PIXABAY, STARTUPSTOCKPHOTOSI woke up to three requests for review, and two papers to handle as a subject editor. It is unusual, but it happens. I declined to do all the reviews. This is not sustainable.
Over the last six months, I kept informal track of the reviews I received, both as an author and as a subject editor. In the overwhelming majority of papers, about half of the “major” points were actually not major, but things that improve the paper because the reviewers see it from a different perspective.
This is burdening the peer review process for very little return (because these comments, important as they may be, do not make the paper more correct or more robust).
Here is what we should do: stop submitting papers to journals.
Wait, what? No, I mean it. We should write our draft, go over it with our coauthors, and then put it on a preprint server. And wait. Some reasonable amount of ...
