Academic journal article reviewing is a very peculiar world, and I wasn't impressed by what I saw of it. My observations (as a former postdoc in biomedical research) were:
Reviewers get no pay or remuneration, pauce guidelines, and no training (which is where articles like this can make a difference). There are no tangible career benefits for doing it (other than 'everyone else does it'), because you won't get any sort of official record for papers that you've reviewed. (And because it's single-blind, you'll never be credited on the paper.) There's very little feedback or quality control on reviews exerted by editors. You can't ever discuss the paper with your fellow reviewer(s). And it's an enormous time sink - reviewing a paper properly takes at least two hours, depending on the length and complexity. This is a real issue when you're in a field where doing lab research, writing your own grants and papers, reading the latest literature to keep up-to-date with the field, and possibly doing some teaching or admin, already takes up most of your time.
It's a seriously broken system. I inherently like the idea of doing reviews because it feels like you're giving back something to the community, but it ended up feeling like this good will was being taken advantage of by the journals, particularly the for-profit ones. I'm amazed that the whole system continues to work as well as it does.
All that and reviewers who have made a name for themselves in a small-ish field can view new entrants into that field are competitors rather than collaborators.
At the very least, services are popping up to help researchers get credit for peer review, like Publons (https://publons.com/), along with journals that publish peer review, like Nature Communication as of a recent announcement: http://www.nature.com/ncomms/2015/151214/ncomms10277/full/nc... (and F1000, eLife, in the life sciences).
Reviewers get no pay or remuneration, pauce guidelines, and no training (which is where articles like this can make a difference). There are no tangible career benefits for doing it (other than 'everyone else does it'), because you won't get any sort of official record for papers that you've reviewed. (And because it's single-blind, you'll never be credited on the paper.) There's very little feedback or quality control on reviews exerted by editors. You can't ever discuss the paper with your fellow reviewer(s). And it's an enormous time sink - reviewing a paper properly takes at least two hours, depending on the length and complexity. This is a real issue when you're in a field where doing lab research, writing your own grants and papers, reading the latest literature to keep up-to-date with the field, and possibly doing some teaching or admin, already takes up most of your time.
It's a seriously broken system. I inherently like the idea of doing reviews because it feels like you're giving back something to the community, but it ended up feeling like this good will was being taken advantage of by the journals, particularly the for-profit ones. I'm amazed that the whole system continues to work as well as it does.