How much does the academic peer review cost in notional staff time?

This paper got me thinking about how much my time commitment to the review process has cost my employers over my career so far.

The authors in this paper suggest each paper review has a US dollar cost of $1272 of time commitment.

And a previous paper suggests a US dollar cost of $1900 per person per year for the lead author submitting a paper. That is the time taken to format and submit a paper and then revise it.

These figures blow out to more than one billion US dollar annual cost for peer review alone. Which of course is typically done for free and often poorly recognized.

Scientific sinkhole: estimating the cost of peer review based on survey data with snowball sampling - Research Integrity and Peer Review https://researchintegrityjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41073-023-00128-2

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