Every September since 2015, the scholarly publishing world has paused to examine the process that quietly underwrites the integrity of scientific knowledge. This year, Peer Review Week runs from 14 to 18 September, bringing together publishers, societies, funders, libraries and researchers to talk about the often unglamorous but essential job of reviewing each other’s work.
The 2026 theme was chosen by community vote – 2,115 votes in total, the highest participation in Peer Review Week’s history. “Peer Review Capacity: Volume, Speed, and Quality“ emerged as the winner, taking 40% of the vote. The result reflects a strain the whole system is experiencing: submissions are rising faster than the pool of willing, qualified reviewers, while authors and funders expect faster decisions than ever. While editors are being asked to hold the line on rigour with the same volunteer hours they always had – or less.
So, to celebrate the essential work that reviewers do, highlight some of the strains the current system is under, and show how we at Pensoft are trying to support our reviewers, we wanted to spotlight our editors-in-chief, the people who see the submission pipeline every single day, by asking them what “capacity” really means to them, and what would need to change for peer review to become more sustainable.
Capacity starts with people
We asked our editors how they would describe “peer review capacity“. Almost every answer was rooted in the same place: people, and whether enough of them are still willing to do the work.
Mark Hauber, Editor-in-Chief of the journal Individual-based Ecology, points to:
It’s about people – their willingness to give the best scientific thought to review and evaluate a fellow scientist’s work.
Tammy Robinson, Editor-in-Chief of NeoBiota, described the day-to-day challenge of finding those people:
NeoBiota editors try to avoid repeatedly asking the same people to review, but it’s very difficult to get people to accept a review invitation these days.
While for Florian Leese, Editor-in-Chief of Metabarcoding and Metagenomics, the strain of growing submissions without letting quality or turnaround times slip is a daily balancing act he’s refreshingly candid about:
Submissions in MBMG are growing faster than the time I and our editors can give them – and I think it’s worth saying that openly.
This is precisely the problem Pensoft set out to address earlier this year, when ARPHA – our end-to-end publishing platform – integrated with Prophy, an AI-driven reviewer-discovery tool that matches manuscripts to qualified researchers from a database of millions. Across more than 90 ARPHA-powered journals, editorial teams can now reach well beyond the small circle of familiar names, surfacing reviewers by expertise and research focus rather than by who comes to mind first – directly widening the pool editors like Robinson are struggling to tap.
Freeing up expertise for what matters most
Pensoft designed the ARPHA Publishing Platform to carry every manuscript through review, editing, publication, dissemination and archiving within a single collaborative environment – precisely so that the whole publishing process is made straightforward.
As Leese reflects:
The workflow side is not the problem; ARPHA handles editor assignment, plagiarism checks and the mechanics of the process efficiently, and the Pensoft team is quick to spot where things are piling up and need fixes.
Where he sees the next opportunity is in the technical, time-consuming checks that sit just beneath editorial judgment:
What no workflow tool currently helps with is the part that actually defines quality in our field: are the sequence data and metadata deposited and usable, are the bioinformatic steps reproducible, do the results actually support the conclusions? Those checks take time that has to be carved out of an already full working day, for editors as much as for reviewers.
As numbers rise, the honest answer is that editors will need support – trained data auditors, or validated AI-based tools from the publisher that pre-screen the technical parts – or the model of the volunteer editor/reviewer will not scale. We are not there yet, but we are at the point where that has to be said.
Making reviewing sustainable
“Recognition” was the word the editors returned to most often when the conversation turned to sustainability, and this is an area in which Pensoft has been investing for a decade and continues to develop.
Since 2016, ARPHA has been integrated with Publons (now part of Web of Science’s Reviewer Recognition Service), so every review logged through the platform becomes part of a reviewer’s visible professional record rather than disappearing into an inbox.
Editors and reviewers across the Pensoft portfolio also receive discounts on article processing charges.
Hauber shared his vision for sustainability in five years:
A broad reviewer base, with folks at all stages of their academic and industry careers, still willing to review and evaluate peer-workers’ studies.
Robinson sees growth coming from investing in the next generation:
Training courses for early career researchers so that they are upskilled and can be drawn in as skilled reviewers. This will be good for them and the system.
Leese proposes fewer publications and a bit more visibility for reviewers’ input:
Stop rewarding the number of papers. My proposal: publish less, and treat reviewing as an obligation to the community that scales with your own output. Review roughly twice as many papers as you publish, and make that visible as a metric. ‘Are you paying back?’ should be a question that counts in evaluations.
He also laid out what he sees as the two changes that would help most, and what’s at stake if the field doesn’t act on them:
Two things would help in parallel. First, better recognition or (even monetary) rewards for reviewers, as long as it does not end up inflating article processing charges. Second, and specifically for a data-heavy field like in our journal: the publishing field should take the necessary but tedious checks – data and metadata availability, code, reproducibility – away from reviewers and automate them, so that human expertise is spent where it is really needed: study design, context, whether the data support the claims, and whether something essential is missing that only an expert would notice. Classical peer review is at a turning point. It can be reformed, and I think it should be; the alternative is that it slowly gets replaced by AI-generated reviews that may often not do the job as we had hoped for.
Building toward that future
Having been around for 34 years, Pensoft treats Peer Review Week as more than a thank-you. Rather, it reflects a continued effort to build a publishing environment that makes reviewing sustainable, from AI-assisted reviewer matching to permanent recognition to the tools that take tedious checks off editors’ plates.
The record turnout in this year’s theme vote shows the community itself has named capacity as the defining challenge of this moment. As we look at insights from editors like Mark Hauber, Tammy Robinson and Florian Leese, the message is clear: the field can only be sustainable if reviewing is treated as seriously as publishing.
