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[pigou]

Is there something obvious I'm missing as to why journals can't have reviewers on staff? Charge the cost as a submission fee and lower the cost for submissions from developing countries. You might end up with a fee of $200 per article, but that would easily be worth not having to wait months for a response. Plus, there would presumably be better feedback, too.

[sciencephd]

Is there something obvious I'm missing as to why journals can't have reviewers on staff? Charge the cost as a submission fee and lower the cost for submissions from developing countries. You might end up with a fee of $200 per article, but that would easily be worth not having to wait months for a response. Plus, there would presumably be better feedback, too.

1. Cost.
2. Size of staff to competently covered breadth of material would be enormous.
3. Even most editing tasks ...well at least in terms of getting manuscripts to the appropriate reviewers are doing by academic editors...i.e. unpaid.

[mouseman]

Ummm... $200 per article?  To publish an article in many of the life sciences you are already may need to pay > $1000.  For example, to publish an article in PLoS ONE, you need to pay $1350, while for PLoS Biology, it's $2900.  

As for the rest, what SciencePhD said.

[quasihumanist]

Is there something obvious I'm missing as to why journals can't have reviewers on staff? Charge the cost as a submission fee and lower the cost for submissions from developing countries. You might end up with a fee of $200 per article, but that would easily be worth not having to wait months for a response. Plus, there would presumably be better feedback, too.

I will submit a (fairly long) paper sometime this month.  For this paper:

1) I don't think there are 100 people in the world who are competent to review this paper.  A generalist journal in my field would need at least several hundred reviewers to cover everything.

2) Reviewing this paper is at least a full week of work.  If the reviewer makes a salary comparable to that of a mid-career academic at a decent research university, we are talking over $1500 for a week, and that's for a fairly poorly paid academic and not counting benefits or various indirect costs.