Making Conventional Peer Review More Efficient: Are Amalgamated Pre-Submission Peer Review and Preprint Models Helpful?

The peer-review burden is a serious threat to the scholarly community. Although journal editors, publishers, and professional associations promote its essence through expert guidance, training modules, and explanatory flowcharts, there is a massive demand to scrutinize thousands of research outputs. Lack of willingness to aid ample time, overload, and transparency issues make this time-consuming process even more complicated, resulting in delayed journal responses, non-publication of manuscripts, and author frustrations. Pre-submission peer reviews by professionally appointed experts by science writing/editing agencies and the readers’ comments and feedback in preprint servers may help reduce the harm to the conventional journal peer review system. Professional peer review through commercial agencies tends to improve manuscript quality by identifying significant reasons for rejection, citing priority issues, providing constructive feedback and suggestions to rectify the noticed lacunas, and suggesting different ways to correct errors, ultimately enhancing the chances of acceptance with the journals. Preprints, on the other hand, also undergo an informal peer review through readership and help authors refine the manuscript. The big publishing houses and leading scholarly associations cautiously encourage the newly breeding preprint culture by laying down guidelines and policies and asking authors for proactive declaration. However, it is essential to openly advertise the downsides of preprints. Here, we propose an amalgamation of the preprint-journal system to improve the current process alongside properly with the option of a professional pre-submission peer-review process. A viable, risk-based approach is suggested by modifying these two journal-independent processes to suit publishers’ requirements.