The Collapse of Peer Review: A Broken System With No Replacement

The system is collapsing. Before we try to save it, we should ask whether it was working.

Something Has Changed

Something has changed in academic publishing. Papers I submit take longer to get reviewed than they used to. Desk rejections — the kind where a paper doesn’t make it out to reviewers at all — feel more common. When a review does come back, it sometimes arrives months after submission, accompanied by an apology from an editor who clearly struggled to find anyone willing to assess the manuscript. I’ve wondered if I’m imagining it, or if my experience is just narrowly my own. It isn’t.

The Infrastructure Is Fraying

Simberloff and colleagues recently published 21 years of editorial data from Biological Invasions — a granular, longitudinal dataset that makes the pattern hard to argue with. In 2003, more than 60% of invited reviewers accepted. By 2023, that number had fallen to just below 40%. Decline rates rose to match. The lines have now converged: for every scientist who says yes, one says no. If the trend holds, declines will soon outpace acceptances.

This is one journal, one field. But a 2018 Publons survey found something consistent across all scientific disciplines: 10% of reviewers complete more than half of all reviews. The system is not failing uniformly. It is being held together by a small, overloaded minority while everyone else declines — and, increasingly, doesn’t bother explaining why. In the Biological Invasions data, the most common reason given for declining is being too busy, a response that has grown more frequent over time. Lack of expertise is also frequently cited. But roughly half of all decliners give no reason at all. There are no consequences for saying no, so scientists have stopped feeling the need to justify it.

But Was It Ever Working?

Before we treat this as an unambiguous crisis, it’s worth asking what exactly we’re losing. Peer review has long been treated as the quality-control mechanism of science — the filter that keeps bad research out of the record. That assumption deserves scrutiny.

The psychologist Adam Mastroianni has written compellingly about peer review as a failed experiment. The evidence he marshals is uncomfortable. Studies in which researchers deliberately inserted major errors into manuscripts — things like misrepresented study designs, unsupported conclusions, obvious discrepancies between data and graphs — found that reviewers caught somewhere between 25 and 30% of them. Not 25 to 30% of minor quibbles. Major methodological flaws. Most of what reviewers are supposed to catch, they miss.

The fraud data tell the same story. If peer review were functioning as a rigorous filter, we would hear about fraud attempts stopped at the gate. We don’t. Almost every high-profile case of scientific fraud begins with a paper that passed review and was published. The detection comes later — from a lab member, a methodologist, someone on the internet who noticed something odd about the error bars. Review did not catch it. Post-publication scrutiny did.

None of this means peer review does nothing. It probably catches some errors, improves some papers, and deters some bad actors who would otherwise have no barriers at all. But the gap between what peer review promises and what it delivers is substantial. We have been running on faith more than evidence.

The Bargain We Made

The deeper problem is what got built on top of peer review’s assumed reliability. Hiring committees treat publication in peer-reviewed journals as a proxy for scientific quality. Grant agencies use it as evidence of track record. Clinicians — and I count myself here — use peer-reviewed literature to make decisions about patient care. The peer-reviewed label became a kind of certification, and institutions downstream of the scientific record built their practices around it.

That certification was always shakier than it looked. But the response, broadly, has been to defend peer review rather than examine it — to argue that more of it, or better-resourced versions of it, would fix the problem. The collapse now underway is forcing a different question: not how do we sustain peer review, but what do we actually need from it, and is there a better way to get there.

Why Nothing Will Change

Here is the detail from the Simberloff paper that has stayed with me. The editors-in-chief of Biological Invasions — the people running the journal, watching decline rates climb year after year, doing the actual work of recruiting reviewers into an increasingly reluctant pool — asked Springer Nature, their own publisher, for reviewer incentives. They asked multiple times. Springer Nature declined.

This is not surprising. It is clarifying. Springer Nature collects subscription fees, article processing charges, and the commercial value of a prestigious catalog, all sustained by the unpaid labor of reviewers and the prestige conferred by the peer-review label. There is no version of that business model that benefits from fundamental reform. The current system, however dysfunctional, is profitable. Incentives to change it would have to come from somewhere else.

This is also part of a larger pattern. Park and colleagues’ 2023 analysis of 45 million papers spanning six decades found a steady decline in disruptive science — work that challenges existing frameworks rather than incrementally extending them. The same incentive structure that rewards volume over depth is now degrading the mechanism that was supposed to ensure quality. More submissions, fewer willing reviewers, and the institutions profiting from the system declining to invest in its sustainability.

We Need a New Model

There are alternatives being tried. Preprint servers like bioRxiv and medRxiv allow rapid dissemination before formal review, with post-publication scrutiny doing some of the work that pre-publication review was supposed to do. Open peer review, where reviewer identities and comments are made public, attempts to introduce accountability into a process that currently operates without it. Some journals are experimenting with paying reviewers. These are not nothing.

But none of them have yet accumulated the institutional weight that peer-reviewed publication carries. Hiring committees still count papers. Grant agencies still look at journals. Clinicians still defer to the peer-reviewed label, even knowing what we know about its limitations. The alternative models exist at the margins while the incumbent system, imperfect and increasingly unsustainable, holds the center.

I don’t know what the right model looks like. I don’t think anyone does with confidence. What I do know is that we need one, that the timeline is shorter than it probably feels, and that the people with the resources and infrastructure to build it have spent decades demonstrating they have no intention of doing so. That is the peer review bargain in 2025: a system that over-promised on quality, under-delivered on rigor, is now running out of the volunteers who kept it going, and has no obvious succession plan.

Referenced works:

Simberloff D et al. (2025). Quantifying reviewer declines in scientific publishing: twenty-one years of data from Biological Invasions 2002–2024. Biological Invasions, 27, 223. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10530-025-03679-1

Mastroianni A. (2022). The rise and fall of peer review. Experimental History. https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review

Park M et al. (2023). Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time. Nature, 613, 138–144. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05543-x