Academic journal article reviewing is a very peculiar world, and I wasn&#x27;t impressed by what I saw of it. My observations (as a former postdoc in biomedical research) were:<p>Reviewers get no pay or remuneration, pauce guidelines, and no training (which is where articles like this can make a difference). There are no tangible career benefits for doing it (other than &#x27;everyone else does it&#x27;), because you won&#x27;t get any sort of official record for papers that you&#x27;ve reviewed. (And because it&#x27;s single-blind, you&#x27;ll never be credited on the paper.) There&#x27;s very little feedback or quality control on reviews exerted by editors. You can&#x27;t ever discuss the paper with your fellow reviewer(s). And it&#x27;s an enormous time sink - reviewing a paper properly takes at least two hours, depending on the length and complexity. This is a real issue when you&#x27;re in a field where doing lab research, writing your own grants and papers, reading the latest literature to keep up-to-date with the field, and possibly doing some teaching or admin, already takes up most of your time.<p>It&#x27;s a seriously broken system. I inherently like the idea of doing reviews because it feels like you&#x27;re giving back something to the community, but it ended up feeling like this good will was being taken advantage of by the journals, particularly the for-profit ones. I&#x27;m amazed that the whole system continues to work as well as it does.