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. 2021 Nov 14;6(1):14.
doi: 10.1186/s41073-021-00118-2.

A billion-dollar donation: estimating the cost of researchers' time spent on peer review

Balazs Aczel  1 , Barnabas Szaszi  2 , Alex O Holcombe  3
Affiliations

A billion-dollar donation: estimating the cost of researchers' time spent on peer review

Balazs Aczel et al. Res Integr Peer Rev. .

Abstract

Background: 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.

Methods: Using publicly available data, we provide an estimate of researchers' time and the salary-based contribution to the journal peer review system.

Results: We found that the total time reviewers globally worked on peer reviews was over 100 million hours in 2020, equivalent to over 15 thousand years. The estimated monetary value of the time US-based reviewers spent on reviews was over 1.5 billion USD in 2020. For China-based reviewers, the estimate is over 600 million USD, and for UK-based, close to 400 million USD.

Conclusions: By design, our results are very likely to be under-estimates as they reflect only a portion of the total number of journals worldwide. The numbers highlight the enormous amount of work and time that researchers provide to the publication system, and the importance of considering alternative ways of structuring, and paying for, peer review. We foster this process by discussing some alternative models that aim to boost the benefits of peer review, thus improving its cost-benefit ratio.

Keywords: Academic publishers; Peer-review; Publication system.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Overview of our calculation estimates of time spent on reviewing for scholarly articles in 2020. Number of published articles was obtained from Dimesions.AI database, all other numbers are assumptions informed by previous literature
See this image and copyright information in PMC

Comment in

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