Many readers of The Nuzzo Letter have probably heard of academic peer review, but few are likely to have ever participated in the process or have viewed it from the inside. Here, my aim is to show readers what a journal’s submission portal looks like and explain how authors are often left in the dark regarding the status of their paper submissions.

Below, I have posted a screenshot of a submission portal for a journal where I currently have a paper under review. The journal is associated with one of the major academic publishers. The title of my paper, which can be seen in the screenshot, is “Sex Differences in Sit-and-Reach Flexibility in Children and Adolescents: A Meta-Analysis.” I have made a pre-print of this paper available at SportRxiv, and I have written a blog about the results at The Nuzzo Letter. (It is one of the papers associated with my GoFundMe drive for research on childhood sex differences in physical performance.)

Not all publishers or journals use the same software for their submission portals. Nevertheless, many of the indicators in the portals are similar across journals, and these indicators give authors imprecise information about the status of their paper.

In the screenshot below, one can see the title of my paper and the identification number that the journal has assigned to it. Likely “25” in the identification number represents the year 2025, and “00200” in the identification number likely indicates that my paper was the 200th paper submitted to the journal in 2025. We can also see that the initial date that I submitted the paper to the journal was March 4, 2025. Thus, my paper has been under review at the journal for over 10 months! Importantly, the 10-month wait is only for the initial round of reviews. Because papers often undergo two or three rounds of reviews, and each round takes a few months, the final version of this paper is a long way away from appearing on the internet.

In the screenshot, one can also see columns labelled “status date” and “current status.” The “current status” of my paper is labelled as “under review.” Yet, my paper has had this status designation for many months, and I have no idea how far along the paper is in the review process. The label “under review” could mean four things:

1. The paper is still with the editor and has yet to be sent out for review.

2. The editor has decided that the paper is suitable for review at the journal and is now searching for other academics to review the paper.

3. Reviewers have been identified by the editor, and the reviewers are currently reading and evaluating the paper.

4. The reviewers have returned their comments to the editor, but those comments are sitting unread in the editor’s inbox.

The “status date” of September 7, 2025, suggests that some action occurred on the paper on that date, but I have no idea what action that was, and I have no idea why no further action has occurred on the paper in the past five months. Was September 7th, the date that the editor started contacting potential reviewers? Was it the date that one of the reviewers decided to review the paper? Was it the date that Reviewer 1 returned their comments to the editor? Was it the date that Reviewer 2 returned their comments to the editor?

My colleagues and I have submitted dozens of papers to dozens of different journals over the years, and I can attest that many of us operate in a state of confusion and uncertainty regarding the status of our papers. Consequently, we often end up sending semi-regular emails to editorial offices, requesting status updates. We often receive copied and pasted replies, which are largely uninformative. The responses that we receive are often along the lines of: “As you know, peer review is a voluntary system, and sometimes, it can take time to identify willing reviewers.”

Many of the email replies that we receive from editorial offices also give off a tone that suggests no one in the editorial office is particularly concerned about how long the review process is taking. For my current paper, I have emailed the editorial office multiple times. In these emails, I have requested updates on the status of my paper, and, in one email, I even went out of my way to send the editorial office the names and email addresses of approximately 20 individuals who I thought might be interested in reviewing my paper. The response I received from office staff amounted to: “Thank you. I will pass this along to the editor, but we do have our own process of selecting reviewers.”

Well, clearly that process is not working!

Problems with Peer Review

Academic peer review is a mess, and the current model is not serving the best interests of academia or the public. A full examination of the many problems in academic peer review is not my purpose here, but a few of these problems do warrant mention.

First, review times are too slow. I have had papers under review for 1.5 and 2 years. My current paper has already been under review for 10 months, which means that it is on similar timeline for publication as these previous papers. Moreover, this only accounts for the review time at a given journal. Sometimes, papers go through review at multiple journals before they are published. For example, my current paper was previously rejected by a different journal after undergoing review at that journal for several months. Ultimately, these long reviews delay the time from the when the researcher has new results from the time that the public is made aware of the new results. Pre-prints were developed to address this issue, but the underlying issue of slow review times remains.

Second, some reviewers are unqualified, biased, or otherwise incompetent. Based on reviewer comments that I have received over the years, it is clear to me that some reviewers struggle with reading comprehension. This can entail not understanding specific comments made in papers but it can also include not understanding the larger context surrounding a paper’s theme. Yet, this lack of understanding does not prevent reviewers from outright “rejecting” papers or making longs lists of suggested edits that do not make sense given the aim of the paper. Ideological bias among reviewers can also be a problem. Crazily, one reviewer once commented on one of my papers: “data be damned…perceptions trump data.” Moreover, bias and incompetence among peer reviewers is likely to only get worse in the coming years due the emphasis placed on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in academic hiring and in outfitting editorial boards at academic journals.

Finally, some other problems that exist in peer review include crazy papers getting through peer review; reviewers taking too long to return their reviews after they agree to provide them; and reviewers not getting paid by for-profit publishers for their time and labor in reviewing papers.

Reform

Reform in academic peer review is necessary. What that reform should be is a matter of debate, but I am in favor of a system in which authors do not submit their papers to journals but instead publish their papers on publicly-accessible platforms. On these platforms, people who have profiles can comment on papers (i.e., provide reviews). This would be like Amazon reviews or any other public forum where people comment on things. The authors can then engage with the commenters, if they wish. If major errors are found, updated versions of the paper can be uploaded to the platform. After a certain amount of time passes, a “final” version of the paper can be made available to the public via the same platform. Academic papers that are funded by taxpayers should not be published in for-profit journals who place the papers behind subscription paywalls.

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