There Is No Peer Review Crisis

Publishers, editors, and authors are crying foul because the supply chain of papers automagically fed into the ecosystem is turning out to be A LOT these days.   

Journal editors report that they can’t “clear their queues” in a timely manner, and authors are waiting longer than they care to for their certified “peer-reviewed” paper to be assigned a DOI from any given indexed journal.

The number of papers seeking publication mathematically outnumbers the global growth in qualified researchers who could have produced them by orders of magnitude.

• You can fact-check that by looking at commercial publisher earnings reports that supply brag graphs and divide them by the number of newborn PhDs worldwide

Where is the surplus coming from, then? 

• Fast and furious paper outputs to boost publication credits and fulfill job requirements 
• Public (e.g., NHANES) and private (e.g., TriNetX) databases quickly and easily mined for correlation studies and systematic reviews
• Fabricated and “meh” reports flying under the radar as good enough to earn a publisher an APC
• Papers produced to sell ideas or products shopped around so they can be referenced
  • These and more, growing weirder every day with the AI of it all

Academic and commercial incentives have aligned with publisher profits to bloat the unsolicited paper influx, and lo and behold, the number of real humans to responsibly review them remains the same.  

Thus, a whole bunch of faceless “peers” who do not exist are being blamed for holding up the works. How rude!

Incentivize them?

Some publishers are paying or issuing certificates of participation to people who fill out peer review forms. While there may be a number of well-intentioned takers and successes in controlled experiments, these practices, if more widely adopted, only open up a new side-hustle market ripe for exploitation and abuse.

• Don’t forget the failed lawsuit claiming “that the practice of not paying scholars for peer reviews amounted to unlawful price-fixing, in violation of antitrust law.”

Ours is an information industry built on a wonky Venn diagram of indirect investments and returns, for better and for worse. 

Every time we financially privilege a different sector via new incentives, it introduces another set of heretofore unconsidered knock-on effects.

Digitize them?

Many publishers are promoting softwares that authors can pay for that might help their papers get over the submission thresholds and, on the flip-side, they have purchased other ones that give their human editorial staff automated reports to wade through.

• When the business model is dependent on scale for the supplier (author) and the vendor (publisher) alike, there will be middlemen rockin’ up with their automated solutions to cash in on helping both sides make number go up

To be sure, true peer review is neither piece-rate gig work nor an inconvenient blip in the supply chain to be solved with automated systems. It has been mistaken to mean quality assurance for standalone claims in papers that have been commoditized by publications who are not accountable to communities of specialized researchers and practitioners.

Humanize them

Peer review comprises a matrix of experts aligned around a publication for a certain community.  From the Editor-in-Chief through the Editorial Board to the sharp-eyed editorial assistants who know who to tap for help at different points in the process, they know how to work together to craft a selection of content for their readers.

Researchers and academics who are connected with publication communities that they relate to and benefit from want to review papers, and they do it expeditiously, just as they expect the same.

The fact of the matter is that for any given specialty, sub-specialty, and research topic, there are a finite number of true peers who are qualified or motivated to spend time providing meaningful feedback.

It is therefore not at all surprising that some people in their right minds with day jobs who have been invited to review papers that aren’t interesting or worth their time are actively declining or passively ghosting invitations like so much other junk mail that we all have to deal with now.

When the academic publishing industry accepted pay-to-play, rudderless, a la carte, pop-up, and mega-journals in the name of transparency and speed, we created a surplus of garbage that is easily sniffed out by those who know, have better things to do, and decline to participate.

The paid-for consumer junk that makes it through is a landfill for sleuths, retraction watchers, and commercial and political profiteers.  

Our current scientific record is more aptly categorized as an ecology in crisis.

It has nothing to do with peer review.