see performing peer review as a service to the community. It’s important to the advancement of the field and so they volunteer their time. If instead we turn peer review into a mandatory, career requirement that is rewarded with credit, it changes the nature of the behavior. If we set standards (you must do X peer reviews per year) people will then work to those standards rather than the more generous acts we see today, where good samaritans (and good reviewers) take on much larger workloads.
Economists suggest that incentives (a form of reward) changes motivation, some of which will be actualized by real behavioral change. Educator Alfie Kohn talks about how behaviors change in light of offering rewards in one of his books on parenting:
Source: Scholarlykitchen
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