Post by @mustapipa@scicomm.xyz

2026-07-01 09:59 UTC

In a shocking discovery, scientific #journal finds that people work better when actually paid for it. In the six-month experiment, reviewers who within four working days delivered a report that their handling editor considered good quality were paid £220 per manuscript. Paying reviewers not only led to faster first editorial decisions — an average of 5.5 working days, down from nearly 38 for unpaid reviews — but review quality, as judged by handling editors on the basis of helpfulness in making an editorial decision, went up. #science https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01973-z

Replies (6)

@wcbdata@vis.social 2026-07-01 11:32

@mustapipa@scicomm.xyz shocking, I tell you!

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@M1st3r@techhub.social 2026-07-01 12:13

@mustapipa@scicomm.xyz I hope this is a kind of joke...

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@elexia@catcatnya.com 2026-07-01 12:22

@mustapipa@scicomm.xyz :neofox_surprised_pika:

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@rickf@indieweb.social 2026-07-01 12:47

@mustapipa@scicomm.xyz “… in a related story, academic publishers Elsevier and Taylor and Francis released a joint study showing that the current academic publishing model works just fine and that changes are not required. They note that the ongoing volume of contributed free labor by scholars from around the world is a healthy thing and necessary to produce vibrant and long-standing scientific publications as shown by the size of their profitable knowledge archives.”

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@PetraPhoenix@beige.party 2026-07-01 12:48

@mustapipa@scicomm.xyz Next can they look at lived experience participation. Maybe paying people properly there will help too?

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@rigrig@akkoma.tubul.net 2026-07-01 16:49

@mustapipa@scicomm.xyz Thanks for sharing, let’s hope other journals follow suit! (That link really irks me though: Nature paywalling an article about the open access journal (Biology Open) that actually ran the experiment.)

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