Third-party firms openly recruit paid reviewers: about 1,000 job ads and five interviewees reveal a market for outsourced journal peer review
Synopsis
An as-yet un-peer-reviewed MetaArXiv preprint manually scraped about 1,000 online advertisements for 'freelance' peer-reviewer jobs from LinkedIn, company websites and other recruitment platforms and interviewed five working and retired researchers in India, Spain and the United Kingdom, finding a market in which third-party firms offer paid reviewing services to scholarly publishers; interviewees often had 2–3 days or even 24 hours to assess a manuscript and most received €30–40 per review, while one company's website listed more than 10,000 registered freelance peer reviewers, including 5,669 marked 'active' who had each reviewed up to 50 manuscripts, though the study does not provide conclusive evidence about which journals use these services or how widespread the practice is.
Interpretation
The study identified about 1,000 online advertisements for 'freelance' peer-reviewer jobs and interviewed five working and retired researchers in India, Spain and the United Kingdom who took up such gigs, indicating that paid reviewing has formed a publicly observable recruitment channel through third-party firms. Earlier debate over whether reviewers should be paid largely stayed within the scholarly community; this work turns to the market of third-party firms offering reviewing services to publishers and brings two kinds of evidence, advertisements and interviews. Evidence comes from the team's manual scraping of LinkedIn, company websites and other job recruitment platforms plus interviews with five researchers; the paper is a MetaArXiv preprint that has not yet been peer reviewed, and the study itself says it does not disclose the names of the firms.
Recruitment requirements and workflow are described concretely: applicants needed more than eight publications in a relevant area in the past 10 years and previous peer-review experience, some ads required disclosing full name and institutional affiliations to publishers, and interviewees said recruitment included background checks to verify scientific expertise before they could sign up, with manuscripts allocated on a first-come, first-served basis and often 2–3 days, sometimes just 24 hours, to submit a report. These details move 'paid peer review' from a conceptual argument to checkable entry requirements, identity disclosure and time limits, showing how the market operates. Based on advertisement text and five interviewees' accounts, a small interview sample plus public advertisement descriptions; the study offers no independent verification of how the process is actually carried out.
On pay and scale, most interviewees received €30–40 (around US$35–45) per review; at one company payment was tied to the quality of the review as rated by the editors of the receiving journal and to speed, and that company's website listed more than 10,000 registered freelance peer reviewers, including 5,669 marked 'active' who had reviewed up to 50 manuscripts each. These figures give concrete magnitudes for the pay structure and workforce size of this market rather than only a qualitative description. Pay figures come from interviewees' accounts and the scale figures from the company's public website; the study does not say whether these numbers represent the whole market.
The study notes that third-party firms advertise publicly but do not list on their websites which journals use their services, so if journals use third-party firms for peer review without disclosing them, this 'lack of transparency is concerning'. It shifts the question from whether paying is appropriate to whether outsourcing and disclosure can be traced, offering a focus for discussing the chain of responsibility among journals, publishers and reviewers. This is the judgment of study leader Amna Pottarath based on the advertisements and interviews; the study states explicitly that it does not provide conclusive evidence about which journals are doing so or the extent to which this is happening.
Perspective
The study is suited to understanding the recruitment, entry requirements, time limits and pay structure of the third-party paid-review market, and the disclosure questions it raises; it is relevant to journal editors, publishers, reviewers and researchers concerned with scholarly publishing governance. It does not answer which specific journals use these services, how widespread the practice is, or how good or poor paid reviews are.
The study is a preprint that has not yet been peer reviewed, does not disclose the names of the firms involved, and provides no conclusive evidence about which journals use third-party reviewing services; only five researchers were interviewed, pay and workflow descriptions come mainly from their accounts, and whether the registered and active reviewer numbers on one company's website represent the whole market remains to be seen. In addition, this evidence bundle contains only the external story and not the full paper, so the scraping method, interview guide and data analysis details cannot be verified here; these are open questions for follow-up.