Congestion in peer review, and an experiment in Nature (the journal)

 Too many papers, and not enough qualified reviewers willing or able to spend the time reviewing them.  And when a paper is reviewed, revised and published, there may have been valuable scientific discussions that went on in private

Nature has a column about the first problem, and is conducting an experiment with published papers that might help alleviate the second.

Here's the column about congestion:

Stop the peer-review treadmill. I want to get off. Faced with a deluge of papers, journal editors are struggling to find willing peer reviewers. by Amber Dance

"In November 2022, health economist Chris Sampson found himself in desperate need of a hero. As associate editor for Frontiers in Health Services, he’d been trying to get a paper reviewed since April. He’d sent out about 150 invitations to potential reviewers and received four reviews, but only one of sufficient quality to be useful.

...

"Sampson’s plight is a problem faced by editors the world over in the face of uncontrolled growth in the number of journals and papers. The tally of articles indexed by the citation database Web of Science tripled from about one million in 1990 to nearly three million in 2016, according to the website Publons

...

"Balazs Aczel is a psychologist at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest who studies the processes of science. Using a data set covering more than 87,000 scholarly journals, Aczel and his colleagues estimated that researchers globally, in aggregate, spent the equivalent of more than 15,000 years on peer review in 2020 alone2. And many scientists are declining to review more frequently.

...

"Many scientists are increasingly frustrated with journals — Nature among them — that benefit from the unpaid work of reviewing while charging high fees to publish in them or read their content. 

...

"Yates and others suggest that cash payments would solve the problem, but others say such a system would be unethical and unsustainable."

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And here's an editorial about the experiment involving published papers and their referee reports (but not, apparently, involving unpublished papers):

Nature is trialling transparent peer review — the early results are encouraging. Last year, nearly half of Nature authors agreed to publish anonymous referee reports. We hope that more will consider doing so this year.  EDITORIAL, Nature, 01 March 2022

"Research papers are the product of lengthy discussions between authors and reviewers — guided by editors. These peer-review conversations can last for months at a time and are essential to progress in research. There is widespread agreement that the robustness and clarity of papers are enhanced in this process.

"Peer-review exchanges are mostly kept confidential, meaning that the wider research community and the world have few opportunities to learn what is said in them. Such opacity can fuel perceptions of secrecy in publishing — and leaves reviewers and their key role in science publication underappreciated. It also robs early-career researchers of the opportunity to engage with examples of the inner workings of a process that is key to their career development.

"In an attempt to change things, Nature Communications has since 2016 been encouraging authors to publish peer-review exchanges. In February 2020, and to the widespread approval of Twitter’s science community, Nature announced that it would offer a similar opportunity. Authors of new manuscript submissions can now have anonymous referee reports — and their own responses to these reports — published at the same time as their manuscript. Those who agree to act as reviewers know that both anonymous reports and anonymized exchanges with authors might be published. Referees can also choose to be named, should they desire.

"A full year’s data are now in, and the results are encouraging. During 2021, nearly half (46%) of authors chose to publish their discussions with reviewers, although there is variation between disciplines 

...

"The benefits to research are huge. Opening up peer review promotes more transparency, and is valuable to researchers who study peer-review systems. It is also valuable to early-career researchers more broadly. Each set of reports is a real-life example, a guide to how to provide authors with constructive feedback in a collegial manner.

Publishing peer-review exchanges, in addition, recognizes the effort that goes into the endeavour. Peer review is integral to being a researcher. Making reviewers’ work public illustrates the lengths that researchers will go in the service of scholarship. According to one study, reviewers in total do tens of millions of hours of peer review each year (B. Aczel et al. Res. Integr. Peer Rev. 6, 14; 2021). Yet this contribution is rarely recognized in research evaluation systems. As we have reported, there is growing interest in reforming these systems to better represent how science is done. If more researchers agree to open up their peer-review exchanges, we can all play a part in making that happen.

Nature 603, 8 (2022)