The academic peer review system to guarantee quality is broken. What could replace it?

Peer review is a central feature of academic work. It’s the process through which research ends up published in an academic journal: independent experts scrutinise the work of another researcher in order to recommend if it should be accepted by a publisher and if and how it should be improved.

Peer review is often assumed to guarantee quality, but it doesn’t always work well in practice. Every academic has their own peer-review horror stories, ranging from years-long delays to multiple tedious rounds of revisions. The cycle continues until the article is accepted somewhere or until the author gives up.

On the other side, the work of reviewing is voluntary and also invisible. Reviewers, who often remain anonymous, go unrewarded and unrecognised, even though their work is an essential part of research communication. Journal editors find recruiting peer reviewers is increasingly difficult.

And we know peer review, however much it is lauded, often does not work. It is sometimes biased, and too often allows errors, or even scholarly fraud, to creep through.

Clearly the peer-review system is broken. It is slow, inefficient and burdensome, and the incentives to carry out a review are low.

Publish first

In recent years, alternative ways to scrutinise research have emerged which attempt to fix some of the problems with the peer-review system. One...

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