The choice of theme reflects a tension that has been building in scholarly publishing for years. Journals are receiving more manuscripts than ever, driven by growth in the number of researchers worldwide, the proliferation of open access outlets, and increasing pressure on academics to publish. At the same time, peer review depends on a finite pool of experts who volunteer their time, often without recognition or compensation. The result is a system in which the demand for reviews increasingly outstrips the available supply, forcing editors to issue more invitations, wait longer for acceptances, and sometimes settle for reviewers with less relevant expertise. The question confronting the community, as the organizers frame it, is how to balance volume and speed with the quality, expertise, and integrity that peer review depends on.

Akhilesh Ayer, CEO of Cactus Technology Solutions, emphasized the stakes in a statement accompanying the announcement. Peer review, he said, is central to the scholarly publishing ecosystem, and as that ecosystem undergoes a transition, it is critical to address the growing capacity challenges at scale while ensuring that trust, integrity, and quality remain at the core of the process. He added that the future will depend on how effectively the community can handle the growing volume of research, evolving technologies, and shifting expectations while upholding the principles that underpin peer review. His remarks capture the dual challenge facing publishers: scaling a volunteer-driven process to meet industrial-scale demand without eroding the safeguards that give the process its legitimacy.

Peer Review Week itself has become a fixture of the scholarly communications calendar. Convened each September, it brings together stakeholders from across the publishing ecosystem, including researchers, reviewers, editors, and publishers worldwide, for a coordinated week of discussions, webinars, and resources. The decentralized format allows organizations to host their own events under a shared annual theme, which in recent years has touched on topics such as research integrity, identity in peer review, and the role of artificial intelligence. For 2026, the capacity theme places the sustainability of the review workforce at the center of the conversation, an issue that many editors describe as one of the most pressing operational problems in publishing today.

Editage’s program for the week is structured around several complementary formats. The centerpiece is a live panel discussion titled Reviewer Fatigue, Invisible Labor, and the Sustainability Problem, which will examine how reviewers can be better supported and whether the peer review model itself needs to evolve to address the growing demands placed on the system. The panel brings together three figures with distinct vantage points on the problem: Alice Meadows, an independent scholarly communications consultant and open research advocate; Daniel Gorelick, editor-in-chief of Biology Open and associate professor at Baylor College of Medicine; and Mario Malički, associate director of the Stanford Program on Research Rigor and Reproducibility and chair of the EASE Peer Review Committee.

The framing of the panel highlights concepts that have gained traction in recent years. Reviewer fatigue refers to the exhaustion experienced by researchers who receive a steady stream of review invitations, often from multiple journals simultaneously, and who may decline or delay responses as a result. Invisible labor describes the fact that peer review is largely unpaid, uncredited in many career evaluations, and performed on top of teaching, research, and administrative duties. Together, these dynamics raise questions about whether the traditional model, in which journals rely on the goodwill of volunteer reviewers, can remain sustainable as submission volumes grow, or whether new incentives, recognition mechanisms, or workflow innovations are required.

Beyond the panel, Editage has scheduled a live manuscript peer review walkthrough led by Dr. Raffaella Gozzelino. The session is designed to give researchers a firsthand view of how reviewers assess submissions, offering practical insights that authors can apply to strengthen their own manuscripts and better understand the process from the other side of the editorial workflow. For early-career researchers in particular, who are often asked to review without formal training, such demonstrations serve a dual purpose: they demystify the reviewer’s task and help cultivate the next generation of competent reviewers, which is itself part of any long-term answer to the capacity problem.

Artificial intelligence features prominently in this year’s program through an interview series titled Peer Review in the Age of AI: What Should Stay Human? The series asks experts to share their views on how AI is reshaping peer review and where human judgment, expertise, and oversight remain critical. Participants include Laura Dormer, editor-in-chief of Learned Publishing at the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP); Maryam Sayab, executive director of the Asian Council of Science Editors (ACSE); and Roohi Ghosh, ambassador for researcher success at CACTUS and vice chair of the EASE India Chapter. The question posed by the series is one that publishers and editors are actively debating: whether AI tools can help triage manuscripts, check statistical rigor, or assist reviewers, without displacing the human accountability on which the credibility of the process rests.

