The billion-pound misunderstanding
20 May 2026
Every so often, someone calculates the "true cost" of peer review and arrives at an enormous number. Billions of pounds. Vast hidden labour. A system apparently held together by unpaid academic goodwill. It almost reads like the current predicament of the entire sector is easily explained by one thing: academics wasting University time on peer review.
The arithmetic seems neat. The conclusion is often wrong.
The standard version goes something like this. Assume the time spent on a paper is perhaps 2-3 hours, 3-5 papers per year per academic, multiply by salary costs, scale nationally, and arrive at a figure large enough to generate social media outrage. It has the appealing quality of all back-of-the-envelope calculations – it looks rigorous while quietly ignoring everything inconvenient.
Who is actually paying?
The most fundamental problem with the calculation is not the arithmetic. It is the assumption buried inside it: that the university is paying for peer review.
In most cases, it is not.
Peer review is a voluntary activity. No institution I am aware of formally requires academics to undertake it as part of their contractual duties. It does not appear on the list of things a university actively enforces, monitors or makes explicit room for in a workload model. If I take on a review, I do so on top of everything else – and everything else takes priority. The university is not, in any meaningful sense, funding those hours. I am.
This matters enormously, because it completely changes what the calculation is actually measuring. It is not university expenditure. It is academic goodwill – which is a rather different thing, and not something that appears on any institutional balance sheet.
What universities do spend time on
It is worth pausing here to consider what academic time universities do explicitly require and enforce. Meetings, for instance – the kind that arrive in your calendar with the inevitability of rain. Hours of meeting time with a lot of relatively highly-paid people and take home messages that often fill five to ten minutes. Administrative processes that exist because they have always existed. Tasks that cry out for professional support but are assigned to academics on the grounds that they fall, technically, within academic responsibility.
I once spent a considerable stretch of time manually assessing 150 multiple choice question cards because the optical reader was unavailable. There were only 12 questions to answer. Still, this meant 1800 I needed to manually assess. It certainly was not a high point of my scholarly career. Nobody calculated the cost of this undertaking and published it on social media.
The contrast is instructive. Time spent on tasks of genuine intellectual value, chosen voluntarily, goes uncounted. Time spent on enforced administrative process is also uncounted – but for quite different reasons.
Why academics actually do it
If peer review is voluntary and unrewarded institutionally, the obvious question is: why do academics do it at all?
The answer, at least in my experience and that of most colleagues I have spoken to, has very little to do with obligation and rather a lot to do with self-interest – in the best possible sense. Reviewing a manuscript means reading work that has not yet been published. It means spending focused time with new results, new methods and new interpretations from your specific corner of the field, before almost anyone else has seen them. It is, in a discipline where keeping up with the literature is a constant and losing battle, one of the few reliable ways to stay genuinely current.
There is also something to be said for the quality of reading that review demands. A paper you are asked to evaluate properly gets read in a way that published papers, in the relentless churn of academic life, often do not. That enforced close reading has value – for the reviewer as much as for the author.
Add to this the less self-interested reasons: improving the work of colleagues, catching errors before they become part of the permanent record, contributing to a system from which every publishing academic benefits. These are real motivations, and they operate entirely outside any institutional incentive structure.
The reciprocity that the calculation ignores
There is a broader point here about how science functions as a collective enterprise. Every paper that gets published has been reviewed by someone, voluntarily, as part of an informal but remarkably durable system of scholarly reciprocity. If you publish, you benefit from that system. Participating in it is not exploitation – it is the mechanism by which the whole thing works.
The "billions wasted" framing treats peer review as overhead: a drag on productivity, an inefficiency to be optimised away. But that misunderstands what it is. Peer review is not the cost of doing science. It is part of doing science – the part where ideas are tested, challenged and refined by people who know the field well enough to do so usefully.
The real inefficiencies in the system lie elsewhere: in the volume of low-quality submissions, in review requests sent to people with no relevant expertise, in the resubmission cascades that multiply effort without improving work. Those are legitimate problems. But they are problems with how the system is managed, not with the principle of peer review itself.
A note of honesty
I should acknowledge that this view is shaped by my own field and my own institution, and that experiences vary considerably across disciplines and career stages. Colleagues under greater pressure, in fields with different review cultures, may find the balance of costs and benefits looks rather different. The argument for treating peer review as professional development rather than unpaid labour is easier to make from some positions than others.
But the basic point stands: a calculation that assigns the full salary cost of peer review hours to the university, while ignoring that those hours are voluntary, unrequired and often undertaken outside normal working time, is not measuring what it claims to measure. It is producing a large number and calling it an insight.
Science is expensive. Careful scrutiny of new work is part of that cost, and a worthwhile one. We just had the pleasure of having another paper accepted in Nucleic Acids Research after quite a long and detailed peer review process. I have said it before, and I say it again: it felt painful, but the process has significantly strengthened the paper (more on this paper very soon).
Pretending that peer review is simply institutional waste misunderstands both how universities work and what academic research actually is.
The arithmetic, as I said, is often neat.
Similar and related blog posts:
- When the editor get's it wrong
- Termination of DNA replication triggers genomic instability, a paper significantly strengthened by the peer review process
- Some insights into the statistics and scale of the peer review process