A billion-dollar donation: estimating the cost of researchers' time spent on peer review.

Balazs Aczel, Barnabas Szaszi, Alex O Holcombe
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引用次数: 62

Abstract

Background: 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.

Methods: Using publicly available data, we provide an estimate of researchers' time and the salary-based contribution to the journal peer review system.

Results: 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.

Conclusions: 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.

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10亿美元的捐赠:估计研究人员花在同行评审上的时间成本。
研究背景:研究人员同行评议工作的数量和价值对学术和期刊出版至关重要。然而,这种劳动没有得到充分认识,其规模是未知的,并且很少考虑组织同行评审劳动的替代方法。方法:使用公开可用的数据,我们提供了研究人员的时间和基于工资的期刊同行评审系统的贡献的估计。结果:我们发现,到2020年,全球审稿人从事同行评审的总时间超过1亿小时,相当于超过1.5万年。据估计,2020年美国评论者在评论上花费的时间价值超过15亿美元。对于中国的审稿人来说,估计超过6亿美元,而对于英国的审稿人来说,估计接近4亿美元。结论:通过设计,我们的结果很可能被低估了,因为它们只反映了全球期刊总数的一部分。这些数字突出了研究人员为出版系统提供的大量工作和时间,以及考虑其他组织方式和支付同行评审费用的重要性。我们通过讨论一些可选择的模型来促进这一过程,这些模型旨在提高同行评议的效益,从而提高其成本效益比。
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