NWB2023_Narrowing the gap between demand and supply of peer review

In 2021 a group of Hungarian psychologists estimated that in 2020, at least 4.7 million articles were published and indexed in Dimensions. Assuming that only 55 % of submitted are published, adding up the ones accepted by three reviewers and the ones rejected by only two, and if it takes 6 hours to perform a peer review, this will amount to more than 130 million working hours or just about the annual workload of 45.000 researchers. At the same time, we are facing a “peer reviewer crisis” as journal editors struggle to identify qualified and willing peer reviewers. Adding to this issue, the newly drafted European Agreement on Reforming Research Assessment suggests that future assessments of research quality should rely more on qualitative assessment. As a result, there may be a growing mismatch between the supply and demand of peer review, and the gap between the demand and the supply will widen further. In our presentation, we will illustrate this gap and seek to identify means of narrowing it. We will discuss the strengths and weaknesses of open peer and the extent to which AI can help narrow the gap.