The 2026 report on the Future of Peer Review puts industry wide numbers onto anecdotal reports from Editors and journals. It is becoming increasingly difficult to find reviewers who are available and interested to review.
The statistics presented here make for stark reading; an Editor must send approximately twice as many invitations in 2025 as they did in 2018, 4.5 and 2.3 invitations on average, respectively. The increasing availability of technology to assist Editors in identifying potential reviewer candidates is not necessarily translating to reducing this number, as reviewers identified using various industry databases had the lowest acceptance rate of all categories, 17%. Technology is likely to form part of the response to the pressure of a growing need for reviewers and increased challenges finding suitable reviewers. However, AI review is not without its own limitations and, as recently discussed in an article in Science, does not yet adequately capture the ineffable human element of peer review, crucial in informing Editors’ decisions. While models are constantly updating, a wholly technology based solution to the challenges faced by Editors is unlikely to come in the next 12 months. In that context, with increasing strain on the peer review system and limitations of available technical solutions to fully address the needs of Editors, the theme of this year’s peer review week ‘Peer Review Capacity: Volume, Speed and Quality’ calls us to discuss what we do as a publisher to support our Editors and journals right now and in preparation for future submissions.
With a rising number of publications across the sector and reports of increasing submissions with suspected Generative AI involvement and/or paper mill activity, the volume in the peer review process is self-evident. The focus on speed in this year’s Peer Review Week is telling. Time is certainly one of the most sensitive factors in peer review, for authors who may be reliant on publication for career advancement and for reviewers who may receive several requests to review per week.
The Future of Peer Review report found that median peer review time for accepted papers rose by 23 days between 2018 and 2025 while Elsevier’s separate 2025 Confidence in Research survey of researchers reported that 68% of respondents felt that the pressure to publish their research had increased in the last 2-3 years. Reviewer availability is one of the most commonly cited reasons to decline to review. While we can’t create more hours in the day to enable researchers to complete the plethora of tasks on their desks, there are many things we can do as a publisher to lighten this load. We can make it as easy as possible for reviewers to evidence their contribution to the literature through streamlined ORCID and Web of Science linking and through publishing reviewer names in our journals. We can enable reviewers to collaborate on review through co-review, meaning they may agree to review where they may not otherwise have time. Through training and recognition, we want to provide reviewers with the means to dedicate the time
Peer review quality is supported by a holistic examination of a manuscript and by creating processes to ensure Editors’ and reviewers’ limited time is focused on manuscripts suitable for publication. To do this, at Karger we have developed a multi-point manuscript and peer review screening process that works immediately from submission. When a manuscript is submitted to our journals, a series of robust manual checks are conducted by the Editorial Office before it is passed to an Editor. These teams ensure that policy expectations are met and clearly explaination in the submission. One example is that, in all journals, mandatory reporting checklists, CONSORT, PRISMA, STROBE and CARE are collected before an Editor is assigned, ensuring that manuscripts in review contain all the elements necessary for a thorough evaluation. Alongside these detailed human-originated checks on all manuscripts, all submissions to all our journals are screened using automated tools to detect potential research integrity concerns, from paper mill similarity to submission irregularities. Concerns are escalated to our dedicated research integrity team, who manually verify and investigate concerns, as needed, keeping a human responsible and accountable for all decisions, as has been our consistent approach. Concretely, in 2025 and 2026 to date, the research integrity / publication ethics team launched over 550 investigations pre-publication and resolved them in an average of 18.3 days. Early detection is crucial. An efficient screening program identifies potential concerns before reviewers or Editors have been invited or assigned. This means that this critical work is often not visible, with teams and systems working in collaboration in the background, allowing the peer review process to focus on manuscripts worthy of its time. While no detection system is perfect and robust post-publication investigations will continue to form a key component to the maintenance of a reliable literature base, by applying a ‘Swiss Cheese model’ we are building greater capacity in peer review.
Volume, Speed and Quality: the singer Meat Loaf would tell us that having two of these three wouldn’t be a bad result. Peer review can be fast and high volume, but quality might suffer. Or it can be high quality and fast, but the volume that is manageable for an Editor would be low. We want to change that status quo. In all, there are over 30 manual and automated research integrity and policy checks running on the full volume of submissions to our journals, conducted and resolved at a speed that means peer review is not delayed, as we support the quality work of our Editors and reviewers to enable publication of trustworthy research.
Volume, Speed AND Quality. Peer Review Week, You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth.
(Featured image declaration: by Jack Moreh from Freerange Stock)