The partnership with EASE adds an institutional dimension to the event. Malički welcomed the collaboration, noting that EASE sees the week as an opportunity to engage in a conversation on the volume, speed, and quality of peer review. He pointed to one of EASE’s most viewed resources, the Peer Review Toolkit, which includes a guide on how to assess peer review quality, and said the organization is looking forward to conversations that can help update that guide. The remark underscores a practical outcome that events like Peer Review Week can produce: the refinement of shared standards and resources that editors and reviewers actually use, informed by the current state of debate across the community.

This year Editage is also extending the conversation geographically, taking the global discussion to researchers across Japan, Korea, and China with tailored events designed to bring broader perspectives to audiences beyond the English-speaking research community. The move acknowledges that the capacity challenge is global in nature: the growth in submissions is driven in large part by rapidly expanding research communities in Asia and elsewhere, and any sustainable solution will need to engage reviewers, editors, and authors across those regions rather than treating the problem as one confined to Western publishing houses. As the scholarly publishing ecosystem undergoes its current transition, the organizers argue, it is important to consider where peer review is headed and how the community can ensure that quality, trust, and integrity, the core pillars of the process, remain intact.

Participation in Editage’s Peer Review Week 2026 event, organized in partnership with EASE, is open to all, and sessions will be available on demand to registrants along with additional resources from the event. For a system that depends on voluntary labor and mutual trust, the week offers a rare moment of collective reflection. Whether the discussions yield concrete changes in how reviews are solicited, recognized, and supported remains to be seen, but the growing attention to reviewer fatigue, invisible labor, and the promise and limits of AI suggests that the capacity challenge has moved from the margins of editorial concern to the center of the industry’s agenda.

Subject of Research: The peer review capacity challenge in scholarly publishing and efforts to sustain volume, speed, and quality during Peer Review Week 2026

Article Title: Editage to explore the capacity challenge in Peer Review during the Peer Review Week 2026

Article References: Editage to explore the capacity challenge in Peer Review during the Peer Review Week 2026. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: peer review, Peer Review Week 2026, Editage, CACTUS, EASE, scholarly publishing, reviewer fatigue, invisible labor, artificial intelligence, research integrity, academic journals, peer review capacity

The research, published in the open-access journal Heliyon, was conducted by JiSu Jang and Jihea Choi, who set out to understand how environmental, behavioral, and cognitive factors interact to shape parenting behavior in a generation redefining family roles. Drawing on Bandura’s social cognitive theory, the team modeled marital intimacy and household labor division as environmental and behavioral factors, parental efficacy as the cognitive factor, and parenting engagement as the behavioral outcome. The framework allowed them to test whether confidence acts as the psychological bridge between a supportive family environment and active participation in childcare.

The context is a society in rapid transition. Historically, Korean parenting was organized around rigid gender divisions, with fathers serving as economic providers and mothers as primary caregivers. That structure is eroding quickly. According to Statistics Korea, 72.8 percent of 20,000 surveyed adults rejected the idea that men should work while women stay home. The Ministry of Gender Equality and Family reported that agreement with the belief that mothers should primarily handle child-rearing fell from 53.8 percent in 2016 to 17.4 percent in 2021, while paternity leave utilization climbed from 1.9 percent in 2005 to 24.5 percent in 2020. Similar shifts toward egalitarian caregiving are visible across many OECD countries, making the Korean case part of a broader global reorganization of family life.

To capture these dynamics empirically, the researchers surveyed 210 parents in Wonju City—105 fathers and 105 mothers—aged 20 to 40, each raising a single child between 1 and 36 months old. Data were collected between March and May 2024 following approval from the Yonsei University Wonju Severance Christian Hospital Institutional Review Board. Participants completed validated questionnaires measuring marital intimacy, household labor division, parental efficacy, and parenting engagement, with all instruments showing strong internal consistency. The sample was highly educated—81 percent held bachelor’s degrees—and predominantly employed in office work, reflecting the profile of contemporary urban Korean parents.

