The market for paid peer review is there, if you know where to search. The debate about whether paid peer review would be a good idea might just be overtaken by vendor companies who simply organise this service. Given the short deadlines, paid peer review seems to be used in fast-track publishing, offered by some journals for an extra article processing fee, or by journals struggling to find volunteer reviewers. Our MetaArXiv preprint, with excellent digging work by Amna Pottarath and together with Serge Horbach, is covered in a nice piece in Nature by journalist Miryam Naddaf. We expect it to be out soon in hashtagLearned Publishing. Our research at the Institute for Science in Society (ISiS) was funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung.

Pottarath, Amna, Willem Halffman, and Serge P. J. M. Horbach (2026). ‘Platform Peers: The Little-Known Market for Peer Reviews’, forthcoming in Learned Publishing.