If you're tired of waiting months to get your latest research manuscript peer reviewed, a small medical research journal has a deal for you: send in $125 with your paper, and you'll get your review in just 14 days, guaranteed, or your money back.

The Journal of Interferon & Cytokine Research started making the offer in 1997 out of frustration. “I just got fed up with people taking too long to review,” said Larry Lachman, a professor at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and one of the journal's two founding editors in chief. He got the idea from a former fraternity brother who had used it when he started an accounting journal.

The key to the offer's success is that both peer reviewers receive $50 if they meet the 2-week deadline. The other $25 goes to pay for extra overnight shipping charges. “After the $50, very rarely did someone not get their review in on time,” Lachman told The Scientist.

The journal receives about 225 manuscripts per year, 25 to 30% of which ask for the guarantee, according to Philip Marcus, a professor at the University of Connecticut and the other founding editor in chief. The 1900-subscriber publication is the official journal of the International Society for Interferon and Cytokine Research. It is apparently the only life sciences journal in the United States guaranteeing such fast turnaround.

About a year after they began offering the 2-week guarantee, Lachman and Marcus tried a marketing experiment that showed how important the guarantee was to authors: they offered the 14-day guarantee free for a month. “Sure enough,” Marcus said, “we doubled the number of manuscripts that month that asked for the 2-week review.”

Some authors are motivated by wanting to have an additional accepted publication to submit with their next grant proposal, said Thomas Hamilton, a researcher at the Cleveland Clinic and one of the two new editors in chief who took over 2 years ago.

Other authors do it to beat their competitors to print. “If there are lots of competing research teams that are working in similar areas, those folks have special incentives” to publish first, said Robert Shirrell, journals manager for the University of Chicago Press.

In fast-moving fields like the life sciences, authors want to publish quickly to avoid irrelevance, according to Ed Barnas, journals manager for the North American branch of the Cambridge University Press. In some fields, the citation half-life can be as short as a year or two, he said. “You want to get it up there and get it seen, get it read, before the paper gets aged.”

“And some people are just anxious,” Hamilton said. “They want to know.”

Some authors may pay the $125 because it's not their money they're spending; it's their grant money. “If people were paying it out of pocket, I think they'd think a little different,” Hamilton said. “$125 is a nice dinner somewhere.”

If you choose not to pay the fee, your manuscript will probably get reviewed within 30 days, Hamilton said. That's relatively fast; Barnas said most journals try to get the author a decision within about 3 months. If revisions are necessary, most can decide within 6 months, he said.

Do the 2-week turnaround and pay for reviewers alter the acceptance rate for manuscripts? Lachman, Marcus, and Hamilton think not, although they haven't examined their data. However, Hamilton said the short time frame restricts which reviewers he can use and forces a decision “in a time that might not be fully consistent with a complete and thorough evaluation.”

As to the money paid to reviewers, “my experience is that people don't agree to do it for the $50, but they're glad to get it,” Hamilton said. “And they certainly inquire of me after the fact when they're going to get it.”

Marcus thinks the money persuades reviewers not to procrastinate. Because of it, he said, “they know they're going to review it, so why not do it now?”

The money seems to temporarily turn “put it in the pile until 2 days before the deadline” reviewers into “do it now” reviewers. “I think the amount of time people spend in the review is pretty much the same,” Hamilton said.

Correction (posted April 21, 2004): When originally posted, this story misattributed the comments in the last paragraph. The Scientist regrets the error.