BY ROBERT M. KAPLAN

Peer-reviewed scholarship remains the central currency of academic life. It advances careers, drives innovation, informs policy, stimulates economies, and lays the groundwork for the next generation of inquiry. Yet the very system designed to vet and disseminate knowledge increasingly drains enthusiasm from scholars—especially early-career investigators—by subjecting them to burdensome, time-consuming, and often pointless article submission portals.

The problem is not peer review. It is the bureaucratic machinery that now precedes it.

The Rise of Mechanical Gatekeeping

Modern submission platforms, such as ScholarOne’s “Manuscript Central” and similar systems, require authors to navigate a protracted series of data-entry screens before a single editor reads a word of the manuscript. Authors must repeatedly re-enter information already present in the paper: titles, abstracts, author affiliations, funding statements, keywords, disclosures, suggested reviewers, and more. Minor formatting deviations trigger automated flags and return submissions for correction before editorial triage even begins.

Yet most leading journals now triage the majority of submissions. Experienced editors typically determine conceptual fit by reading the abstract and scanning the tables and figures. If a manuscript falls outside scope, that judgment can often be made in minutes.

When I served as editor, we did not waste authors’ time with procedural hurdles if a paper was clearly better suited elsewhere. Today, however, authors usually spend half a day wrestling with portal idiosyncrasies only to receive a desk rejection based on scope. The mismatch was evident from the outset, but the system required ritual compliance before editorial discretion could operate.

Trivial Errors, Meaningful Delays

More troubling is the growing practice of returning manuscripts for nonsubstantive technicalities.

I have had papers returned after weeks in queue because structured abstract headings did not exactly match the journal’s template. Another was flagged because a period appeared before rather than after a reference citation. These details matter, and professional copyeditors exist precisely to address them. But does it advance scholarship to delay editorial consideration over minutiae that can be corrected during revision or production? There will be plenty of opportunities to move a period to the other side of a reference.

Does it make sense to support a plethora of unique referencing styles? The reference management system Zotero supports more than 10,000 journal-specific styles with 1,700 distinct formats. As readers of a diverse range of journals, few of us care about the exact peculiarities of reference formatting.

In an era when timeliness can influence funding, promotion, and policy relevance, unnecessary pre-review delays are not trivial. They represent opportunity costs—especially for junior scholars navigating increasingly competitive environments.

The Widespread Frustration

Author frustration is not anecdotal. Stuart Macdonald, general editor of Prometheus at ScienceOpen, has observed that authors “loathe” submission systems, describing them as “time-consuming, hostile and, most offensive of all, pointless.” Estimates suggest that navigating submission requirements can consume upward of 14 hours per manuscript. Most of the time is spent on complying to formatting requirements. Multiply that across millions of submissions annually, and the lost time becomes staggering.

Rick Anderson captured the sentiment memorably in his essay, “The Manuscript Submission Mess: Brief Notes from a Grumpy Author.” Many of us recognize ourselves in that description.

These systems are not merely inconvenient. They represent a shift from intellectual evaluation to procedural gatekeeping. Scholars increasingly interact not with editors exercising judgment, but with interfaces enforcing compliance.

What Would Reform Look Like?

If the goal is to advance knowledge, the quality of the scholarly contribution must take precedence over mechanical conformity at the point of submission.

Journals clearly have the right to state scope, word limits, and structural expectations. But initial editorial triage should focus on intellectual merit and conceptual fit—not punctuation placement or abstract subheadings. Detailed formatting requirements can—and should—be addressed after a manuscript clears the first substantive threshold.

We once operated under a system in which strong ideas prompted editorial collaboration. When the scholarly contribution was compelling, editors worked with authors to refine clarity, grammar, and formatting. The emphasis was on improving communication—not enforcing ritualistic compliance before evaluation.

Keeping Our Eye on the Ball

No one disputes the importance of standards. Precision and professionalism matter. But standards should facilitate scholarship, not obstruct it.

If we care about sustaining intellectual vitality and encouraging the next generation of scholars, we must reconsider whether our submission infrastructure is serving its intended purpose. Bureaucratic friction may appear minor in isolation, but collectively it erodes morale and diverts time from research itself.

Peer review is essential to the academic enterprise. Submission portals are not. It is time to redesign them so they support scholarship rather than smother it.

Robert M. Kaplan is a faculty member at Stanford University’s Clinical Excellence Research Center. He is a former associate director of the National Institutes of Health and a former chief science officer for the U.S. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. He previously served as editor in chief for two academic journals.