The Reviewers Guild is an organization for academic peer reviewers. We advocate for payment for work.

Peer Review is an important part of the academic publication process. It helps ensure high quality research does get published, and poor quality research does not. It has traditionally been performed pro bono, i.e. without pay, in many disciplines. This culture emerged from a time when publication was infrequent, and the publishers were often non-profit societies. 

However, from this culture, large, profitable academic publishers have emerged, which charge libraries well in excess of cost for subscriptions, and charge authors well in excess of cost for open access publication. The value of those publications are enhanced because of our peer review. We, the members of the Reviewers Guild, do not believe we should give away our labour for free. We believe the time and effort involved in reviewing creates value. As time is scarce, we believe if we review for these for-profit publishers, we should be rewarded, as there is something else that we cannot do.

While we may wish for a world without large for-profit publishers, in the world in which we live such publishers exist. And thus, while we may wish we could volunteer our efforts and not be exploited, we recognize we cannot at this stage of academic publishing history.

Reviews may be as comprehensive as we choose. It is not our job to rewrite papers for authors or publishers, or to make suggestions for authors,  merely to determine whether or not the article has met the criteria of academic worthiness to be published in the journal in question.

Our suggested rates ($US 2020) are as follows. 

$1/100 words + $10/figure + $10/table +  $10/equation.

Each round of review needs to be compensated.