In a correspondence addressed to PLoS Biology, entitled “An Incentive Solution to the Peer review Problem”, Marc Hauser and Ernst Fehr propose that editors should punish slow reviewers. The proposed “incentive solution”? Deliberately delaying submissions from slow or bad reviewers! “You were two weeks late with your report? I am going to sit on your manuscript for four…” 
It is rather difficult to articulate what sort of violation to the editorial principles this would actually represent! Even if I am willing to accept that the proposal is half a joke and half a provocation, its purely coercive nature strikes me – in fact it even hurts. It is clear that when scientists accept to review a manuscript–and do so for free, when they are most of the time submerged by traveling, teaching and administrative duties– it is certainly not because editors are pointing a gun to their chest. There must be some positive motivations: could it be a sense of duty, scientific interest and intellectual stimulation to critically analyze a study, desire to stay updated on the latest advances in the field?
Having said that, it is true that it becomes incredibly frustrating when reviewers are awfully late, return a useless two-liner or worst never send any report at all. The simplest action is then to eliminate the person from the circuit and avoid using his/her services in the future. But this very measure makes the shortage of reviewers even more acute. So what can we do?
Beside extreme measures, like suppressing peer-reviewing altogether or in contrary increasing drastically the number of editorial rejections, one has to admit that it is not easy to come up with convincing suggestions for concrete measures, and even more so to find positive incentives.
Should reviewers be paid? How much and by whom? To give some numbers, in the 12 past months, a journal like the EMBO Journal has involved more than 2500 reviewers writing more than 4500 reports! Perhaps an iPod (or a week of vacation on an internet-free island) offered to the best top 10 reviewers would be feasible, but would this represent a strong incentive? Should there be an Academy Award to nominate the Best Reviewers?
Another idea is that acting as a referee on a regular basis for a journal should be highly regarded when hiring. Should journals issue official certificates to join to the CV? Along the same line, should journals more often advertise on their websites lists of regular referees? Again, is this a strong measure?
Altogether, these appear however rather modest incentives (except maybe the holiday on an island). One important problem might be the problem of time management. Even slow reviewers may in fact be motivated to do their job but they are late simply because they are overwhelmed and generally underestimate the time required for writing a decent report.Perhaps reviewers who proved to be slow in the past could be helped by being asked to provide a definite date and time of the day when they will do the job? At the level of education, young scientists would probably benefit from being well trained early on to read fast and render a critical assessment on papers under strong time pressure. See for example the forthcoming EMBO Young Investigator PhD course for an example of such training. Another alternative is to offer young scientists the possibility to spend some time in an editorial office to make them aware of the entire publication process and the crucial importance of good reviewers (see A short trial period in science publishing on nodalpoint).
More creative (and positive) suggestions are clearly required if we want to avoid transforming the scientific arena into a stereotypical confrontation between the Good Author, the Bad Reviewer and the Ugly … Editor 😉