Injecting youth into peer-review to increase its sustainability: a case study of ecology journals

The ‘tragedy of the reviewer commons’, where the referee pool is being drained by an influx of manuscript submissions, is becoming an increasing problem for journals. To mitigate this growing concern, we suggest that there is a need to inject youth into the peer-review process. Graduate students, post-docs, and junior researchers are an important, yet often underutilized resource, for the peer-review process. A survey of leading ecology journals revealed that editors are generally receptive to increasing the involvement of junior referees in the peer-review process. Through 45 responses to the survey, no journal had specific policies regarding junior referees or maintained databases specifically identifying junior reviewers, and only 34% of respondents actively solicited junior referees. Despite this level of utilization, editors generally feel that junior referees have expertise in specific subject areas, are keen to review, and are willing to make time to provide a high-quality review, particularly when aided by their supervisors. Editors were significantly more likely to select junior referees with higher levels of education and experience (e.g., 90% of respondents were highly likely to select a post-doctoral researcher to conduct a review), although editors were willing to consider graduate students as well. Integrating and expanding on these survey results, we argue that injecting youth into peer review benefits the process and provides invaluable experience and insight to junior scholars, all while helping to mitigate the problem of the tragedy of the reviewer commons.