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Reviewers are humans and might be affected by cognitive biases when information overload comes into play. In fact, no amount of scientific training will completely mask the human impulses to partisanship. And the consequence is that authors may receive incorrect editorial decisions in their submissions to peer-reviewed journals. For instance, the journal editor issues a substantial revision when in fact a moderate one would suffice. This would be over-revision in peer review. In this situation, there exists a fraud cost if the journal editor tries to request the author to make a substantial revision when in fact a moderate one would be sufficient. Thus, in this article, we identify a set of conditions under which the peer review process involves equilibrium fraud and over-revision. An equilibrium in peer review is efficient if the first peer-reviewed journal to which the author submits their research paper makes a truthful editorial decision, which the author accepts. When the fraud cost is sufficiently high, there exists an efficient equilibrium. Otherwise, when the fraud cost cannot sustain an efficient equilibrium, it may arise a specialization equilibrium in which the author first submits the manuscript to a top journal which makes a truthful editorial decision. This specialization equilibrium may explain why academic journals with higher quality standards more often attract authors who write articles of higher quality. Finally, when the fraud cost is not too large, we show that a new type of equilibrium emerges in our model, equilibria involving costly fraud, in which the first peer-reviewed journal to which the research paper is submitted always requests substantial revisions. If the review time and the probability of very serious concerns from reviewers were large, the author would prefer to send the research paper to one single peer-reviewed journal even if that would involve over-revision. In the fraud equilibrium, the author's revision cost is high and independent of the true quality of the manuscript.

A financial compensation model could incentivise peer reviewers to provide the optimal amount of effort by rewarding them for their quality reports. Therefore, in this article, we consider peer-reviewed journals with the mission to financially compensate reviewers for delivering quality reports and to ensure affordable access to peer review for every author. In a cross-subsidy scenario of compensated peer review, the mission-driven journals expect all authors to pay for either the standard or a premium peer review. However, using this strategy, the journals offer standard peer review to low-income authors at lower prices, compared with the premium price high-income authors pay for higher-quality peer review. In addition, we also present a buy-one-give-one model of compensated peer review for the mission-driven journals. In this alternative setting, when a high-income author pays for a premium peer review, the journals would donate a certain number of free peer reviews to the low-income authors who are unable to afford them. In this two-tiered system, scholars with access to more funding receive premium treatment, while low-income authors can still access standard peer review similar to what authors currently receive for free. In this article, we show a comparative study between the cross-subsidy and buy-one-give-one models of compensated peer review. We find that a buy-one-give-one scenario provides a higher total sum of financial and social gain than the cross-subsidy scenario either when the mission-driven journals are highly socially responsible or when the social gap between the high-income and the low-income authors is large enough. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we model and study a cooperative peer-review scenario in scholarly publishing. In this scenario, the peer-reviewed journals cooperate in the necessary investment for the peer-review system. However, the final decision on what to publish in each journal would rest with the journal's editor, and the journals still compete in their quality standards for accepting papers. This simultaneously cooperative and competitive relationship between peer-reviewed journals is co-opetition in scholarly publishing. From the comparison between a benchmark scenario of competition between journals and a cooperative peer-review setting, we find that by sharing the cost of providing a common peer-review system, the peer-reviewed journals could offer a higher review quality in the manuscript evaluation process than they would otherwise be able to achieve individually. Furthermore, we find the conditions under which the competing academic journals using cooperative peer review could increase their expected quality levels, their standards for accepting articles, and their peer-review quality, which establishes the benefit from co-opetition between peer-reviewed journals. Nevertheless, a threshold cost-sharing factor exists above which the benefit from cooperative peer review disappears. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we introduce the concepts of sensitivity and specificity to mathematically describe the accuracy of the peer review process. Sensitivity refers to the probability that the final decision for a manuscript would be acceptance, provided the manuscript meets the journal standards required for publication (i.e., true positive rate). Specificity refers to the probability that the final decision would be rejection, provided the work does not meet the standards required for publication (i.e., true negative rate). Therefore, in the peer review process, sensitivity measures the ability to correctly accept manuscripts that meet the required standards (true positives) and specificity measures the ability to correctly reject manuscripts that do not meet those quality standards required for publication (true negatives). Sensitivity and specificity values can inform the editor under what conditions the outcome of a peer review process becomes more precise and, therefore, if this does not occur, when the editor must improve the analysis involved in processing the information received from reviewers' reports. Sensitivity and specificity understood in this way can promote the ethical conduct of peer review processes and improve the validity of manuscript editorial decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]