A billion-dollar donation: estimating the cost of researchers’ time spent on peer review

Table 1 Estimating the Value of Review Labor for the US, China, and the UK for 2020

Parameter	US	China	UK
Annual postdoc salary	$65,000	$68,174	$39,692
Annual professor salary	$179,736	$76,428	$116,731
Annual labor hours	1767	2174	1367
Reviewer hourly wage	$69.25	$33.26	$57.21
Articles	715,645	618,430	224,220
Contribution to global article production	16.68%	14.41%	5.22%
Reviews	3,636,031	3,141,908	1,139,106
Value of reviewing time	$1,510,810,944	$626,945,064	$391,036,638

Note. Salary values were collected from https://inomics.com/sites/default/files/2018-05/INOMICS%20Salary%20Report%202018.pdf for the USA and the UK, and were downloaded on 2021.09.09. from http://www.salaryexplorer.com/salary-survey.php?loc=44&loctype=1&job=50&jobtype=1#disabled for China. To estimate the average full professor salary, we calculated the average of the 39 professor categories available at salaryexplorer.com. To convert the average Chinese salary to USD, we used the 2020 average exchange rates (6.90) from CNY to USD based on https://www.macrotrends.net/2575/us-dollar-yuan-exchange-rate-historical-chart (The calculations are available at the projects’ OSF page). Note that we are concerned that the Chinese salaries may be inaccurate, based on anecdotal feedback we have received. For China, labor hours were found in https://ourworldindata.org/working-hours; for the USA and the UK they were retrieved from https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS. The numbers of articles published in 2020 for each country are from the Dimensions database. To calculate the value of reviewing time, we used the non-rounded form of the hourly wages

ISSN: 2058-8615