Author: Christian Wallner
Position: PhD student
Institution: Academic Medical Center, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
E-mail: c.wallner@amc.uva.nl
Submitted Date: October 12, 2007
Published Date: October 15, 2007
This comment was originally posted as a “Reader Response” on the publication date indicated above. All Reader Responses are now available as comments.

To my opinion, to increase speed/quality in the peer review process, reward will work much more successfully and will be much less dangerous then punishment. Punishment might lead to serious ‘collateral damage’ to reviewers or co-authors of reviewers (see response of Hanna Kokko).

Reward will only lead to improvement of the peer review process. Although a financial reward for every performed review is an interesting proposal an interesting alternative would be to introduce a ‘High Quality Reviewer Award’ for a journal. This award can be given to the top quality reviewers (for example top 5% of reviewers). Additionally, the award could be linked to a sum of money, which of course can be much higher than the amount received for reviewing a single manuscript, as proposed in previous responses. Additionally such an award improves your CV.

Finally I would like to propose a way to increase the amount of potential reviewers. Let PhD students review manuscripts. Most PhD students review manuscripts anyway (the ones that are sent to their busy supervisors) but do not get the credit for it. By letting PhD students review manuscripts, the amount of potential reviewers is increased a great deal. Also PhD students are (still) more serious about deadlines. For the student this is a good way to get accustomed to the reviewing process and to build a stronger CV.