The peer review crisis and the future of scholarly publishing: notes from the editorial frontline

Abstract

Abstract Academic peer review is in crisis—it is a structural reality that every editor, reviewer, and conscientious author now navigates daily. The symptoms are familiar: reviewer fatigue, inconsistent decisions, declining response rates, and a growing sense that the machinery of scholarly quality assurance is straining under a load it was never designed to bear. For a journal like Data & Policy—operating at the intersection of multiple disciplinary traditions and sectorial experiences, serving a field still in the process of constituting itself—these pressures are not abstract. They shape every editorial decision we make.