Peer review depends on people doing work for which they are usually not paid.
An editor sends a manuscript to an academic. The reviewer reads it, thinks carefully about the argument, checks the methods, considers the contribution, writes a report and perhaps does the same thing again after revision. Depending on the paper, that might take several hours. Sometimes considerably longer.
For most reviewers, there is no payment.
It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that frustration occasionally produces very strong language. Peer review has been described as exploitation, free labour and, in more extreme cases, modern-day slavery.
I understand where the frustration comes from. But I do not think peer review is modern-day slavery. In fact, I think using that description risks obscuring a much more interesting and legitimate discussion about unpaid academic labour.
What do we mean by modern-day slavery?
Words matter, particularly when the words describe serious abuses of human rights.
One definition from Voices4Freedom[1] describes modern-day slavery as
“Modern Day Slavery is real slavery: where people are held against their will, under violence or threat of violence, and unable to walk away. They are either never paid or paid irregularly, either in the form of food or money, the sum of which is far below any minimum wage standards; typically they are paid only enough to survive another day.”
I don’t think anybody can argue that carrying out peer review for free meets that definition.
It is very different to an academic receiving an email asking:
“Would you be willing to review this manuscript?”
The reviewer can click decline if they so wish. They can even just ignore the email or tell the editor that they are too busy. They could decide never to review for that journal again and ask not be considered again. Indeed, many academics routinely do all of those things.
Of course, there are professional pressures associated with peer reviewing, and I will return to those, but there is an enormous difference between professional expectation and coercion. A researcher who feels guilty about declining a review invitation is not in the same position as somebody who is physically prevented from leaving a workplace or threatened with violence if they refuse to work.
That distinction is important. Describing conventional peer review as slavery risks diminishing the experiences of people who genuinely live under conditions of forced labour and coercion. So, for me, the answer to the headline question is straightforward.
No. Peer review is not modern-day slavery.
But that should not end the discussion.
“Not being slavery” is a very low bar
There is a danger in rejecting an extreme comparison and then assuming that everything must be fine. It is not. The fact that peer review is voluntary does not automatically mean that the system is fair, sustainable or appropriately structured.
Academics provide publishers with an enormous amount of highly skilled labour without receiving direct payment. A competent peer review requires expertise that may have taken decades to develop. The reviewer is being asked to apply that expertise to somebody else’s work, often within a relatively short deadline.
That work has value. If a publisher employed someone with equivalent expertise to carry out the same task, that person would expect to be paid. Yet the traditional peer-review model largely assumes that academics will provide this labour free of charge.
Why?
The traditional bargain
There is a reasonable answer. Academics do not generally review manuscripts because they have accidentally stumbled into unpaid employment. They participate because peer review has traditionally been understood as part of academic citizenship.
Other academics review my papers, so I review theirs. I benefit from the scholarly publishing system, so I contribute to maintaining it.
Reviewing also offers other, less tangible, benefits. It allows researchers to see emerging work, contribute to the development of their field, build relationships with editors and demonstrate professional standing. There is therefore an implicit exchange.
The publisher may not pay me directly to review a paper, but I participate in a system from which I also benefit. For many years, that bargain probably seemed reasonably balanced. The question is whether it still is.
Has the bargain changed?
Scholarly publishing has expanded enormously. There are more journals, more manuscripts and more pressure on academics to publish. Editors frequently report difficulty finding reviewers, sometimes having to invite ten, twenty or even more people before securing the necessary number of peer reviews.
Part of this may be due to increasingly heavy academic workloads. Researchers are expected to teach, publish, secure funding, supervise students, undertake administration, demonstrate impact, engage externally and satisfy an expanding range of institutional requirements. Peer reviewing gets added somewhere on top.
The traditional reciprocal model starts to look less comfortable when the volume of work increases but the available pool of reviewer time does not increase at the same rate. A system built on goodwill can function very effectively. But goodwill is not an unlimited resource.
Who benefits from the unpaid labour?
This is where the debate becomes more complicated.
It is easy to frame the issue as academics working for free while publishers make money. There is some truth in that, particularly when we are talking about highly profitable commercial publishers. But it is incomplete.
Authors benefit from peer review. Editors benefit from reviewers’ expertise. Universities benefit because their researchers publish papers that contribute to reputation, rankings, research assessment and career progression.
