Insights
Peer review is often a thankless task. Academics collectively dedicate around 70 million hours
annually to evaluating manuscripts for scholarly journals, typically receiving no financial
compensation and little recognition for their efforts. Some participate to stay informed about
developments in their field, while others view it as a professional duty. Regardless of motivation, the
academic publishing system would struggle to function without their contributions.
In recent years, some researchers have started posting their reviews online to gain recognition for
their work. Platforms like Publons allow academics to share full referee reports or simply list the
journals they’ve reviewed for. The growing popularity of Publons reflects an increasing awareness of
the value of peer review and a demand for that work to be acknowledged by others, including grant
funders. This recognition is essential in the “publish-or-perish” culture of academia, but the
potential of peer review data extends beyond credit. Sharing such data could address systemic
issues in academic publishing, such as fraud, inefficiency, and bias.
Peer review data, for instance, could expose and combat biases. A recent study of nearly 24,000
submissions to the biomedical journal eLife revealed significant disparities: women and researchers
from non-Western countries were underrepresented among reviewers. Only one in five reviewers
was female, and fewer than two percent were from developing nations. Publishing peer review data
openly could highlight such imbalances and drive efforts to correct them. Additionally, transparency
could help journals tackle fraudulent practices, such as authors fabricating email addresses to pose
as external experts and approve their own manuscripts.
Critics of open peer review often argue that confidentiality is crucial to preserving the process’s
integrity. They fear that referees might be less candid in their assessments if their reviews—or
identities—are made public. Others worry that open review could discourage researchers from
agreeing to review or lead to delays as referees strive for perfection under potential scrutiny.
Even if reviewer identities and report content cannot always be disclosed publicly, journals could
still share anonymized peer review data with researchers or release metrics that don’t compromise
confidentiality. Such information could illuminate how long reviews typically take, how many
invitations editors must send before securing a reviewer, and the geographic distribution of
reviewers.
While transparency alone won’t resolve all the challenges of peer review, it’s clear that the current
norm of blanket opacity should evolve. Instead, openness should be the default, with confidentiality
maintained only when genuinely necessary.
