A Billion-Dollar Donation: Estimating the Cost of Researchers' Time Spent on Peer Review

BackgroundThe amount and value of researchers’ peer review work is critical for academia and publishing. However, it is rarely recognized, its magnitude is unknown, and alternative ways of organizing peer review labor are rarely considered.MethodsIn this paper, we provide an estimate of researchers’ time and the salary-based contribution to the peer-review system, using publicly available data. ResultsWe found that the total time reviewers globally worked on peer reviews was over 100 million hours in 2019, equivalent to over 12 thousand years. The estimated monetary value of the time US-based reviewers spent on reviews was over 1.1 billion USD in 2019. For China-based reviewers, the estimate is over 600 million USD, and for UK-based, over 200 million USD. ConclusionsWhile these results are only rough estimates, they 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 improve the return on investment of scholarly publishing.