On June 22, 2026, the Research on Research Institute (RoRI) published The Future of Peer Review, the flagship synthesis report that closes out its three-year PEER REVIEW project (2023-2026). The report’s headline argument: peer review as currently practiced across scholarly publishing and research funding has reached a breaking point, strained simultaneously by hyper-competition for funding and publication slots and by the accelerating use of generative AI in both writing and reviewing. RoRI frames this not as a call for incremental fixes but for system-wide reform of how research quality is assured.
What the report is, and isn’t
This is a synthesis and reform blueprint, not an empirical trial or a policy mandate. It draws on two evidence streams built up over the project’s three-year run: an extensive literature review of existing peer review research, and 39 in-depth interviews with stakeholders across the research ecosystem, including funders, publishers, and policymakers. RoRI’s PEER REVIEW project was co-led by Stephen Pinfield (University of Sheffield) and Ludo Waltman (CWTS, Leiden University), with research fellows Kathleen Gregory and Andre Brasil, and was carried out in collaboration with RoRI funder-partners including the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and the Volkswagen Foundation.
The core diagnosis: two forces straining the same system
RoRI identifies hyper-competition and AI as the two forces overwhelming a peer review model that was never designed to absorb either at current scale:
- Hyper-competition. Funders and journals face an ever-growing volume of proposals and manuscripts chasing a comparatively static pool of reviewer time, which the report argues makes the prevailing one-proposal-at-a-time, one-manuscript-at-a-time review model structurally unsustainable.
- AI acceleration. Generative AI tools now make it faster to produce submissions than to review them, widening the gap between submission volume and available review capacity, and raising new questions about how AI-assisted writing and AI-assisted review should be disclosed and governed.
The proposed reform blueprint
Rather than proposing a single replacement mechanism, the report sets out a high-level, system-wide reform direction with several linked recommendations:
- Funders as system shapers, not just competition managers. RoRI argues funders should move away from reviewing many thousands of individual project proposals one at a time and toward shaping the research system at a strategic, programmatic level, investing in larger, longer-term initiatives rather than running an ever-larger volume of individual competitions.
- Layered quality assurance in place of one-size-fits-all review. The report proposes combining several complementary mechanisms: trust markers (reputational and provenance signals about a submission or its authors), open peer engagement (more transparent, community-visible review), and evidence synthesis (aggregating and weighing existing evidence rather than re-litigating novelty in isolation), instead of relying on a single closed review step to carry the full weight of quality assurance.
- Context-sensitive evaluation over standardized metrics. RoRI calls on institutions and funders to evaluate research in ways aligned with their actual strategic goals, rather than defaulting to standardized proxy metrics such as grant income totals or publication counts.
The report stops short of prescribing a single universal replacement for peer review, positioning its recommendations instead as a blueprint that funders, publishers, and institutions would need to adapt and pilot in their own contexts. RoRI’s own materials describe this as a direction for the field to build toward, not a finished, off-the-shelf system.
How this differs from other recent peer-review stories
This report sits alongside, but is distinct from, several other developments CASRAI has covered recently. It is worth being precise about which is which:
- It is not an account of a specific integrity incident. See Wiley’s investigation into alleged peer-review extortion, which concerns a specific security and integrity breach at one publisher, not a systemic policy proposal.
- It is not a funder’s specific operational overhaul. See NIH’s emergency peer review overhaul, which describes concrete process changes at a single US funding agency, whereas RoRI’s report is a multi-funder, cross-system diagnosis and recommendation set rather than an implemented change at any one organization.
- It is not primarily about AI-generated manuscripts themselves. See fully AI-generated papers passing peer review, which is about specific AI-authored submissions clearing review; RoRI’s report treats AI as one of two structural pressures on the system as a whole, alongside hyper-competition, rather than focusing on any single AI-authorship case.
Where this report does connect directly to existing CASRAI coverage is on terminology and assessment infrastructure. RoRI’s push for more differentiated, context-sensitive review models is easier to discuss precisely using the shared vocabulary in ANSI/NISO Z39.106-2023, the peer review terminology standard that defines terms like open, closed, and transparent review and reviewer identity disclosure. And RoRI’s own AGORRA observatory, which compares national research-assessment systems, is a directly relevant companion body of RoRI work: AGORRA documents how countries actually evaluate research today, while the Future of Peer Review report argues for how that evaluation infrastructure should change.
Why this matters for research administrators
RoRI’s report is a policy and research-synthesis document, not a compliance requirement. Nothing in it is binding on any funder, publisher, or institution. But its funder-partner list (CIHR, FWF, the Moore Foundation, UKRI, SSHRC, and the Volkswagen Foundation) signals that several major research funders were directly engaged in shaping its recommendations, which makes it a reasonable early indicator of where funder-side review policy may move over the next several years. Research administrators managing grant portfolios or supporting institutional research assessment should treat it as a signal to watch, particularly the recommendation that funders shift toward programmatic, strategic funding rather than high-volume individual proposal review, rather than as a change to plan around today.
Key facts at a glance
- Publisher: Research on Research Institute (RoRI)
- Report title: The Future of Peer Review
- Published: June 22, 2026
- Project: PEER REVIEW project, 2023-2026 (now concluded)
- Evidence base: literature review plus 39 stakeholder interviews
- Project leads: Stephen Pinfield (University of Sheffield), Ludo Waltman (CWTS, Leiden University)
- Funder-partners: CIHR, FWF, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, UKRI, SSHRC, Volkswagen Foundation
This summary is based on RoRI’s own published report page. As with any newly released policy synthesis, the field’s response, and whether any funder or publisher moves from RoRI’s recommendations to concrete pilots, will take time to become clear; CASRAI will follow up as that plays out.
