In May 2026, Inside Higher Ed asked the question a growing number of editors, funders, and researchers are asking out loud: will paying peer reviewers actually ease the capacity crisis in scholarly publishing, or just move the strain somewhere else? Two concrete developments are giving the debate real data to argue over for the first time, rather than just principle: a small psychology journal with four years of payment records, and a federal funder weighing whether to reward paid-review journals with a higher publication-cost allowance.
The status quo: unpaid review, under acknowledged strain
Journal peer review has operated by convention, not contract, for as long as modern peer review has existed: reviewers volunteer their time as a form of service to their field, with no direct payment from the journal for the review itself. That convention is distinct from how funding agencies handle grant (as opposed to manuscript) peer review — NIH, for example, pays study-section reviewers an honorarium through its Secure Payee Reimbursement System, structured per day and tied to written critiques submitted, plus separate travel reimbursement. NIH’s own framing is explicit that the honorarium is not compensation for reviewers’ time or the value of the service. That is a narrow, funding-panel-specific practice; it has never meant that journal manuscript reviewers are commonly paid. The volunteer-service convention for manuscript review is what the current debate is actually challenging, and it comes at a moment editors across the industry describe as a capacity, volume, speed, and quality crunch (the framing Peer Review Week 2026 organized around).
Advances in Psychology: four years of paying $100 a review
Advances in Psychology, an open-access journal launched in 2022 by psychologist Jonas Kunst specifically to test a paid-review model, now has roughly four years of operating data behind its approach. The journal pays $100 (USD) for each of a reviewer’s first three completed reviews in a calendar year, rising to $150 for any additional completed review that same year — payment is tied to completing the review to the journal’s standards, not merely agreeing to review. According to the journal’s own editorial materials and reporting on its results, submitting authors are typically notified within about 11 days whether a paper is being desk-rejected or sent for review, the average time from submission to final acceptance is roughly five months, and accepted papers are typically published within about nine days of acceptance. The journal and outside reporting both frame this as evidence that modest, guaranteed payment can shorten turnaround without an obvious quality trade-off — though a single journal’s multi-year track record, however informative, is not yet a field-wide result, and independent replication across larger and more established venues hasn’t happened.
NIH’s proposal: a bigger publication-cost allowance for journals that pay reviewers
The second thread is regulatory rather than editorial. In July 2025, NIH issued Notice NOT-OD-25-138, a Request for Information on limiting how much grant funding NIH-funded investigators can put toward publishing costs (principally open-access article processing charges). CASRAI has covered the proposed APC cap itself, its options, and its timeline in depth elsewhere; the detail specific to this debate is one option inside that RFI. Under the option, NIH would allow a higher publication-cost cap — reported as $3,000 per publication, versus a lower baseline cap under the other options — specifically for journals that (a) compensate peer reviewers at a rate equivalent to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ average hourly wage for medical scientists and biochemists/biophysicists (on the order of $50/hour) and (b) publicly post all reviews associated with the accepted, NIH-funded manuscript. NIH’s own stated rationale for the size of the increase assumes a typical journal would pay three reviewers roughly $300 each. Comments on the RFI closed in September 2025; as of this writing NIH has not announced a final rule or effective date, and prior reporting on the broader APC-cap proposal (independent of the reviewer-pay option specifically) noted its original January 2026 target date had already slipped. Treat the reviewer-pay incentive as a proposed option under an open rulemaking, not a finalized policy.
Why this is a genuinely different question from “does the journal pay”
It’s worth separating this debate from adjacent but distinct peer-review stories. Legitimate reviewer compensation, disclosed and structured like Advances in Psychology’s model or NIH’s proposed incentive, is not the same issue as a reviewer covertly demanding payment to approve a manuscript outside any journal policy — the kind of conduct Wiley is investigating at one of its journals. It’s also distinct from restructuring when and how review happens at all, as with eLife’s Reviewed Preprints model, and from triaging application volume in grant review, as in NIH’s 2026 emergency overhaul of its grant-application peer review (which addresses study-section backlog, not journal manuscript reviewers or payment). The compensation debate is narrower and more specific: does attaching a direct, disclosed price to the act of reviewing change reviewer behavior, review speed, or review quality — and who ends up paying for it.
The case for paying reviewers
- Capacity. Editors widely report that finding willing, qualified reviewers has gotten harder as submission volume grows faster than the reviewer pool; a direct incentive is one lever to widen that pool or speed responses from it.
- Recognition with teeth. Non-monetary recognition schemes — reviewer certificates, reviewer recognition programs, ORCID-linked review credit — already exist but don’t carry the same weight as direct pay in a promotion-and-tenure system that still rewards authorship far more visibly than review service.
- Transparency as a condition. NIH’s proposed option ties the higher cap to publishing reviewer comments, not just paying for them — bundling compensation with a disclosure requirement that, independently, is part of a broader open-review trend.
The case against, or at least the open questions
- Who actually pays. Reviewer payments are a journal cost; for open-access journals financed through APCs, that cost has to be recovered somewhere, typically the APC itself — which shifts the expense back to authors, funders, or institutions rather than eliminating it.
- Equity across journals and reviewers. A flat per-review payment is a larger incentive in lower- and middle-income contexts than it is where reviewers already have strong institutional incentives to review, and well-resourced journals and funders can afford to offer it while smaller, subscription, or society journals may not.
- Incentive effects on review quality are not yet settled at scale. A payment large enough to speed responses could, in principle, also speed reviews at the expense of thoroughness; Advances in Psychology’s reported turnaround gains are a data point, not proof either way, and ties payment explicitly to meeting the journal’s review standards for exactly this reason.
- Conflicts of interest. Direct payment from a journal to a reviewer is a financial relationship that itself needs disclosure norms — a question COPE and journal integrity policy generally have not yet had to answer at scale, because paid review has been rare enough not to require one.
What this means for research administrators
For institutions and grants offices, the immediate relevance is upstream of any individual reviewer’s paycheck: if NIH finalizes a publication-cost cap that varies by whether the target journal pays and discloses its peer review, that becomes a factor in journal-selection guidance and in what publication costs are allowable and reasonable to charge to an NIH award, alongside the existing allowability tests under 2 CFR 200. Watch for a final notice superseding NOT-OD-25-138 rather than assuming the RFI’s options are settled policy. Separately, institutions that already run reviewer-recognition or review-credit programs should treat the compensation debate as adjacent to, not a replacement for, that existing recognition infrastructure — the two are complementary levers, not competing ones.
Frequently asked questions
Is Advances in Psychology the first journal to pay peer reviewers?
No. Various publishers and journals have experimented with paid review over the years, and some preprint-review and platform models compensate reviewers as part of their structure. What makes Advances in Psychology notable in 2026 is the length of its track record — roughly four years of consistent, disclosed per-review payment at a single journal — rather than being a first attempt.
Does NIH currently require journals to pay peer reviewers?
No. As of this writing, NIH has not finalized any rule tying publication-cost allowability to reviewer payment. The $50/hour, reviewer-pay-linked option is one proposed option within a 2025 Request for Information (NOT-OD-25-138) on limiting allowable publishing costs generally; NIH has not announced a final decision.
Would paying reviewers replace unpaid peer review across scholarly publishing?
Nothing currently on the table proposes that. Both developments described here are opt-in or incentive-based — one journal’s chosen editorial policy, and one funder’s proposed higher cost allowance for journals that choose to pay and disclose — not a mandate applied across all journals or funders.
