The number of papers indexed in the databases Scopus and Web of Science, for example, has recently been increasing exponentially, at a rate of 5.6 percent per year. By one estimate, researchers around the globe are devoting a collective 15,000 years of work to peer review every year—work that, if paid, would cost $1.5 billion for the share done in the US alone. Increasingly, researchers are finding it hard to donate that kind of time.
“I struggle like anything to get peer reviewers,” said Haseeb Irfanullah, who is on the editorial board of Wiley’s Learned Publishing but whose comments represent his own views as an independent consultant. Steven Mack, an editor for Human Immunology, has recently had to email around thirty researchers to find just one who would review a paper. Five years ago, he estimates it would have taken only five to 10 emails to find three willing reviewers. In this landscape, it’s not surprising that editors are assigning reviews to people who aren’t qualified or don’t have the time to concentrate on them.
In most fields, researchers need peer-reviewed publications to secure jobs and grants, so they continue to slog through the system even though it’s becoming “extremely protracted and painful,” in the words of microbiologist Sebastian Lourido from the Whitehead Institute.
Increasingly, many are advocating for change. Meanwhile, a few bold researchers have decided that the traditional publishing system just isn’t worth it anymore—AI research in particular has seen a shift toward communicating impactful findings through very informal means, like blogs.
Dumb question, but what would happen if the act of peer review was a cost that had to be paid? I assume that’s the reason why journals have such high fees to read documents, that’s how they fund peer review.
Former academic with publications here! Peer reviewers are not paid. Editors often are not either. You work for free for the prestige. Seriously. Journal publishers exploit that and make bank from institutional subscriptions and individual purchases.
Its an antiquated system that was meant to produce good science and understanding and has become a beast of burden for thousands of academics with no good alternative.
I get that you are supposed to get prestige from peer review, but the system is breaking down.
What I’m asking is if an independent group got together where they would peer review the research for a fee that can get built into a grant. Or maybe a grant giving research organization builds it in house, where all research performed under a grant goes through their internal peer review with qualified reviews.
I apologize for not understanding your question. Grants would be possible, if a grant was made specifically to support a journal and reviewers in that process. But you run into new problems a voluntary system was meant to prevent.
It’s not a bad idea at all. In fact, I agree that it could work and be better. You just need guard rails. Prevent review speed runs to get paid, internal review processes that highlight one type of research over another. Hard, but doable and there are enough people that, I surmise, want to work within a better system.
You don’t want internal peer review, that’s a conflict of interest.
peer review is not funded at all. That’s the problem.
None of that goes to the reviewers though.