Submissions are climbing every year, and almost exploding due to the ease of producing academic papers with LLMs. Although triage tools are getting better, in a lot of cases, the tsunami of submissions still leads to a higher demand of finding peer reviewers. But the pool of willing, qualified reviewers isn't climbing at the same pace as the submissions.

Many publishers, relied on their own pools of trusted reviewers for years, but find themselves in a situation where they now have to scout for fresh blood into the pool of reviewers. The instinct is to just recruit more reviewers. But volume isn't really a headcount problem, it's a matching problem. The right reviewer for a particular paper might be sitting in the data somewhere, just not easy to find fast enough.

With Global Campus this is what we enable, but no matter how smart a solution like Global Campus is, it still relies on the dataset it navigates through. Which is why we are such fans of the open infrastructure of OpenAlex. The coverage of data in OpenAlex is unprecedented, it's the biggest repository of academic output available, including the largest coverage of Global South research. Two direct reasons why the OpenAlex data can support to find new potential reviewers. The fact this repository is openly available, also means that a long list of organizations benefit from any improvements in this set. Not just vendors like ourselves, but also funders, publishers, libraries and research institutes.

We already see that the combination of the smart matching of Global Campus, based on the huge set of OpenAlex data works. Because every funder and publisher working with our solution report a significant increase in identifying new, good fitting reviewers. More submissions doesn't have to mean more strain — it means the matching layer has to get smarter.

(The first of a series of blog posts for Peer Review Week - Peer Review Capacity: Volume, Speed, and Quality)