Leave a Comment
Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *
A Future Without Scholarly Publishers in Peer Review: Vision or Vulnerability?
Peer review sits at the heart of scholarly publishing. It serves as the crucial filter through which rigor is tested, credibility is established, and trust is maintained between the research world and the public it serves. For generations, scholarly publishers have shouldered the responsibility of coordinating, managing, and upholding the standards of this complex process. But as the industry evolves, a provocative question emerges: What if peer review were no longer managed by publishers?
This isn't merely a hypothetical scenario; it's part of a growing conversation. Open science advocates and platform-based innovators increasingly envision a world where peer review management shifts from traditional publishers to the research community itself. This transformation could take many forms: decentralized platforms, society-led systems, or AI-curated open review hubs.
But what would this world actually look like? Let's explore both the promise and the pitfalls.
The Dream: Transparency, Autonomy, and Innovation
Removing publishers from the center of peer review could deliver compelling advantages:
Radical Transparency: Open peer review platforms could illuminate every step of the process, feedback, decisions, and even reviewer identities, creating unprecedented accountability.
Community-Driven Control: When peer review becomes a service "by researchers, for researchers," it could align more naturally with disciplinary norms and ethical expectations.
Innovation Acceleration: Freed from conventional workflows, the research community could experiment with newer models like post-publication review, modular review systems, or AI-augmented triage.
Cost Redistribution: By removing commercial interests from the equation, costs for institutions and funders might decrease, though this assumes any replacement system proves equally efficient and scalable.
These benefits paint an appealing picture. Yet they often overlook a crucial reality: the operational machinery that makes peer review actually work.
The Reality: Managing Peer Review Is Complex and Costly
Behind every peer-reviewed article lies an intricate web of effort, largely invisible and often underappreciated. Currently, publishers bear this responsibility, incentivized to ensure efficiency, timeliness, and quality because their journals' reputation and sustainability depend on it.
Consider what's actually involved:
Reviewer Discovery and Coordination: This goes far beyond keyword matching. It requires nuanced expertise mapping, availability checks, conflict-of-interest management, and careful workload balancing across diverse fields and geographies.
Workflow Management at Scale: Tracking thousands of submissions, ensuring deadlines are met, sending reminders, managing revisions, it's an endless, coordinated dance of editorial operations.
Quality and Ethical Standards: From vetting reviews for constructiveness and relevance to addressing manipulation or fraud, maintaining integrity requires trained staff and sophisticated oversight systems.
Technology Infrastructure: Modern peer review platforms like Editorial Manager or ScholarOne are highly specialized systems requiring licensing, customization, and ongoing user support at a massive scale, far from plug-and-play solutions.
Author and Reviewer Support: Technical assistance, dispute resolution, appeals management, and remain fundamentally human-intensive functions that resist automation.
These aren't merely operational challenges, they're essential components of a functioning scholarly ecosystem. They demand sustained investment, coordinated teams, and unwavering institutional commitment.
The Hidden Engine: Incentives and Motivations
Any serious discussion about peer review's future must grapple with a fundamental question: What actually motivates people and institutions to participate in and sustain the system?
Current incentive structures, while imperfect, operate at multiple levels:
Publishers treat peer review as a core quality function that directly impacts their journals' reputation and influence. This creates strong incentives to invest in infrastructure, editorial support, and ethical safeguards.
Researchers participate for mixed reasons. Some view it as a professional duty or scholarly altruism. Others see networking opportunities or a way to stay current in their fields. Many, however, feel overburdened and under-recognized.
Academic editors are motivated by the opportunity to shape discourse in their fields, contribute to quality, and uphold scientific standards.
Institutions and funders face increasing pressure to demonstrate research integrity and responsible stewardship of public funds, yet they typically treat peer review as a volunteer-based external function rather than something requiring active funding or management.
If publishers step back from peer review management, what incentive structures will take their place? Will funders begin directly supporting peer review labor? Will institutions incorporate it into faculty workload models? Might AI platforms or commercial services commoditize reviews through pay-for-review systems?
