The Future of Peer Review

Drawing on an extensive literature review and 39 in-depth interviews with key stakeholders across the research ecosystem, including funders, publishers, and policymakers, a major new report from RoRI reveals that peer review is at a breaking point. Strained by hyper-competition and supercharged by AI, the current model is no longer sustainable. Moving beyond incremental fixes, the report outlines an ambitious high-level blueprint for system-wide reform.

Key insights

To build a sustainable future for quality assurance, the report argues we must confront several systemic realities:

Funders should move beyond a focus on individual projects: The endless cycle of reviewing many thousands of project proposals is unsustainable. Funders need to step back from being “competition managers” and instead become “strategic system shapers,” shifting their focus to funding large-scale, long-term strategic research initiatives.

The research system must move away from one-size-fits-all peer review of all research outputs to a layered approach to quality assurance: The output side of the research system is completely overwhelmed. The report argues for a layered approach to quality assurance, moving to a smart mix of “trust markers” (like integrity and reproducibility checks), open, ongoing “peer engagement,” and rigorous evidence synthesis.

AI is a system shock that exposes structural weaknesses of conventional funding and publishing processes: AI tools are supercharging submission volumes for both grants and articles, further exacerbating a system overload that cannot be fixed by incremental process-level innovations alone.

Research institutions and funders need to become strategic actors, evaluating research in the context of their strategic goals: Evaluations must be layered, context-sensitive, and based on actual strategic contribution. Research institutions and funders must stop using standardised one-size-fits-all indicators like grant income or publication counts to measure success.

Read the full report for our proposed pathways for funders, institutions, and publishers to build a future-proof research ecosystem. 

Read the full report

The report is accompanied by Questioning peer review: Understanding peer review system-wide (RoRI Working Paper No. 21), which provides the deep-dive foundation for this work, mapping the “why, who, how, and what” of peer review across different domains, and analysing the critical themes of quality, capacity, diversity, openness, and trust.

Background to the PEER REVIEW Project

This flagship report marks the official conclusion of RoRI’s PEER REVIEW project (2023–2026), an initiative dedicated to taking a holistic, system-wide view of how peer review might evolve across different scientific domains. The project was co-led by Stephen Pinfield (University of Sheffield) and Ludo Waltman (CWTS, Leiden University), alongside research fellows Kathleen Gregory and André Brasil. The project was conducted in collaboration with RoRI partners Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), Austrian Science Fund (FWF), The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and the Volkswagen Foundation.