That question is where the 2026 Future of Peer Review Report begins. Before accepting a crisis narrative that benefits publishers, vendors, and funders in different and often contradictory ways, the report asks for evidence. What the report finds is more complicated, and (hopefully) more useful, than a simple alarm.
A system under real pressure
The data comes from eight years of ScholarOne Manuscripts activity combined with a literature review, expert interviews, and survey responses from more than 2,000 reviewers, authors, and editors.The data reveals patterns that are hard to ignore. The global reviewer pool grew 54% between 2018 and 2025. At the same time, the rate at which those reviewers accept invitations has fallen sharply. It now takes editors an average of 4.5 invitations to secure a single review, nearly double the rate from 2018.
That inefficiency has a cost. Per 100 invitations sent, editors wait a combined 407 days for reviewers who ultimately say no or say nothing at all. That's time manuscripts aren't moving, authors aren't hearing back, and editorial bandwidth is being spent on dead ends.
The geography of the problem
Not all reviewer markets are equally strained. The report maps where the gaps are widest and where reviewer capacity actually exists. Publishers and editors who have relied on the same networks for years may find these networks fatigued.For publishers looking to reduce wasted editorial time, building reviewer communities in new geographies (especially Southeast Asia) may see invitation rates rise and quicker turnarounds.
The question publishers should be asking
It's easy to read declining acceptance rates as a motivation problem. The report suggests that on top of motivation, we have a targeting problem. The sourcing methods editors rely on most heavily are also the ones that perform the worst. The method with the highest acceptance rate in the entire dataset isn't a discovery tool or a database: it's a relationship.That distinction matters for how publishers invest in their editorial infrastructure, and the report traces the implications through the data.
AI, integrity, and what's actually being measured
The report also examines the research integrity signals that publishers depend on, and where automated checks are and aren't keeping pace with volume (as submission volume surges, so to do desk reject rates). It maps the rapid spread of AI in the review process against a policy landscape that has largely failed to keep up. Fifty-three percent of reviewers report using AI for peer review tasks. Most of them are doing so without any publisher guidance.These aren't arguments for alarm. They're arguments for clarity: about what the data shows, what it doesn't, and where the decisions that matter most still sit with publishers.
Four futures, one question
The report closes with four scenarios for where peer review goes from here: a managed evolution that absorbs pressure through incremental change, a selective collapse concentrated in lower-tier and high-volume journals, a professional transformation that would require coordinated investment at scale, and a decentralized disruption that may already be further along than most publishers realize.None of these is inevitable. Which future materializes depends on decisions the industry is making or deferring right now.
The 2026 Future of Peer Review Report is available to download. The data is there. The question is what you do with it.