Peer review remains one of science’s most important filters, but the system is showing signs of strain. As more papers move through journals, editors are leaning on a limited pool of volunteer reviewers who already have full research jobs.
The pressure is not abstract. It can affect what gets published, how long decisions take, and whether a manuscript receives the careful expert reading that the process is supposed to provide.
A System Built On Volunteer Labor
Peer review usually asks researchers to judge other researchers’ work anonymously and without pay. Their role is to assess whether a study is sound enough for publication and to advise journal editors on what should happen next.
That model depends on time, attention, and subject expertise. When any of those are missing, the result can be frustrating for authors and risky for journals.
Jason Semprini, a health economist at Des Moines University, experienced that problem after submitting research on policies requiring elementary school students to receive the human papillomavirus vaccine. HPV causes most cases of cervical cancer, but Semprini’s study found that mandates don’t do that much to reduce the overall rate of cervical cancer in a population.
The issue, as described in the source article, was not whether the HPV vaccine prevents cervical cancer. The study examined whether a policy meant to raise vaccination rates worked as intended. Semprini said, “There’s a very big difference there.”
His paper was reviewed by only one person, and that reviewer appears to have misunderstood the central point. Because papers are often assessed by two or three experts, one confused review can sometimes be balanced by another. In this case, there was no such backup, and the paper was rejected.
Why The Workload Is Rising
The volume of research publishing has been climbing quickly. Papers indexed in Scopus and Web of Science have recently been increasing exponentially, at a rate of 5.6 percent per year.
That growth translates into a large demand for expert attention. One estimate cited in the source article says researchers around the world collectively spend 15,000 years of work on peer review every year. If the portion done in the US were paid, it would cost $1.5 billion.
Editors are already feeling the shortage. Haseeb Irfanullah, who is on the editorial board of Wiley’s Learned Publishing but whose comments represent his own views as an independent consultant, said, “I struggle like anything to get peer reviewers.”
Steven Mack, an editor for Human Immunology, recently had to email around thirty researchers to find one willing reviewer. Five years ago, he estimates that five to 10 emails could have found three willing reviewers.
For researchers, the requests can arrive constantly. Sebastian Lourido, a microbiologist from the Whitehead Institute, estimates that he receives about 10 requests to review manuscripts each month, while he realistically has time for only one or two. Mack, who is also an immunogeneticist at the University of California, San Francisco, receives a request every day or two.
AI Adds Another Layer Of Pressure
AI is part of the current overload because it can make writing papers easier. It can also help researchers from around the globe submit to English-language journals.
Those changes do not remove the need for expert evaluation. They may instead increase the number of manuscripts that need it. If the pool of reviewers does not expand at the same pace, each available reviewer faces more pressure to accept, decline, or rush through requests.
The source article also points to paper mills, services that charge researchers a fee to put their names on fabricated but legitimate-looking publications. That creates another challenge for journals, because the review process must identify not only weak arguments or mistakes but also work that may not be genuine.
The pressure is intensified by changes in publishing itself. Journals proliferated between 1960 and 2020. Some regularly run special issues, and many now publish online-only, removing the old constraint of fitting an issue onto a limited number of printed pages.
Research is also increasingly interdisciplinary. That can make review harder because a single manuscript may require more than one kind of expertise. A reviewer may need more time to understand the methods, assumptions, and implications before offering a useful judgment.
Peer Review Is Newer Than Its Reputation Suggests
Although peer review is now treated as a defining feature of legitimate science, it has been universal in academic publishing for only about 50 years. Scientific societies had ways to assess submissions as far back as the early 1800s, but those systems varied, and science itself operated differently.
Aileen Fyfe, a historian of science from the University of St Andrews, described earlier research communities as small networks of people who might gather regularly, discuss astronomy, and publish a journal together. In that setting, publishing was not tied to the same career pressures that researchers face now.
Peer review became universal partly because it helped science defend its legitimacy. In the 1970s, the US economy was under pressure, with inflation up, employment down, and a gas crisis underway. The National Science Foundation needed to justify its spending after a period of post-World War II support for science in which federal funding had increased 25-fold.
The foundation had used external reviewers to evaluate grant applications since the 1950s, which was unusual at the time. That system helped give funding decisions credibility and kept lawmakers from taking direct political control of those decisions.
Melinda Baldwin, a historian of science from the University of Maryland, said, “It was really, in a lot of ways, a sales pitch from scientists to other stakeholders that made peer review into this cornerstone of science.”
The United Kingdom later faced a similar moment in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when public debates around HIV, the cause of autism, and cold fusion created a need to separate legitimate science from quackery. Scientific organizations responded by pointing to peer review as the marker of proper science.
What Is At Stake Now
The challenge is that the modern research system still depends heavily on peer-reviewed publications. In most fields, researchers need them to secure jobs and grants. That means authors keep submitting papers even when the process becomes slow and difficult.
Lourido described the system as “extremely protracted and painful.” Some researchers are pushing for change, while others are moving important findings through less formal channels. AI research in particular has seen impactful work shared through blogs.
None of this means peer review has lost its value. It means the system’s workload, incentives, and expectations are increasingly mismatched. Semprini called peer review “the bedrock of science,” but also said that right now, “it’s not standing strong.”
The future of peer review may depend on whether journals, editors, and researchers can protect the part that matters most: careful evaluation by people with the right expertise and enough time to read closely.