Unhelpful, caustic and slow: the academic community should rethink the way publications are reviewed

The current review system for many academic articles is flawed, hindering the publication of excellent, timely research. There is a lack of education for peer reviewers, either during PhD programmes or from journal publishers, and the lack of incentives to review compounds the problem. Thomas Wagenknecht offers up some solutions to the current system, including encouraging associate editors to use their authority to mitigate the impact of bad reviewers, shortening the entire peer review process, and increasing peer reviewer education during PhD and even Masters programmes. However, there are also opportunities for more significant reforms, by adopting post-publication peer review and by exploiting new distributed ledger technologies.