A billion-dollar donation: estimating the cost of researchers’ time spent on peer review
The amount and value of researchers’ peer review work is critical for academia and journal publishing. However, this labor is under-recognized, its magnitude is unknown, and alternative ways of organizing peer review labor are rarely considered.
Screening, sorting, and the feedback cycles that imperil peer review
Scholarly journals rely on peer review to identify the science most worthy of publication. Yet finding willing and qualified reviewers to evaluate manuscripts has become an increasingly challenging task, possibly even threatening the long-term viability of peer review as an institution. What can or should be done to salvage it? Here, we develop mathematical models to reveal the intricate interactions among incentives faced by authors, reviewers, and readers in their endeavors to identify the best science. Two facets are particularly salient. First, peer review partially reveals authors’ private sense of their work’s quality through their decisions of where to send their manuscripts. Second, journals’ reliance on traditionally unpaid and largely unrewarded review labor deprives them of a standard market mechanism—wages—to recruit additional reviewers when review labor is in short supply. We highlight a resulting feedback loop that threatens to overwhelm the peer review system: (1) an increase in submissions overtaxes the pool of suitable peer reviewers; (2) the accuracy of review drops because journals must either solicit assistance from less qualified reviewers or ask current reviewers to do more; (3) as review accuracy drops, submissions further increase as more authors try their luck at venues that might otherwise be a stretch. We illustrate how this cycle is propelled by the increasing emphasis on high-impact publications, the proliferation of journals, and competition among these journals for peer reviews. Finally, we suggest interventions that could slow or even reverse this cycle of peer-review meltdown.
Peer Review at the Crossroads
Peer review has long been regarded as a cornerstone of scholarly communication, ensuring high quality and credibility of published research. Although academic journals trace their origins back three centuries, the procedures for evaluating submissions, particularly peer review, have undergone continuous evolvement. Peer review’s formal institutionalization in the mid-20th century represents a significant, yet natural, phase in this ongoing transformation of scholarly communication. By the early 21st century, there emerged an opinion that the conventional model of peer review faces systematic challenges, including inefficiency, bias, and institutional inertia. The study aims to synthesize the evolution, practices, and outcomes of both conventional and innovative peer review models in scholarly publishing. Through a mixed-methods approach combining interpretative literature review and process modeling (Business Process Model and Notation –BPMN), it identifies four frameworks: pre-publication peer review, registered reports, modular publishing, and the Publish-Review-Curate (PRC) model. While the PRC model, which integrates preprints with post-publication review, demonstrates advantages in transparency and accessibility, no single approach emerges as universally ideal. The choice of model depends on disciplinary context, resource availability, and institutional priorities. The analysis underscores the need for adaptable platforms that enable hybrid workflows, balancing rigor with inclusivity. Future research must address empirical gaps in evaluating these innovations, particularly their long-term impact on equity and epistemic norms.
Science discussions of retracted articles on Bluesky: public...
Post-publication peer review (PPPR) has emerged as an important supplement to traditional peer review, with social media playing a growing role in publicising potential problems in published...
A New Paradigm for Scientific Publishing, Peer Review, and Impact Assessment
Scientific publishing and peer review have evolved little in three centuries, while the demands placed on them have grown profoundly. The growing role of artificial intelligence has underscored deep, systemic shortcomings of an aging system that has largely evaded innovation, a system whose origins are appallingly closer to the invention of the printing press than to the internet. We can do better – much better. This article is intended as the beginning of a communal experiment: a living document that critically reviews the modern academic publishing and peer-review system and presents a concrete framework to address what bibliometrics experts¹ have characterized as "the pervasive misapplication of indicators to the evaluation of scientific performance". Building on the Leiden Manifesto, DORA, and a body of scholarship spanning many disciplines and decades, we present a community-governed, non-profit platform organized around three trust-weighted impact factors, for articles, authors, and reviewers, with full algorithmic transparency, an open development log, and structural decoupling of credibility scoring from content moderation and from monetization. We invite the community to discuss, critique, and help shape it.
