Original title: A billion-dollar donation: estimating the cost of researchers’ time spent on peer review
Researchers read and assess papers before journals publish them, but this work is often unpaid and hard to count. Using public information, the researchers estimated how much time reviewers spent and what that time would be worth at salary rates. They estimate more than 100 million hours of reviewing worldwide in 2020. The estimates cover only some journals, so the authors say the true total is likely higher.
Imagine a group of neighbors taking turns checking each other’s work before it goes on a shared noticeboard. The checking takes real time, but nobody keeps a full count of the hours or what they are worth. In this paper, the neighbors’ checking stands for researchers’ paper reviews, and counting their time and salary value makes that hidden work easier to see.
Peer review depends on researchers donating time to assess other people’s work. Putting a scale and salary-based value on that labor makes its hidden cost visible to researchers, journals, and institutions considering how review should be organized or paid for.
The estimates use publicly available data and cover only a portion of journals worldwide, so the authors say they are likely underestimates. The abstract does not establish the total labor across every journal or whether any proposed alternative model would improve peer review.
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A billion-dollar donation: estimating the cost of researchers’ time spent on peer review — Balázs Aczél, Barnabás Szászi, Alex O. Holcombe — Research Integrity and Peer Review — doi:10.1186/s41073-021-00118-2
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.