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For nearly 300 years, peer review has been the main arbiter of regulating scientific quality and maintaining academic integrity. Articles have to be evaluated and satisfy appointed reviewers before they are rubber-stamped into the scientific record, so peer review is unquestionably an indispensable step of the publishing process.

As we know ‘peers’ are fellow scientists: authors and colleagues from the same field of work who are tasked with scrutinizing and critiquing a manuscript before it’s published for a wider audience. Aside from their regular jobs and other commitments, ‘peers’ usually provide this all important assessment of somebody else’s work in their own time and for non-financial gain. It is something that scientists have become accustomed to and it is widely perceived that providing a review is simply routine procedure in academia. But, whether it’s an unwritten rule of scholarly duty or just an act of scientific altruism, we believe that reviewers deserve credit and recognition for their efforts.

That’s why at F1000Research we are providing rewards for our reviewers. Anyone who reviews a paper for us will get some ‘perks of the job’ in appreciation of their labor.

What we are currently offering our reviewers:

1. A six month personal subscription to our sister article recommendation service, F1000Prime.

2. A 50% discount on any article submission to F1000Research within the ensuing 12 months of the report.

However, we don’t want to stop there. We are also looking at other ways to provide our reviewers with rewards that will be perceived as useful and worthwhile. With our transparent, open peer review system, we have a great opportunity to provide further benefits. As all of our reviews are published openly alongside each paper together with the reviewer names, we are looking at how to provide useful metrics to measure a researcher’s individual reviewing output to help towards better recognition of a researchers’ overall output to the broader research community.

The idea of reviewer rewards is not new. For example, Rubriq are planning to provide compensation, and the winner of Elsevier’s Peer Review Challenge proposed the idea of providing reviewer badges with a related rewards scheme.

However, we don’t do the reviews – researchers do – and we think you should have an input in what you would like to receive as a referee reward. So here we would like to ask two open questions:

1. What do you think would be a sufficient reward for reviewing a paper in F1000Research?

2. Are there any other ways that we could be using open and transparent reviews to benefit the reviewers who provide them?

All commenters will receive an F1000Research T-shirt… as a reward.