At the end of this Editorial, we ask you to take a few minutes to respond to our short
anonymous online query. If you have no time to read this Editorial about the possible
collapse of the peer review system, please just respond to the survey. But we—the
editors in chief and managing editor of the International Journal of Public Health
(IJPH) and the Public Health Reviews (PHR)—hope you dedicate the time to read this
Editorial about the peer review crisis in public health sciences.
In a 2019 workshop of the Swiss School of Public Health (SSPH+)—the owner of the IJPH
and PHR—all participants agreed that our journals should continue with thorough pre-publication
peer review, including revisions, point-by-point responses and final decisions made
by science editors, to strengthen the quality of publications. But soon after, the
explosion in COVID-19 research caused an unprecedented increase in submissions and
thus demand for peer review in health science journals [1–3]. During the first 6 months
of the pandemic, total publications and COVID-19 related publications increased exponentially
[2]. Submissions to JAMA almost tripled [4] and to IJPH more than tripled. Elsevier’s
health and medical journals saw a 63% increase in submissions between February and
May 2020, compared to the same period in 2019 [3]. The publication rates of all peer
reviewed public-health related articles increased by 25% from 2019 to 2020, and by
21% from 2020 to 2021, exceeding the annual publication growth rates before the pandemic
which were 4, 15, 9 and 19% from 2016 until 2019 (Web of Science, category Public,
Environmental and Occupational Health).
The growth in publications has brought the peer review system to the edge, as the
commitment of scientists did not keep pace with the increase in manuscripts. In Elsevier’s
health and medical journals the increase in peer review invitation acceptances from
2019 to 2020 (February to May periods) was about 50% lower than the increase in submissions
[3]. The records of IJPH provide sobering facts, too. “I do not have time” has become
a leading response—and even worse: the majority does not respond at all. In 2021,
53% of (repeated) invitations for peer review remained un-answered, whereas 38% actively
declined. Both, in 2021 and 2022, only 9% of all invited reviewers agreed to provide
a review. In contrast, during the years prior to the pandemic, we observed a rather
stable rate of 35%–40% who would agree and deliver a review report.
The consequences of this crisis are equally bad for our authors and editors. First,
the endless search for reviewers has slowed down the publishing process substantially.
Second, editors have to resort to the release of automatic “mass-invitations” to 20+
potential reviewers at a time and to remind those repeatedly, thus, flooding the stressed
community with even more invitation emails. Third, automated search strategies require
artificial big-data search engines. As those are of limited intelligence yet, a rather
high rate of 25%—probably the tip of an iceberg—of active decliners tell us “this
is not my field.” Fourth, we are forced to discuss whether and under what conditions
final decisions should be based on the feedbacks of only one review. And last but
not least, the workload for our handling editors has also increased substantially,
which in turn triggers their resistance to handle manuscripts.
The simple truth is: if we collectively “do not have time” to review manuscripts,
there will be no peer review anymore. Thus, key questions emerge. Does public health
science serve authorities and the public sufficiently if research is published without
formal pre-publication peer review? Is post-publication peer review also appropriate
to promote good public health sciences? Will publishing on pre-print servers become
the new standard given the abundance of innovation in this field [5]. In the absence
of clear evidence for the opposite, we strongly believe that the multi-disciplinary
public health sciences profit from pre-publication peer review. Thus, we need a solution
to address the crisis.
Given the ubiquity and magnitude of the problem, we call for concerted strategies
also of publishers to resolve it together with journal editors as they cannot do it
alone. The literature discusses various incentives for reviewers, among them discounts
on publishers’ products, certificates, recognizing the best reviewers, increasing
diversity in the peer-review process and financial incentives [5–8]. The development
of reviewer recognition platforms (ORCID, Clarivate’s reviewer recognition platform)
is a positive example.
From a quantitative perspective, the solution looks rather straightforward in our
typically multi-authored science: if researchers agree to review as many papers per
year as they write as first or last author, the crisis would resolve. Indeed, the
trends in scientific publishing where the number of publications doubles every 10 years
whilst the number of scientists increases by only 21% [7] call for such level of commitment.
When reviewers are asked, a vast majority (85%) find recognition and training will
improve the efficacy of peer review and, that universities and research funders should
explicitly require and recognize the reviewing work which should be career enhancing
[9].
Our two journals have adopted a feature to remove at least barriers of the peer review
mode (blinded or open) on reviewers’ willingness to review: while we run peer reviews
double blind to minimize biases, we leave it up to the reviewers to decide after peer
review if they would like to publish their name, the review report or both with the
published article. We are aware that reviews of rejected articles are not recognized
this way and therefore, encourage reviewers to register their reviews on reviewer
recognition platforms. We invite excellent reviewers who provided relevant information
beyond the content of an article to comment in an Editorial. We publish reviewer acknowledgments.
And on request we issue reviewer certificates. We offer an online course to train
junior researchers in editorial tasks and peer reviewing. However, this is not enough.
As a non-profit society journal, we wonder whether our research community is more
open to review for society journals as compared to the many for-profit journals owned
by publishers and their shareholders. Or does it matter who the publisher—rather than
the owner—of the journal is? Alternatively, is the Impact Factor of a journal or its
open access status relevant for scientists’ decision to review or decline? IJPH has
a Q1 Impact Factor of 5.1 and PHR’s Q1 CiteScore of 9.6 is promising for its first
Impact Factor to be obtained next year. Both journals publish gold open access. Do
scientists consider whether journals promote early career researchers and researchers
from low and middle- income countries like we do with our Young Researcher Editorial
Series (YRE) in IJPH and the Globequity APC waiver program?
In an attempt to better understand the requirements of reviewers of PHR and IJPH we
reach out to you. We would greatly appreciate your answers to a few questions that
will guide our decisions to foster your willingness to review for IJPH and PHR.
Please kindly follow this link https://ssphplus.ch/en/ssph-journals/survey-peer-review/
to our query.
Do you have time to counter the peer review crisis? We very much hope!