Peer Review Is Overwhelmed—Can It Survive the Age of AI?

Jason Semprini, a health economist at Des Moines University, studied HPV vaccine mandates for elementary school students and found that, although HPV causes most cervical cancer, the mandates did little to reduce population-level cervical cancer rates because they can motivate vaccine avoidance. During anonymous peer review, a reviewer misread the finding as questioning the vaccine’s effectiveness rather than the policy’s impact. The episode highlights the pressures facing peer review, a volunteer system increasingly strained in the AI era.