[michaf]

Your comment brings focus to the question of why reviewers agree to do these unpaid reviews in the first place. I assume your comment is in jest, and you were fully aware of the unpaid nature of the work. But what was your motivation to do it anyway and spend 2000 hours on it?

[betterunix2]

I personally do peer review because I am part of a research community that requires it -- 9 of every 10 articles I review are absolute crap, and the community is better off if only 3-5 reviewers waste time reading those articles. The only way to avoid a free rider problem is if everyone agrees to participate, so I participate. It is also a good way to build a career in research -- reliable peer reviewers will eventually be asked to do more visible things like chair conference sessions.

Would it be nice to be paid? Maybe, although to be honest I would rather keep money out of the process entirely -- I would like to continue having peer review be voluntary, and go further by also scrapping the publishing companies (who add nothing of value to any article I have written or seen in my entire career). In my field (cryptography) we run a preprint archive on a volunteer basis and it would not be a huge step to introduce a formal peer review process (there is already a minimal review process where the eprint vounteers reject papers that are obviously crap). We only bother with Springer because the European professors demand it (more precisely, their universities demand one of a handful of publishers, and Springer is least bad of the bunch).

[jhrmnn]

When I do peer review, I don’t think of it as providing free service to the publisher, but as providing free service to the scientific community. I’m indirectly paid to do so by my employer. IMO employers of scientists should strike deals with publishers to get compensation for peer review from them.

[matthewdgreen]

This is like asking an open source maintainer what their motive was to contribute to an important piece of software, since it’s going to be hosted on a for-profit entity like GitHub. The motive is that reviewing is necessary to make science work (and secondarily it’s required for promotions etc.) The problem in this setting is that Elsevier is part of the equation and demands copyright ownership, which makes it much worse than hosting on something GitHub. Unfortunately “just stop contributing” isn’t a good answer, because that would throw out the baby with the bath water, and scientists care very deeply about the baby.

[whatever1]

Which was kinda ok, until the moment they started going after the people who are creating the Journals' IP and value / reputation.