But peer review processing firm must deal with author comments like those on ‘consenting mole rats’

Processing a paper submitted to a journal takes 45 to 50 minutes of work, according to the director of a company that organises peer review for publishers.

The comments by Alice Ellingham, director of Editorial Office, which handles peer review for 85 journals, add to the debate about open access and journal profit margins.

Critics have argued that publishers do little to justify their subscription fees or article processing charges because peer review is generally done by academics for free. Income per article varies widely; article processing charges at the publisher Elsevier range from $500-$5,000 (£350-£3,497).

Speaking in London at the Researchers to Readers conference on 16 February, Ms Ellingham presented data from three anonymised journals that outsource the organisation of peer review to her company.

Staff at her company spent more than a quarter of their time screening new submissions, while sending emails also took up a sizeable chunk of time.

The 45-50 minute figure does not include peer reviewers’ time – just the work spent organising it and other tasks such as copy-editing.

Ms Ellingham later told Times Higher Education that “we would struggle to get it much below that [45-50 minutes]”. 

Her presentation to the conference on “the unseen costs of peer review” argued that organising peer review came at a cost, not least because someone has to deal with bizarre problems and queries thrown up by authors and peer reviewers.