Peer Review as Professional Development

Peer review offers a professional development pathway for reviewers while safeguarding scholarly credibility amid intensifying debate about how scholarly publishing allocates value. Notably, public, private, and philanthropic funding supports research production and peer review. Commercial publishers monetize access and often monetize publication. Recent analyses of publisher financial statements describe large revenues and high margins in journal publishing, which intensifies controversy around uncompensated reviewer labor. Some have experimented with submission charges to compensate reviewer time, yet such approaches can shift the cost burden toward authors and, in turn, risk widening participation gaps between scholars based in higher-income versus lower-income contexts. Yet, moral critique alone cannot protect the knowledge system, given that reviewer scarcity threatens review quality. This editorial argues for a growth stance that treats reviewer gain as the starting point for sustainable peer review. Noteworthily, peer review can deliver learning returns through early exposure to new work, skill returns through iterative practice that sharpens and sustains judgment, and governance returns through influence on field standards. Global marketing, in particular, can benefit from diverse reviewer lenses, including topic knowledge, method knowledge, and reader comprehension across cultures and disciplines. In turn, a reviewer-centered approach, paired with collective reforms on rights retention and workload recognition, builds reviewer capability in global marketing and protects scholarly legitimacy. Therefore, this editorial functions as a conceptual, field-shaping statement that clarifies the Journal of Global Marketing reviewer philosophy and advances a reviewer capability agenda for global marketing scholarship.