How to speed up peer review?

Correspondence in PLoS Biology suggests a way to give peer reviewers an incentive to review manuscripts more speedily.

Whenever a reviewer sends in a review, the date is logged... Next to the date the editor enters a positive or negative value that indicates the relative timeliness of the review: negative values for reviews arriving before the deadline, and positive values for those arriving afterwards. Reviewers that turn in their reviews late are punished, whereas those that arrive on time are rewarded: for every day since receipt of the manuscript for review plus the number of days past the deadline, the reviewer's next personal submission to the journal will be held in editorial limbo for twice as long before it is sent for review. Journals reward timely reviewers by sending their manuscripts out for review as soon as they come in, and if accepted, by pushing their papers high up into the publication queue.

This is certainly a thought-provoking idea! The authors recognise some of the possible pitfalls and address these in their letter. They argue that their propsed solution is based on "the logic of economic incentives and the evolutionary origins of human nature".

There are some readers' responses to the suggestion, and also some further feedback on the new EMBO blog.