Benefits of Cooperative Peer Review

An authors' satisfaction is apparently influenced by the duration and quality of the scientific peer review process. In a research field, where multiple peer-reviewed journals offer the publication of articles and share a common scientific interest, an opportunity exists for them to cooperate in the often costly investment needed to maintain the peer review system. In a cooperative peer-review scenario, academic journals would share a submission management system, a reviewer database, a reviewer selection process, a recommended set of standards for reporting reviews, a review quality instrument, and a model for reviewer compensation. However, the final decision on what to publish in each journal would rest solely with the journal editor. This paper aims to apply peer review theory to the exploration of cooperative peer review. Thus, game theory is used to describe and model how peer review agents behave. A set of strategies for those agents is an equilibrium if each represents a best response to the other strategies. If all the players are playing the strategies in an equilibrium, they have no unilateral incentive to deviate, since their strategy is the best they can do given what others are doing. The equilibria of these games can predict how actual journals, authors and reviewers will behave when confronted with situations analogous to the peer-review game being studied. In particular, cooperation between peer-reviewed journals is more likely when each journal's prospective benefits outweigh that journal's prospective costs. Therefore, in this paper, we compare a Benchmark scenario of competition between journals and a cooperative scenario to further analyze the impact of incorporating cooperative peer review in the academic publishing process. We find that a cost-sharing scheme in cooperative peer review helps the academic journals offer a higher review quality than they would otherwise be able to achieve individually. A key insight from our results is that if a cost-sharing factor is properly specified, cooperative peer review can benefit the competing academic journals and help increase their profit levels, quality standards for accepting articles and review quality.