Analysis relied on partial least squares structural equation modeling, a statistical technique well suited to estimating complex mediation and moderation pathways with minimal distributional assumptions. The measurement model passed rigorous validity checks, including indicator reliability, convergent validity via average variance extracted, and discriminant validity through heterotrait–monotrait ratios. The final structural model performed well, explaining 22.6 percent of the variance in parental efficacy and 41.4 percent of the variance in parenting engagement, with fit indices such as a standardized root mean square residual of 0.089 falling within acceptable bounds.

The path coefficients told a clear story. Marital intimacy strongly predicted parental efficacy (β = 0.407, p < 0.001), and household labor division also contributed positively (β = 0.194, p = 0.038). Yet the direct effect of marital intimacy on parenting engagement was not statistically significant, while household labor division showed only a modest direct effect. Parental efficacy, by contrast, was a powerful predictor of engagement (β = 0.545, p < 0.001) with a large effect size. Mediation analysis revealed that parental efficacy fully mediated the link between marital intimacy and engagement, accounting for 78.9 percent of the total effect, and partially mediated the link between household labor division and engagement, accounting for 36.1 percent.

The most provocative finding concerned gender. Parental role significantly moderated the relationship between household labor division and parental efficacy (β = −0.457, p = 0.001), and the direction of the association flipped between fathers and mothers. As the perceived fairness of household task division increased, parental efficacy rose among fathers—from a predicted 110.9 to 112.2 on the efficacy scale—but fell among mothers, from 105.4 to 103.7. In other words, the same behavioral condition carried opposite psychological meanings depending on which parent experienced it.

The authors interpret this divergence through the lens of persistent gendered expectations. For fathers, participating in household labor may represent an expansion of their caregiving role, reinforcing paternal identity, role satisfaction, and confidence. For mothers, an equitable division of labor may not confer the same psychological benefit; instead, it may be entangled with greater parenting-related burden and role stress, mechanisms the study did not directly measure but which previous research has linked to lower efficacy. The result suggests that behavioral equality can coexist with unequal cognitive and emotional experiences, echoing the concept of invisible labor—the unacknowledged mental and emotional workload that often continues to fall on mothers even in egalitarian households.

These dynamics may be especially pronounced among Millennial and Generation Z parents, whom the study treats as a single cohort shaped by a shared contemporary context rather than comparing them as separate generations. This group tends to construct parenting roles through negotiation and individual readiness rather than obligation, and their constant exposure to digital parenting information and social comparison environments amplifies the role of perceived competence. For some parents, abundant online resources build confidence; for others, they breed uncertainty and self-doubt. Either way, psychological readiness appears to outweigh structural equality in determining whether favorable conditions translate into engaged parenting.

The practical implications are significant. The findings suggest that interventions should prioritize building parental efficacy through mastery experiences, skill-based training, and supportive feedback, while couple-based programs that strengthen marital intimacy may indirectly boost engagement by reinforcing each partner’s confidence. Policy measures such as paternal leave and flexible work arrangements could support fathers’ involvement, but the authors caution that such policies must also address the visible and invisible burdens mothers carry, including emotional and cognitive labor. The study’s limitations—a cross-sectional design that precludes causal inference, self-reported measures vulnerable to social desirability bias, a single-city Korean sample, and a household labor measure based on only four items—warrant careful interpretation. Still, the core message resonates well beyond Korea: in the transition to egalitarian parenting, fairness in chores is only the beginning, and how parents feel about their own competence may ultimately decide how fully they show up for their children.

Subject of Research: Mediation and moderation effects of parental efficacy, marital intimacy, and household labor division on parenting engagement among Millennial and Generation Z parents

Article Title: Parenting engagement of Millennial and Generation Z parents in infant and toddler care: mediation and moderation effects

Article References: Jang, J., & Choi, J. (2026). Parenting engagement of Millennial and Generation Z parents in infant and toddler care: mediation and moderation effects. Heliyon, 12(15), Article e45443. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45443

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2026.e45443

Keywords: parenting engagement, parental efficacy, Millennial parents, Generation Z, household labor division, marital intimacy, South Korea, social cognitive theory, gender roles, infant care, PLS-SEM, invisible labor