Crumbling Scaffolding: How the Absence of Institutional Support Is Dismantling Peer Review From Within

For decades, the peer review system has operated on an implicit social contract: researchers donate their expertise to evaluate the work of their colleagues, journals benefit from that labor, and the broader scientific enterprise gains the credibility it needs to function. That contract, however, was never formalized, never resourced, and never protected. Today, the consequences of that neglect are becoming impossible to ignore.

Across the United States, reviewers are declining invitations at record rates. Those who do accept are completing reviews more slowly, and many report declining quality in their own output—not from indifference, but from sheer exhaustion. The problem is not a shortage of qualified scientists. It is a shortage of the institutional conditions that make sustained, high-quality reviewing possible.

The Weight Nobody Officially Carries

When a faculty member at a mid-sized research university receives a review invitation, that request arrives without any formal acknowledgment from their institution that the work is expected, valued, or even permitted within their professional obligations. Tenure and promotion committees rarely credit peer review contributions in any meaningful way. Department chairs seldom factor review commitments into course load negotiations. And journal editors, under their own mounting submission pressures, may send multiple simultaneous requests to the same small pool of experts.

One senior researcher at a large public university in the Midwest, who asked not to be identified by name, described the experience plainly: "I received eleven review requests in a single month last fall. I was also teaching two graduate seminars and finalizing a grant renewal. There is no version of my job description that accounts for any of that review work, and yet the expectation is that I will do all of it."

This invisibility is not incidental. It reflects a structural assumption embedded in how research institutions and publishing organizations have historically conceived of peer review—as a professional obligation so fundamental that it requires no dedicated support, no training infrastructure, and no formal recognition. That assumption is now collapsing under its own weight.

Inadequate Training as a Compounding Factor

Beyond sheer volume, many reviewers report that they were never adequately prepared for the role. Graduate programs across disciplines routinely produce PhDs who have published multiple papers but have never received formal instruction in how to construct a rigorous, fair, and constructive review. The result is a workforce that learns by trial, error, and occasional mentorship—when mentorship is available at all.

This gap has real consequences. Poorly structured reviews create additional burdens for editors, authors, and subsequent reviewers. Reviewers who lack confidence in their evaluative frameworks are more likely to decline future invitations or to submit cursory assessments that fail to serve the manuscripts under consideration. The training deficit, in other words, does not merely affect individual reviewers—it degrades the entire system.

Several forward-thinking institutions have begun to address this directly. The University of Michigan's Office of Research recently piloted a structured peer review preparation module integrated into its postdoctoral training curriculum. According to administrators familiar with the program, early cohorts reported significantly higher confidence in their reviewing capacity and greater willingness to accept journal invitations. Similar initiatives are emerging at Johns Hopkins and the University of California system, though they remain the exception rather than the rule.

What Sustainable Infrastructure Actually Looks Like

Building a peer review ecosystem that does not cannibalize its own participants requires action at multiple levels simultaneously. Institutions, publishers, and professional organizations each bear a share of the responsibility—and each has distinct levers to pull.

At the institutional level, the most impactful changes involve formal recognition and workload accounting. When peer review contributions are documented in annual faculty evaluations and weighted in promotion decisions, reviewers gain a professional rationale for protecting time to do the work well. Several institutions have begun experimenting with review activity dashboards that allow faculty to track and report their contributions in the same systems used for teaching and grant activity.

At the publisher level, sustainable infrastructure demands more honest calibration of reviewer capacity. Journals that send invitations to the same individuals repeatedly, without tracking aggregate burden, are effectively externalizing a cost onto the research community. Some publishers have begun implementing reviewer fatigue protocols—internal systems that flag when a single individual has been contacted more than a defined number of times within a rolling window. While imperfect, these mechanisms at least acknowledge the problem.

At the professional organization level—and this is where bodies like the PRR Society have a particular role to play—the opportunity lies in creating shared standards, training resources, and advocacy frameworks that individual institutions and journals lack the capacity to build alone. Centralized reviewer training programs, credentialing pathways, and publicly articulated norms around reasonable review volume could collectively shift the culture in ways that no single actor can achieve unilaterally.

The Administrator's Perspective

Not everyone is waiting for a systemic solution. At a private research university in the Northeast, a research dean who oversees faculty development has spent the past two years building what she calls a "review stewardship" program—a structured effort to treat peer review capacity as an institutional asset worth cultivating.

"We started by simply asking our faculty how many reviews they were doing," she explained. "The answers were staggering. Some people were doing thirty or forty reviews a year on top of everything else. Others were doing none. There was no coordination, no equity, and no support. We realized we had been treating this as entirely an individual responsibility when it is clearly an institutional one."

Her office now offers quarterly workshops on effective reviewing techniques, maintains a voluntary registry of faculty review commitments to help identify overextension, and has worked with the provost's office to include peer review activity in the annual faculty reporting template. Early indicators suggest that faculty participation rates have stabilized and that reported satisfaction with the reviewing process has improved.

A Reckoning That Cannot Be Deferred

The peer review system is not failing because researchers have become less dedicated or less capable. It is under strain because the infrastructure that should support it has never been built. The social contract that once held the system together was always contingent on conditions—reasonable workloads, professional recognition, adequate preparation—that were assumed rather than guaranteed.

Those conditions are no longer reliably present, and the consequences are visible in declining acceptance rates, lengthening review timelines, and the quiet withdrawal of experienced scholars from the reviewer pool. Addressing this crisis will require institutions to stop treating peer review as a background obligation and start treating it as a core professional function worthy of deliberate investment.

The science that emerges from this process—the knowledge that informs policy, clinical practice, technological development, and public understanding—depends on that investment being made. The cost of not making it is one the research community cannot afford.