You can just review things: A digital ethnography of informal peer review
Across scholarly communities, manuscripts face similar evaluative rituals: editors invite experts to privately assess submissions through formal peer reviews. This closed, loosely structured, and...
Reviewing post-publication peer review
Post-publication peer review (PPPR) is transforming how the life sciences community evaluates published manuscripts and data. Unsurprisingly, however, PPPR is experiencing growing pains, and some elements of the process distinct from standard pre-publication review remain controversial. I discuss the rapid evolution of PPPR, its impact, and the challenges associated with it.
Open Evaluation: A Vision for Entirely Transparent Post-Publication Peer Review and Rating for Science
The two major functions of a scientific publishing system are to provide access to and evaluation of scientific papers. While open access (OA) is becoming a reality, open evaluation (OE), the other side of coin, has received less attention. Evaluation steers the attention of the scientific community and thus the very course of science. It also influences the use of scientific findings in public policy. The current system of scientific publishing provides only journal prestige as an indication of the quality of new papers and relies on a non-transparent and noisy pre-publication peer review process, which delays publication by many months on average. Here I propose an OE system, in which papers are evaluated post-publication in an ongoing fashion by means of open peer review and rating. Through signed ratings and reviews, scientists steer the attention of their field and build their reputation. Reviewers are motivated to be objective, because low-quality or self-serving signed evaluations will negatively impact their reputation. A core feature of this proposal is a division of powers between the accumulation of evaluative evidence and the analysis of this evidence by paper evaluation functions (PEFs). PEFs can be freely defined by individuals or groups (e.g. scientific societies) and provide a plurality of perspectives on the scientific literature. Simple PEFs will use averages of ratings, weighting reviewers (e.g. by H-factor) and rating scales (e.g. by relevance to a decision process) in different ways. Complex PEFs will use advanced statistical techniques to infer the quality of a paper. Papers with initially promising ratings will be more deeply evaluated. The continual refinement of PEFs in response to attempts by individuals to influence evaluations in their own favor will make the system ungameable. OA and OE together have the power to revolutionize scientific publishing and usher in a new culture of transparency, constructive criticism, and collaboration.
Reformation of science publishing: the Stockholm Declaration
Science relies on integrity and trustworthiness. But scientists under career pressure are lured to purchase fake publications from ‘paper mills’ that use AI-generated data, text and image fabrication. The number of low-quality or fraudulent publications is rising to hundreds of thousands per year, which—if unchecked—will damage the scientific and economic progress of our societies. The result is editor and reviewer fatigue, irreproducible experiments, misguided experiments, disinformation and escalating costs that devour funding from taxpayers intended for research. It is high time to reevaluate current publishing models and outline a global plan to stop this unhealthy development. A conference was therefore organized by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to draft an action plan with specific recommendations, as follows. (i) Academia should resume control of publishing using non-profit publishing models (e.g. diamond open-access). (ii) Adjust incentive systems to merit quality, not quantity, in a reputation economy where the gaming of publication numbers and citation metrics distorts the perception of academic excellence. (iii) Implement mechanisms to prevent and detect fake publications and fraud which are independent of publishers. (iv) Draft and implement legislations, regulations and policies to increase publishing quality and integrity. This is a call to action for universities, academies, science organizations and funders to unite and join this effort.
