A billion-dollar donation: estimating the cost of researchers’ time spent on peer review

“the total time reviewers globally worked on peer reviews was over 100 million hours in 2020…The estimated monetary value of the time US-based reviewers spent on reviews was over 1.5 billion USD in 2020”

The authors of the paper above published on “Research Integrity and Peer Review” have assumed that on average a paper takes 6 hours to review. More interesting however are the numbers that they presented in Table 1 and were used to calculate the reviewer´s hourly wages in US ($69), UK ($57), and China ($33).

On this subject check also a list of 28 European countries ordered by the ratio (number of reviewers with more than 400 confirmed revisions of papers from journals indexed in Web of Science)/(million inhabitants) that show researchers from Germany and France do not like to make time donations.

PS – Let´s also not forget the article on the rise of “dodgy academic journals” and how citations can be used to spot those journals https://pacheco-torgal.blogspot.com/2020/06/the-economistin-just-20-years-predatory.html