Unpaid peer review is worth £1.9bn

From the THES

"Study tallies 'hidden subsidy' of global scholarly communications system. Zoe Corbyn reports
The idea of being paid for the time spent assessing colleagues' research might only fleetingly cross most academics' minds.

The advancement of the academy's collective body of knowledge has traditionally been held to be reward enough for the time and effort put into peer review.

But a new report has attempted to quantify in cash terms exactly what peer reviewers are missing out on. It puts the worldwide unpaid cost of peer review at £1.9 billion a year, and estimates that the UK is among the most altruistic of nations, racking up the equivalent in unpaid time of £165 million a year."