Saving Peer Review means Saving Science: The imperative of active and formal recognition of peer review in scholarly and funder circles.
By Luchuo Engelbert Bain, MD, PhD.
The scarcity of reviewers is crippling the peer review process, a cornerstone of academic publishing. Reviewers face mounting challenges: lack of recognition, overburdening responsibilities, and dissatisfaction with for-profit publishers that profit immensely while offering negligible support. With rising manuscript submissions and the advent of AI-generated papers, the burden on publishers and reviewers has reached unsustainable levels.
Note:
- Reviewers are unpaid despite contributing over 130 million hours annually
- Early-career researchers are underutilized, lacking mentorship and incentives
- Reviewer fatigue leads to delays, compromised quality, and superficial feedback
- AI offers efficiency but introduces biases and risks of confidentiality breaches
- Peer review is still not recognized as a merit in academic promotions
- Science funders respect researchers with admirable research records; but scarcely, or never recognize peer review in the evaluation of grantee profiles.
Some publishers are increasingly providing monetary incentives to reviewers. Although this could be considered as fair, as publishing remains a business, sustainability dimensions, and reviewing “for the money” could dilute the very essence of the peer review exercise.
The literature on the impact of peer reviewer recognition (like review certificates, presence on platforms like publons, and financial incentives) and the quality of peer review is sparse.
The Way Forward
Institutional Recognition: Include peer review and being on journal editorial boards as editors or associate editors as criteria for promotions and academic merit
Funder Recognition: Include peer review as a criterion for evaluating the CVs of applicants.
Integrating AI Responsibly: Use AI to support tasks like matching reviewers to manuscripts and improving review clarity, while safeguarding data security. Indeed, the growing number of manuscript submissions today will require responsible use of AI to support the peer review process.
The future of scientific integrity hinges on addressing quality peer reviewer scarcity. By coming up with inclusive, formal, and context specific reviewer compensation schemes, leveraging technology responsibly, and fostering institutional support in academic and funding circles we can save science.
An important area of empirical inquiry in Journalology will certainly be how diverse peer reviewer recognition schemes influence the quality of the peer review process.
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