Are You Still There, Reader? Peer Review, Unpaid Labor, and the Enshittification of Science

Who, exactly, is peer review for? The question sounds almost rhetorical, the kind of thing one raises at a conference dinner after too much wine and not enough sleep. But we pose it here, at the opening of this editorial, because we have come to believe it is the most consequential question the scientific community is currently failing to ask. Peer-reviewed articles remain, at least nominally, among the most credible vehicles for disseminating knowledge. And yet, as multiple commentators have observed, the infrastructure that supports this credibility has been eroding for some time now (Tennant et al., 2017). Invoking the authority of peer review in the current landscape feels less like a statement of fact and more like an act of faith.

We write this editorial together, which is itself a small departure from convention. Editorials tend to carry a single voice, a single signature. But the frustrations we describe here were shaped by separate trajectories within the same eroding landscape, and we felt that a shared account would be more honest than either of us writing alone. We also write in the first person, something that has grown unfashionable in academic prose but that editorials still tolerate, and that seems necessary when the subject is, in the end, about the people who do the work.

Not much more than decade ago, when we were each preparing our manuscripts for submission, the process already carried the traces of an older, more material world. One of us still remembers printed copies of articles sent by post, accompanied by diskettes containing the electronic file. The other entered the system a few years later, when submission was already online, but still encountered editors who replied personally and reviewers whose reports read as though they had genuinely wrestled with the manuscript. Journals in that period were still largely managed by institutions, departments, and professional societies. If your manuscript was accepted, you sometimes still received a set of printed copies. There was something in that gesture, in holding the physical pages of your own argument, that made the whole enterprise feel like it mattered to someone other than yourself.

The less charming side of that world was logistical. Scholars who needed to demonstrate their output traveled with folders of originals and photocopies, guarding them with a vigilance that now seems quaint. But at least the system, for all its clumsiness, preserved a proximity between the researcher and the thing researched. You could hold your contribution. You knew where it lived.

Then journals migrated online, rapidly and irreversibly, and the apparent gains were hard to dispute. Submission became quicker, audiences could access papers as soon as they were uploaded, and large commercial companies built platforms to manage these services. Neither of us has ever received a printed manuscript to review. We both still print them, at our own expense, because reading on screen does not give us what we need. From this seemingly benign transition, something far less benign followed. The entire administrative and intellectual weight of peer review was shifted onto the scientific community, onto authors and their peers, while the companies that profited from the system shed every obligation they could. Librarians, who had served for generations as the institutional memory of scholarly communication, were removed from universities as though their function had simply evaporated. Publishing monopolies, meanwhile, only grew. By 2013, the five largest publishers controlled more than half of all scientific articles indexed in the Web of Science, a concentration without precedent in the history of scholarly communication (Larivière et al., 2015).

Is it possible to pinpoint when reviewing manuscripts stopped feeling like a privilege and started feeling like unpaid labor? We are not sure. But by the mid-2010s, we were both reviewing regularly, and we both found it exciting for reasons that are worth examining honestly. Being trusted by an editor to evaluate a piece of scholarship felt like confirmation that you belonged in the conversation. That may sound self-congratulatory, but the truth is closer to the opposite. Neither of us has ever felt expert about anything in particular. The impostor syndrome is not something we outgrew; it is something we learned to work alongside. The deeper you go into a new method or a new theoretical framework, the more you realize how fragile your previous certainties were. And that fragility, paradoxically, was exactly what made peer review valuable to us. Not as a mechanism for sorting good manuscripts from bad ones, but as an opportunity to reread, to question, to verify whether the authors’ claims actually held up against the sources they cited. A good review required you to track down references, interrogate methods, and sit with the uncomfortable possibility that you might be wrong about something you had long taken for granted. That kind of intellectual engagement improved our own work at least as much as it improved the manuscripts we reviewed.

So what happened? How did a system that once sustained genuine scholarly exchange become something that most academics now experience as exploitation? We do not pretend to have a complete answer, but we can describe what we have watched unfold. Higher education was restructured around principles that had nothing to do with education, and peer review was dragged along for the ride. The best shorthand we can find for the logic that governs this restructuring is Thatcher’s TINA. There Is No Alternative. That phrase has been recycled so many times in academic corridors that it barely provokes a reaction anymore. But it should. Because what TINA really means, when translated into the daily reality of a faculty member, is that you should stop expecting things to make sense and start accepting that they will only get worse.

The practical consequence is as absurd as it sounds. You review for a multimillion-dollar company. You are not paid. You comply with their deadlines. You receive a formulaic thank-you email. Then the same company charges you to read the paper you just reviewed. And when you want to publish your own work, you pay them again, often an amount equivalent to a month’s salary, for the privilege of making your findings available. “Get a grant,” says the administrator examining your output, output that will later appear in the institution’s promotional material to recruit the next cohort of doctoral students into this very arrangement. “Get a grip” is what most of us whisper to ourselves.

The privatisation of higher education did not merely add bureaucratic inconvenience. It rearranged the relationship between faculty and their own intellectual labor. Decisions about workload, strategy, and institutional direction are now made by managerial layers that do not teach, do not research, and do not review. The instructions they issue are always recognizable. Output must increase. Everything that can be counted must be counted. Whatever cannot be counted does not exist. TINA, once more.

We worry, genuinely, about the people entering this profession now. What we have described here, the excitement of reading a manuscript carefully, the slow pleasure of discovering that a cited source does not quite say what the authors claim it says, the sense that reviewing was a form of learning, all of that belongs to what Cory Doctorow (2023) would recognize as the first stage of enshittification. The stage when a platform still delivers real value to its users. We are past that stage. The publishing system is not merely struggling; it is being hollowed out by the same institutional logic that has hollowed out the universities themselves. Students are clients. Research is output. And faculty, in this vocabulary, are not supposed to ask whether the business model makes intellectual sense. They are supposed to comply.

Are you still there, reader? We ask because we are not sure this editorial will find its audience, or whether its audience still has the institutional space to care. But if you are here, and if any of what we have described resonates with your own experience, then perhaps the question we opened with deserves one more attempt. Who is peer review for? Because if the answer is no longer “for the advancement of knowledge,” then we ought to say so plainly, and begin the difficult work of building something that actually is.