It's hard to spend any time on science-related social media and completely avoid stories about peer review being broken, about the unreasonable 'Reviewer 2' , and about the need for publishers to remunerate scientists for their contributions to peer review.In general, it's probably better to avoid engaging with that level of online discussion, but to read some proper, peer-reviewed articles on the topic.One paper that provides some fascinating and recent statistics about peer review is Kadaifci et al. (2025).Another recent paper that I recommend, which provides a neat overview of the challenges and possibilities for the future, is The present and future of peer review: Ideas, interventions, and evidence (Aczel et al., 2025).Not all researchers accept that there is value in the dominant paradigm that all papers are expected to undergo review, usually by at least two independent experts.The 'argument from history' against peer review is that widespread peer review is only a relatively recent phenomenon, that excellent science was published without it, and that some major discoveries would have been prevented by it.The 'argument of pluralism' is that discovery and innovation is enabled when multiple, diverse, sometimes apparently contradictory or 'incorrect' methods are applied to problems (Aczel et al., 2025).Further (presumably peer-reviewed) studies strongly question the value of peer review: Heesen and Kofi Bright (2020) concluded that ' on present evidence abolishing peer review weakly dominates the status quo' .In subsequent work, they proposed that a crowd-sourced model might be of more value than journal-solicited peer review (Arvam et al., 2025).So, after that lengthy introduction, am I going to announce that The Journal of Dairy Research is abandoning peer review?No. Definitely not.Although I think the arguments against the present model are strong, a unilateral declaration of unconcern about the prevailing laws of nature in the academic publishing ecosystem might cause more problems than it solves.What I would like to do is to make sure that the peer-review process with The Journal of Dairy Research works as well as it can to ensure that high-quality papers are published, and with as little pain as possible for reviewers, editors and authors.To do this, we need to understand exactly what we want it to do for us.
N.N. Jonsson (2026) studied this question.