Adding extrinsic rewards for tasks like this can often introduce dark patterns eg maxing reviews to max rewards. It’s not as simple as “just pay someone to read papers.” As much as I detest academic publishers, it’s also not as simple as just throwing everything into open access (which we should do no matter what) and then having folks do it for the good of the community. There will have to be some experimentation with a balance of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards.

In the US I directly pay for the funding for papers through tuition and taxes. I shouldn’t have to fucking pay a parasitic publisher on top of that just to access that shit. In math at least I don’t mind paying a little here and there for an MAA or AMS journal though.

Paying people to review articles is just going to make things worse. The real problem is open access. In the current system the author of the manuscript has to pay to publish it, and the publisher turns around and asks readers to pay to access it. Its a scam. If research was conducted with any public money the knowledge generated should be public. This is why Elsevier needs to go. If you saw how much money institutions have to pump into these useless publishers to get access to knowledge funded by the public for the public there would be more outrage.

If you’re not being paid for reviews, then only review for open access (and ideally non-profit) journals.

The whole system is broken. Putting a financial incentive in front of the review process is not going to fix that.