| To give an idea of how much pro-bono review costs the rest of the system: A thorough review of a journal article takes 6-12 hours. If the paper develops novel theory it is more likely to take ~ 24 hours to understand and check properly. The average return on 1 hour of grant writing for a PI or experience staff researcher is ~ $300, averaged over the year. One 10-hour review therefore has ≥ $3000 opportunity cost to my lab. Looking at the opportunity cost to my funders due to spending time on a review instead of on research, funders presumably believe that research is at least as valuable as the how much they pay to support it. At the rates I'm familiar with, the opportunity cost to them is therefore at least $800 for a 10 hour review. Worse, a portion of every grant from the NIH or NSF is filtered through the university system as "indirect costs" and paid to the publishers as journal subscription fees. (The amount paid in subscription fees is hidden behind NDAs.) There are 2-3 reviewers per paper, and a paper may be rejected and resubmitted 2-4 times. Reviews don't follow a paper between resubmissions—the whole process starts again from square one with new reviewers. So multiply the per-reviewer costs above by somewhere between 2 and 12 to get the total cost. One could counter that review generates similar value as other research activities. I doubt this. The cost-benefit tradeoffs involved in review strongly incentivize cutting corners or delegating the task to inexperienced workers, which lessens the average review quality. The median review is a list of gut reaction bullet points rather than an evidence-based critique. This promotes an adversarial relationship between reviewers and authors. Of course there are many idealistic people who fully commit to the process anyway, but the system as a whole is costly and wasteful. (All of this is based on my experience doing academic biomedical research in the US. It is probably laughably wrong for other fields or other countries.) |