Just saying -- perhaps "editors who have gone AWOL, referees who are late in responding, or who turn out to be inappropriate" would likely be less of a problem if they were properly paid for what they're doing. I haven't been in academia for a long time (and my stint was short), but I don't remember ever hearing of a reviewer who got anything more substantial than maybe a discount or a one month of free subscription to a journal from a publisher. Managing peer review is admittedly more than "sending a few e-mails", but not in a good way.
The last review I did (for an open access journal) took ~6 hours. At minimum wage that's about $50. There were two reviewers = $100. Reviewer must get paid even if the recommendation is "don't publish", otherwise reviewers will have an incentive to say "yes". The OA fee for that journal is about $1300. If 50% of the peer reviewed papers are published, then the average price for peer review would be $200, which would raise the price to publish by about 10%.
It is an open access journal, so everyone effectively has a free subscription to it.
One alternative is a credit model, where N reviews gives a discount on the price to publish. However, as the above points out, it may be more cost effective to mow lawns on the weekend than it is to plan for that discount.
Then there's the question of perceived fairness. If one reviewer says "great job. Publish" and another gives 10 pages of useful critique, is it proper to pay each the same?
My information may be out of date because, as I've said above, my dance with academia ended a long time ago. AFAIK most (all?) of Elsevier's journals aren't open access and reviewers aren't paid at all. They aren't improperly paid, they're not paid at all. The publisher gets a hefty amount of income out of their unpaid work, of which they share exactly nothing. This is well past the level where we can debate nuances of fairness.
I don't know enough about this field to be able to properly debate the proper mechanics of payment. I just wanted to point out that one of the pillars of these publishers' income -- the credibility brought by peer review, such as it is -- is effectively the unpaid labour of a lot of very, very clever people, who contribute enormously to human progress (not just to the publishers' pockets) pretty much for free (sure, some of them are also assholes, but that's besides the point). I can understand why sometimes they'd be less then collaborative. Over here, in the industry, if I were offered the (industrial) equivalent of that deal, my answer would be a warm and heartfelt fuck you; in fact, I don't think any serious company would want to compromise its image by offering such a deal.
Edit: at the risk of appearing to suffer of the anti-academic sentiment that is so plaguing our profession (which, I have to insist, I do not), I also think that some of this problem is self-inflicted and has to do with the way in which modern society treats higher education. I sometimes think that part of the solution could lay in discouraging the short-sighted, what-can-we-reliably-solve-in-no-longer-than-three-years, paper-focused approach to research activity that is self-feeding the publishing machine.
Referee wrangling is not unique to Elsevier. While you are correct about "one of the pillars of these publishers' income", I have heard very few argue that referee compensation would improve the situation.
To the best of my limited knowledge, the complaints about reviewers taking a long time or not responding at all are independent of the publisher, and equally true for open access journals. I've gotten my share of "the deadline is in two days" emails. No can I think of what compensation might entice me to respond in three days rather than three weeks.
The blanket statement "Over here, in the industry" does not universally apply. In my field of pharmaceutical chemistry, I believe most research papers are from industry, they participate in the free peer review model, and do not believe their image has been compromised.
Your industry may well be different; perhaps it doesn't have a large research component?
> I have heard very few argue that referee compensation would improve the situation.
Referee compensation alone? No, not at all. I think compensation would help to some degree, but it wouldn't bring an end to these problems.
What I argue is simply the point that managing editors is a very complex matter that is extremely expensive and somehow justifies what publishers are charging for it. It's certainly not as trivial as just sending e-mails (because of the, uh, human factors), but obviously the bulk of it is done by the reviewers -- and they basically do it for free. If this money, or at least part of it, were to go to the reviewers, the claim would at least be credible. As it stands now, it's simply not.
It's as if I were running a paint shop, charged clients a thousand times the sum of the paint (claiming that I do more than just splat paint on cars -- which would be arguably true), but then paid zero wages to all employees except for a few supervisors (not to mention magically reusing every bucket of paint I ever bought, just to keep the analogy correct). Sure, I'd be doing more than just splattering paint on cars -- but a-thousand-times-the-price-of-the-paint-more, when I'd basically have an endless supply of paint that I'm given more or less for free, and only have to pay like 10% of my employees?
Maybe the scientific publishing business isn't profitable enough to allow for proper remuneration (and defining "proper" is also difficult). But, leaving aside the - possibly idealistic - observation that it's probably important enough that maybe it could be worth doing it for no profit at all (or at least for something somewhat more modest that 2 billion dollars!), that's certainly not an argument for keeping it unfair, too. Surely, some payment, even if meager, would at least provide some peace of mind for some of the reviewers, and is arguably better than no payment at all
> Your industry may well be different; perhaps it doesn't have a large research component?
Hm. I guess my claim about industry isn't entirely fair, seeing how the field in which I did academic work (briefly and at a very basic level) is not quite the same as the one I'm active in (tl;dr a niche in microelectronics back then vs. computer engineering now). In any case, indeed, I think neither of these fields have as large a research component as pharmaceutical chemistry (microelectronics as a whole probably does, but what I was doing wasn't as fancy as the name of the field would imply).
> but obviously the bulk of it is done by the reviewers -- and they basically do it for free
Agreed. 6 hours @ $200/hour for my consulting rates gives $1,200. I give that away for free. What remains is the non-bulk. That's still expensive. Who will do the typesetting and proof reading? In physics and math, this is often pushed into the TeX stylesheet. Not so for most other field.
One of the journals I've reviewed for has a box for "does this paper need to be reviewed by a professional statistician?" That costs money.
http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1883 recently outlined the costs for PLOS One, an open access biology journal. It costs about $2,000 for them to publish a paper. By comparison, the for-profit journals make about $6,000 per paper. Hence the 40% profit for Elsevier and others. The physics preprint site arXiv costs about $10 per paper, so there's plenty of room, certainly. (There's an increasing growth in "overlay" journals, which build on top of preprint systems.)
If you start to pay reviewers actual money, then accountants get involved. Any idea of what it would cost to manage all that overhead, for residents in countries across the world?