Academic societies often depend on journal income to support their activities. Readers benefit from a system designed, however imperfectly, to improve the reliability of published research. And publishers clearly benefit because much of the intellectual assessment required to operate journals is supplied without direct payment.
Peer review is not simply a transfer of free labour from academics to publishers. It is an ecosystem in which many parties benefit. The more useful question is whether those benefits, costs and responsibilities are distributed fairly.
Is reviewing really voluntary?
This is perhaps the strongest challenge to my argument. Yes, an academic can decline an individual review. But can academics collectively decline to review? Probably not, at least not without fundamentally changing the system on which their own careers depend.
Researchers need journals to publish their work. Universities assess their staff through those publications. Funding agencies examine publication records. Promotion committees do the same. And the ranking of universities relies on bibliographic databases as one indicator of the quality of a university.
The system creates an expectation that academics contribute to peer review even if nobody explicitly forces them to do so. That is a genuine form of professional pressure. But pressure is not the same as slavery.
We should be capable of discussing structural expectations, professional obligations and unpaid labour without reaching for a term associated with coercion, trafficking and violence. Indeed, using less dramatic language may allow us to have a more productive conversation.
Perhaps universities are part of the problem
There is another uncomfortable aspect of this debate. We often ask whether publishers should pay reviewers. But perhaps we should also ask why universities do not recognise peer reviewing more explicitly as part of academic work. If reviewing is essential to the research system, then why is it so often treated as something academics squeeze into evenings, weekends or whatever time remains after their “real” work is finished?
Universities benefit from functioning scholarly communication. They also benefit when their academics serve as reviewers and editors because those activities contribute to institutional reputation and disciplinary standing. Yet many workload models give little or no explicit recognition to reviewing.
That seems inconsistent.
If we believe peer review is important, perhaps it should appear more clearly in workload allocation, annual appraisal and promotion criteria. That would not necessarily require publishers to pay every reviewer. But it would recognise that reviewing is work.
Should publishers pay reviewers?
Payment is the obvious solution, but it raises difficult questions. Would payment improve the quality of reviews? Would reviewers feel greater responsibility if they were being paid? Would it make it easier for editors to recruit reviewers? Possibly.
But payment might also change the character of peer review. What has traditionally been a contribution to a scholarly community could become a transactional service. Researchers might prioritise journals that pay. Publishers might impose stricter performance expectations. Reviewers might begin accepting assignments primarily for income rather than expertise or interest.
And, of course, somebody would ultimately pay the cost. It could be absorbed by publishers. It could also appear in higher subscription charges, higher article processing charges or new fees elsewhere in the system.
There is no simple answer. But the fact that payment is complicated does not justify pretending that the labour has no economic value.
The real question
For me, “Is peer review modern-day slavery?” is ultimately the wrong question.
The answer is no.
Academics are not being physically coerced into reviewing manuscripts. They are not prevented from walking away. They are not subjected to violence or threats of violence. To present peer review as slavery stretches the concept of slavery beyond recognition and risks doing a considerable injustice to people who experience genuine forced labour and coercion.
But the discomfort behind the comparison should not simply be dismissed. Peer review relies on a large amount of unpaid, highly skilled labour. The volume of that labour appears to be increasing. The people being asked to provide it are already under substantial pressure.
Universities often give it limited recognition. Publishers depend upon it. And the entire scholarly communication system would struggle to function without it.
So perhaps the question we should be asking is not whether peer review is slavery, but
How much unpaid labour can scholarly publishing reasonably expect?
That, I think, is a much harder question to answer. And one that the publishing industry, universities and academics themselves increasingly need to answer.
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About the Author
Professor Graham Kendall is Vice-Chancellor of GlobalNxt University, Malaysia, and an Emeritus Professor at the University of Nottingham. Over the past 25 years, he has published more than 300 peer-reviewed papers and has served as Editor-in-Chief and Associate Editor of several international journals. Through Publishing with Integrity, he explores the ethical, governance and practical challenges facing scholarly publishing, encouraging greater transparency, integrity and informed debate across the global research community.
[1] https://www.voices4freedom.org/what-is-modern-day-slavery/, accessed 19 Aug 2026