When publishers want researchers for peer-reviewing, there often aren’t many volunteers. This is the office building of Relx, the parent company of Elsevier, the world’s largest scientific publisher. | Photo: Provided by subject

“Scholarly communities must understand that sustaining peer review is a shared responsibility”. This is the claim of three scholars from Charles Sturt University in Australia in an article published in the online journal The Conversation in February 2026. Peer review is a system that needs saving, they say. They undertook a survey among editors of specialist journals who are responsible for dealing with articles submitted. They found that 55 percent of them regarded organising peer review as a “significant or very significant challenge”. Some of them had to send out 30 requests to obtain just two peer reviews. But there are other scholars who are convinced that it’s the job of publishers to save the system – such as Csaba Szabo, a professor of pharmacology at the University of Fribourg. He has written a response on LinkedIn to the above-mentioned article in which he insists that its arguments are “not very helpful”. If journals were actually run by the research funding agencies, he says, “I am not even sure peer review would be needed; post-publication review and replication studies could take its place”. ff

CC BY-NC-ND