Taxation relief for peer review volunteers

In response to an IEEE article, I previously wrote about the annual fundraising that occurs to supplement fees paid to societies. The same IEEE article praises volunteers that organize conferences, deciding on the technical program and managing the final publication. However, the article does not mention the contribution of peer reviewers as volunteers. As I have already noted in my earlier writings, peer review is an essential aspect of the conference ecosystem.

For an IEEE article, it is a little disappointing to see such a biased coverage. I would hate to see our young members or other readers become disillusioned from such biased articles. Peer reviewers do not get a single cent from the conference revenues. They are only rewarded with a pat of the back, and a sincere thank-you from the organizers. The article fails to stand up for the masses of volunteers that work just as hard on quality paper reviews. I hope to give a voice to these peer reviewers who offer their time solely to improve the dissemination of research.

Without them, conferences would not function at all. Just imagine, in a large conference with 200 paper submissions and a low acceptance rate of 10%, only a 20 papers get selected. If you view this in another way, peer reviewers help to weed out 180 papers. "Weed out" might be a poor choice of word to use here, but there are those that do not meet the quality, standard, theme, or focus of the conference. There are also occasions for authors to reuse too much of their previously published articles. Nevertheless, with four reviews per paper, that would be 800 total paper reviews. It is a staggering amount of work involved.

The difficultly comes from the ability of conference organizers to find good peer reviewers. That is, in order to maintain high quality of paper reviews to decide which of the 20 papers to accept, you would need a very detail analysis of the research performed. How could this be done efficiently? Conference organizers are already busy with fundraising, so the extra burden to find quality reviewers adds to the problem.

I propose a radical alternative idea that indirectly rewards peer reviewers financially. We can do this by giving them tax relief based on their time they volunteer. Much like many non-profit organizations get tax relief from the government, peer reviewers ought to have similar incentives. This will bring and maintain the number of quality peer reviewers we desperately need. The federal government has been actively pushing research funding in order to stimulate the economy. I would say that taxation relief for peer reviewers ought to have similar consideration.

While this process could create a level of unnecessary bureaucratic red tape to maintain accounts for each reviewer, it might be a good infrastructure to maintain a reviewer rating system that is based on the quality of review from a particular reviewer. The rest is implementation, and I would leave it to you. Perhaps IEEE would be able to champion such an idea through lobbying.