Paying peer reviewers: benefits, risks, and challenges.

The vast majority of peer-reviewed journals rely on specialists' voluntary services in order to ensure that work they publish is as advertised, i.e., peer reviewed. In the real, commercial world, work that relies on expert opinions, i.e., in the form of consultancy, carries a financial cost and is usually very well remunerated. However, exceptionally, in the world of academic publishing, this reliance on experts has been reduced to an art of exploitation, although it has been marketed as a necessary community service, duty or professional obligation. Ultimately, a journal that claims to conduct peer review must do so, or risk the label of engaging in fake peer review or worse-predatory publishing behavior-by claiming peer review when none has been conducted, so there is constant pressure on editors (and to a lesser extent, publishers) to secure a constant stream of peer reviewers to match or exceed the influx of submissions. Although relying on free labor has its benefits, the most obvious being the absence of costs, the risks are incalculable and can include the use of individuals who are tardy, unprofessional, abusive, frustrated, only provide superficial feedback, or may engage in this task exclusively for rewards even if they do not deliver quality reports. Editors may even have to contend with those that agree to complete the task but then fail to deliver on time, or at all. Although the issue of paying reviewers is a well-debated topic and one with seemingly no sustainable solution, it may have become a rather miniscule issue now that large language models and generative AI are reaching prominence in academic publishing, with the risk that free human peer reviewers will be substituted by free AI-driven "reviewers".