The European Commission has just highlighted a report whose recommendations include “Recognising and rewarding the labour involved in peer review, editorial work and research curation”, while acknowledging that much of the reviewing process depends on unpaid and frequently invisible labour. This recommendation deserves the close attention of every funding agency and evaluation panel entrusted with judging scientific merit, because an assessment system that celebrates published articles while overlooking the intellectual effort required to scrutinise them adopts a conveniently selective understanding of scientific contribution, in which the visible product attracts recognition while those who help safeguard its credibility are expected to remain satisfied with occasional expressions of gratitude.
The consequences of this contradiction were illustrated in my earlier post, “The serious case of papers that remained unassigned to editors for more than a year”, which discussed the reported experience of Noemi Felisi, whose manuscript remained unassigned to an editor for 380 days before peer review had even begun, exposing how an editorial bottleneck can obstruct the dissemination of research and jeopardise opportunities for researchers whose careers depend on timely publications. I also examined this broader problem in a previous post published in 2025, questioning the wisdom of German researchers’ recommendation to increase the number of reviewers per manuscript without first tackling reviewer fatigue and the persistent failure to recognise and reward this essential scientific service. Asking an already strained community to undertake additional reviewing while leaving its professional incentives unchanged amounts to demanding greater generosity from those whose generosity the system already takes for granted, while allowing the benefits of publication and the burden of evaluation to remain unequally distributed.
The Commission’s recommendation should therefore prompt funding agencies and universities to explain how reviewing, editorial responsibility and research curation actually influence their assessments. Scientists who publish hundreds of papers while contributing only a handful of peer reviews should likewise be expected to explain that discrepancy, because systematically relying on the scrutiny of others while scarcely reciprocating raises serious questions about their ethical standards and commitment to scientific citizenship. Recognition must also protect the intellectual independence required to challenge weak research, particularly when its authors occupy positions of academic influence, because rewarding servile deference while expecting rigorous criticism merely reproduces entrenched academic hierarchies under the seductive language of scientific excellence. A system that rewards publication, demands ever more reviewing and then marginalises those who perform it is actively manufacturing the very crisis it subsequently claims to deplore.
PS - As I argued in my January 2024 post, “AI has radically changed the core university business, shifting focus from teaching and publications to ‘assessment, curation, and mentoring’”, generative AI makes this contradiction increasingly indefensible, because the easier academic content becomes to produce, the greater the value of the intellectual judgement required to assess its reliability, distinguish meaningful contributions from plausible prose and guide researchers towards questions worth pursuing. That post also recalled Stanford Professor John Ioannidis’s call to reward scientific citizenship, including peer review, replication and data sharing, rather than allowing publication and grant records to monopolise the definition of scientific merit, an argument that becomes increasingly urgent as the ease of generating superficially plausible academic prose threatens to outstrip the rigorous scrutiny required to establish whether its claims deserve scientific credibility.
