Aczel Balazs, Szaszi Barnabas, Holcombe Alex O
Present address: Institute of Psychology, ELTE, Eotvos Lorand University, Izabella u. 46, Budapest, 1064, Hungary.
School of Psychology, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia.
Res Integr Peer Rev. 2021 Nov 14;6(1):14. doi: 10.1186/s41073-021-00118-2.
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.
Using publicly available data, we provide an estimate of researchers' time and the salary-based contribution to the journal peer review system.
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.
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.
研究人员同行评审工作的数量和价值对学术界和期刊出版至关重要。然而，这种劳动未得到充分认可，其规模未知，且很少有人考虑组织同行评审劳动的替代方式。
利用公开可用的数据，我们对研究人员投入到期刊同行评审系统的时间以及基于薪资的贡献进行了估算。
我们发现，2020年全球审稿人用于同行评审的总时长超过1亿小时，相当于超过1.5万年。2020年，美国审稿人用于评审的时间估算货币价值超过15亿美元。对于中国审稿人，估算值超过6亿美元，对于英国审稿人，接近4亿美元。
从设计角度来看，我们的结果很可能是低估的，因为它们仅反映了全球期刊总数的一部分。这些数字凸显了研究人员为出版系统提供的大量工作和时间，以及考虑构建同行评审和支付同行评审费用的替代方式的重要性。我们通过讨论一些旨在提高同行评审效益从而改善其成本效益比的替代模式来推动这一进程。
