image: The Vatican Museums' Bramante Staircase provides a striking visual metaphor for a feedback cycle in scholarly publishing: rising paper submissions across an expanding landscape of journals strains the limited supply of volunteer peer review labor, which in turn makes editorial decisions less predictable and encourages authors to submit their work more ambitiously, increasing the burden on peer reviewers further still.
Credit: Carl T. Bergstrom (CC-BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
The process of peer review is vital to contemporary science, but is also under enormous strain. This study uses mathematical models to dissect the threats to the long-term viability of peer review, suggesting paths forward to place peer review on more stable footing.
In your coverage, please use this URL to provide access to the freely available paper in PLOS Biology: https://plos.io/3NUgj2X
Article title: Screening, sorting, and the feedback cycles that imperil peer review
Author countries: United States of America
Funding: This work was partially supported by NSF (www.nsf.gov) awards SES-2346645 to CTB and SES-2346644 to KG, by Templeton World Charity Foundation (www.templetonworldcharity.org) Diverse Intelligences frameworks grant 32581 to CTB, and through visitor support at IAST (www.iast.fr) to KG via funding from the French National Research Agency (ANR) under grant ANR-17-EURE-0010 (Investissements d’Avenir program). No funder played any role in the study design, analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Journal
PLOS Biology
Method of Research
Computational simulation/modeling
Subject of Research
Not applicable
COI Statement
Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.