You can just review things: A digital ethnography of informal peer review
Across scholarly communities, manuscripts face similar evaluative rituals: editors invite experts to privately assess submissions through formal peer reviews. This closed, loosely structured, and publisher-mediated process is now being supplemented by critiques on open, distributed platforms. We call this practice, a blend of three open peer review variants, informal peer review as it is accessible to outsiders, unmediated by publishers, and conducted across public platforms. Informal peer reviewers range from occasional error detectors to experienced sleuths who identify plagiarism, fraud, errors, conflicts of interest, and conceptual flaws. They may interpret methods, clarify jargon, assess value, and connect to related work. Here, we asked four questions: (1) Who are informal peer reviewers? (2) Where do they work? (3) How do they evaluate research? and (4) What are their impacts? To answer these questions, we conducted a cross-platform digital ethnography with participant observation. We traced discourse across communities over four months and revisited cases after nine and twelve months. From 15 communities, we selected 12 case mentions (10 unique cases) and 8 meta-commentaries from 26 reviewers. Using open and axial coding, we generated 1,080 codes and four themes: reviewers are a motley crew, they self-organize across subpar digital spaces, use deep, uncommon strategies, and they face resistance from authors, publishers, and editors. Informal peer review, we concluded, is a fragile, minimally governed patchwork of people, platforms, and practices, as well as an emerging evidence infrastructure that can be scaled up. We advise advocates and tool-builders to evolve informal review tools, communities, training, and governance by connecting to scholars' values, reducing participation friction, and rewarding attempts to extend the scholarly dialogue.
Every layer of review makes you 10x slower
We’ve all heard of those network effect laws: the value of a network goes up with the square of the number of members. Or the cost of commun...
Current market rates for scholarly publishing services
For decades, the supra-inflation increase of subscription prices for scholarly journals has concerned scholarly institutions. After years of fruitless efforts to solve this “serials crisis”, open access has been proposed as the latest potential solution. However, also the prices for open access publishing are high and are rising well beyond inflation. What has been missing from the public discussion so far is a quantitative approach to determine the actual costs of efficiently publishing a scholarly article using state-of-the-art technologies, such that informed decisions can be made as to appropriate price levels. Here we provide a granular, step-by-step calculation of the costs associated with publishing primary research articles, from submission, through peer-review, to publication, indexing and archiving. We find that these costs range from less than US$200 per article in modern, large scale publishing platforms using post-publication peer-review, to about US$1,000 per article in prestigious journals with rejection rates exceeding 90%. The publication costs for a representative scholarly article today come to lie at around US$400. These results appear uncontroversial as they not only match previous data using different methodologies, but also conform to the costs that many publishers have openly or privately shared. We discuss the numerous additional non-publication items that make up the difference between these publication costs and final price at the more expensive, legacy publishers.
Current market rates for scholarly publishing services
For decades, the supra-inflation increase of subscription prices for scholarly journals has concerned scholarly institutions. After years of fruitless efforts to solve this “serials crisis”, open access has been proposed as the latest potential solution. However, also the prices for open access publishing are high and are rising well beyond inflation. What has been missing from the public discussion so far is a quantitative approach to determine the actual costs of efficiently publishing a scholarly article using state-of-the-art technologies, such that informed decisions can be made as to appropriate price levels. Here we provide a granular, step-by-step calculation of the costs associated with publishing primary research articles, from submission, through peer-review, to publication, indexing and archiving. We find that these costs range from less than US$200 per article in modern, large scale publishing platforms using post-publication peer-review, to about US$1,000 per article in prestigious journals with rejection rates exceeding 90%. The publication costs for a representative scholarly article today come to lie at around US$400. These results appear uncontroversial as they not only match previous data using different methodologies, but also conform to the costs that many publishers have openly or privately shared. We discuss the numerous additional non-publication items that make up the difference between these publication costs and final price at the more expensive, legacy publishers.
Why “Trusted Publishing” Can’t Save Us from Social Engineering
Unmasking the risky illusion of npm's "trusted publishing" amidst recent cyber attacks.
Minimum Queue Publishing - Wesley's notes
A strategy for writing more often without losing momentum
More Versus Better: Artificial Intelligence, Incentives, and the Emerging Crisis in Peer Review | Organization Science
As the AI Task Force for Organization Science, we provide an early account of artificial intelligence’s (AI) impact on both submissions and reviews at a major academic journal. Submission volume ha...