Without sustainable motivation, even the most transparent or technologically advanced system risks collapse under disinterest, overload, or strategic disengagement.
Beyond Peer Review: Trust, Sustainability, and System-Wide Accountability
Recent scrutiny of peer review, from high-profile retractions to manipulated reports and persistent bias concerns, reflects deeper issues than process mechanics alone. These symptoms point to a more fundamental problem: eroding trust throughout the research ecosystem.
Fixing peer review in isolation won't solve this broader crisis. What's needed is an ecosystem-wide approach to rebuilding trust and strengthening research integrity.
Every stakeholder authors, reviewers, editors, publishers, institutions, funders, and technology providers, influences scholarly communication outcomes. Their decisions, incentives, and blind spots create ripple effects that extend far beyond individual papers to impact the entire scientific enterprise's credibility.
True reform must begin with cross-stakeholder dialogue addressing three fundamental questions:
- How do we rebuild trust in visible, structural ways?
- How do we ensure the financial, human, and technical sustainability of scholarly communication?
- How do we make research communication more impactful and accessible beyond academic circles?
These challenges extend well beyond peer review and demand solutions that are both systemic and global in scope. Success requires shared vision, distributed responsibility, and innovative collaboration models to ensure scholarly communication's health.
Evolution, Not Revolution
Rather than discarding publishers entirely, the scholarly world needs to evolve its approach. The path forward likely involves more collaborative models where publishers work alongside academic communities, funders, and technologists to create peer review systems that are more transparent, efficient, and inclusive.
This evolution could include:
- Shared infrastructure that multiple publishers or societies co-manage
- Open review ecosystems where publishers facilitate rather than gatekeep
- Incentivized reviewer networks with recognition systems integrated into ORCID, funder databases, and academic hiring processes
The Future Requires Collective Commitment
Innovation is essential. Reform is overdue. But disruption without responsibility carries significant risks.
Peer review isn't just a noble ideal; it's a carefully calibrated process requiring daily operational rigor, thoughtful system design, and unwavering commitment to ethical and procedural fairness. Publishers, despite their limitations, have fulfilled this role at an unprecedented scale. The scholarly community must carefully consider who will assume this responsibility, and how.
Creating a trustworthy, equitable, and sustainable system requires more than fixing individual components; it demands redesigning the entire network. The future of peer review may well extend beyond traditional publishers, but it certainly depends on the entire ecosystem's ability to collaborate effectively and maintain a long-term commitment to the work.
The question isn't whether change will come; it's whether that change will strengthen or weaken the foundations of scholarly communication. The answer lies in our collective willingness to engage thoughtfully with both the promise and the complexity of transformation.
Keywords
Peer review Scholarly publishers Open science Transparency Incentives Research integrity Sustainability Collaboration
Ashutosh Ghildiyal brings nearly two decades of experience in author services, business development, and strategic leadership. He has worked closely with authors, institutions, and scholarly publishers worldwide, driving sustainable growth and international market expansion. Ashutosh currently serves as Vice President, Growth & Strategy at Integra. A regular contributor to industry publications and blogs, Ashutosh writes on topics including AI, peer review, research integrity, and the evolving landscape of academic publishing. He serves on the Board of Directors of ISMTE, the ISMTE Asia-Pacific Advisory Council, the Steering Committee for Peer Review Week, and the Advisory Cabinet of the Asian Council of Science Editors (ACSE). Ashutosh is passionate about reaffirming the industry’s core values of openness, compassion, and community. To him, scholarly publishing represents a vital ecosystem that safeguards the integrity and meaning of global academic discourse. As the landscape continues to evolve, he advocates for change that honors the industry’s fundamental purpose: serving as gatekeepers of trust and knowledge in society.
View All Posts by Ashutosh GhildiyalDisclaimer
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of their affiliated institutions, the Asian Council of Science Editors (ACSE), or the Editor’s Café editorial team.
