Peer review by Amazon: Could it be coming soon?

The headline got me. “Amazon Peer Review: Coming to a Preprint Near You.” This was published on April 1 on the Scholarly Kitchen, an independent blog established by the Society for Scholarly Publishing that is designed to keep members and interested parties abreast of developments in scholarly publishing and communication. I knew it was published on April Fools’ Day and still, for a brief period of time, completely fell for it. The post begins like this:

“Starting today, anyone shopping on Amazon will soon be able to review manuscripts, just like pens, sneakers, and toiletry products.

“Supporters of Amazon Peer Review™ believe that their simple 5-star rating system and unstructured comment boxes will greatly expand the community that participates in the review of scientific research.”

It then goes on to explain that Amazon will link to the preprint server bioRxiv, where ratings will be tagged to manuscripts.

It became clear the post was a prank when I got to the part where it indicates that Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, is “thrilled” that scientists are embracing this new online review system and quotes him as saying, “Why shouldn’t the public comment on a research paper on kidney disease? I have two kidneys, and so do most of my friends.”

So why did this post fool me, if only briefly? Because I don’t think it is such an unrealistic idea. Please note, I haven’t said it is a good idea, but it’s certainly not out of the realm of possibility.

Corporate titans such as Amazon and Alphabet (Google’s parent company) have diversified and have been moving into all kinds of areas outside their core businesses. So why not scientific publishing? According to a June 2017 article in the Guardian, total global revenues for this industry are estimated to be more than 19 billion pounds annually (around $27 billion), placing it “between the recording and the film industries in size.” Not only that, but publishing is also a higher-margin business, with organizations like Elsevier—one of the world’s major providers of scientific, technical, and medical information—reporting profit margins of 36% in 2010—higher than Apple, Amazon, or Google in the same year, according to the article.

As I mentioned, some of these large organizations have been exploring businesses outside their core, with Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase, for example,announcing they would jointly pursue methods of providing “simplified, high-quality, and transparent” health care to their U.S. employees.

Alphabet is another well-known example of a corporate titan operating outside what most of us consider to be its space—that is, internet-related services and products. In fact, Alphabet came out of a restructuring of Google in 2015 that was designed to give greater autonomy to other Google subsidiaries so they could operate in businesses other than internet services. Alphabet has been funding research in the life sciences for a number of years.

Getting into scientific publishing could be seen as a natural extension of many of the activities these companies are already pursuing. Think about it: They are already indexing tons of content, reaching millions of users, processing payments from customers, and investing in research. And they have highly effective recommendations and review systems that in many cases are powered by sophisticated—far more sophisticated than most publishers have been able to achieve—implementations of artificial intelligence. In addition, once voice-activated devices make it into the lab, companies like Amazon will have access from the get-go.

What do you think: Is this such a foolish April Fools’ Day prank?

Views expressed on this page are those of the author and not necessarily those of ACS.