“Fast & Fair” Paid Reviews?

Over the past year or so, the Company of Biologists has been building a case for paid peer reviews, with the most recent coverage coming late last week after the Editor-in-Chief and Managing Editor of Biology Open, the single journal involved, posted a preprint on bioRxiv about it.

Let’s pause here a moment to savor how weird this is:

1. Let’s presume paying reviewers improves something important. If your journal’s paid review approach gives you a market advantage, why publicize it?
   1. Do they not think a secret market advantage is a good thing?
2. Is feeding mimicry and author/reviewer discontent a goal?
   1. One journal publishing a baker’s dozen of papers each month is a model for anything? Hmmm.
3. What is a publisher press release doing on bioRxiv?

Then, there’s the name they’ve given their paid review approach — “Fast & Fair.” By contrast, does this mean the conventional approach is “Slow & Biased”? Is this an admission? Or is “fair” used in a different sense, as in “not great, but just fair”?

It’s all so weird already.

Luckily, it gets weirder.