Paid Peer Review Cuts Biology Journal's Decision Time by 85%, Preprint Finds

A small biology journal may have cracked one of academic publishing's most stubborn problems: getting peer reviewers to respond quickly without sacrificing quality. Results from the first full year of expanded operations suggest the answer, at least in one controlled case, is straightforward -- pay them.

The journal Biology Open launched a program called Fast & Fair in July 2024. According to a news piece reviewed by Nature published July 1, the scheme was so effective in its initial six-month pilot that the journal never reverted to conventional review. The underlying data come from a preprint by Daniel Gorelick and Alejandra Clark posted to bioRxiv in June 2026, which covers the expanded 2025 rollout.

The numbers are striking on their face. Under the Fast & Fair model, <cite index="19-7">time to first decision with reviews dropped from a mean of 37.7 working days under conventional peer review to 5.5 working days.</cite> That's the efficiency claim that's driving most of the attention, and it maps directly to the 85% reduction figure Nature highlighted.

The mechanism isn't complicated. <cite index="19-5,19-6">From April 2025 onward, all direct submissions to the journal were considered for Fast & Fair review unless appropriate pre-contracted reviewer expertise was unavailable. Reviewers were paid £220 per manuscript only if they completed the review on time and the review met editorial quality expectations.</cite> The conditionality matters: this isn't a flat honorarium for showing up. You get paid for a timely, quality product.

<cite index="16-12">The scheme is funded by the journal's publisher, The Company of Biologists, a non-profit charitable organization based in Cambridge, UK.</cite> That funding structure is worth noting when thinking about scalability. A non-profit with a narrow, well-defined scope can absorb per-review costs in ways a large commercial publisher managing thousands of journals might not.

The obvious question -- does paying reviewers degrade independence or invite favorable reviews -- isn't fully answered by this data. The preprint reports that editorial quality expectations were met, but quality assessment here is largely internal: handling editors evaluated whether reports were good enough to trigger payment. That's a reasonable operational check, but it's not an independent audit of review rigor. The study also has no control arm running in parallel; the before-and-after comparison involves different cohorts of papers and reviewer pools across different time periods.

<cite index="19-2">Traditional peer review is often slowed by delays in identifying willing reviewers and waiting for completed review reports.</cite> That's not a new diagnosis. What's less common is a journal publishing its own internal data on an attempted fix with enough transparency to invite external scrutiny -- even if that data arrives first as a preprint, not a peer-reviewed paper, which carries its own irony.

<cite index="16-14">The scheme is approved to run through the end of calendar year 2026.</cite> Whether it survives beyond that will depend on the annual evaluation the journal's editor described to Nature. Other journals watching this will want to see independent replication, a longer time horizon, and ideally some measure of downstream impact -- whether faster reviews correlate with faster corrections, retractions, or citation patterns.

For now, Fast & Fair is a promising single-journal experiment with an n of one institution, one discipline, and one funding model. It's not a template yet. But it's the kind of structured, data-generating pilot the field needs more of.

Sources cited:
- Nature (news, July 1, 2026) (https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01973-z)
- bioRxiv preprint, Gorelick & Clark, June 3, 2026 (https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.06.02.729548v1)