Contemporary science depends heavily on peer review. Usually without compensation, experts evaluate the reliability and quality of work contributed by other scientists. The system of peer review now confronts serious challenges. The volume of scientific work that requires peer scrutiny has grown exponentially, placing pressure on reviewers’ availability. Academic publishing has been challenged by two trends. First, uncompensated peer reviewers are less willing to offer evaluations. The rate of declining invitations to review has dramatically increased. Second, commercial publishers charge authors exorbitant fees to publish their work. Younger authors, and those from less wealthy countries, can’t afford these charges. We offer several remedies to address these problems. These include reevaluating the relationships between universities or scholarly societies and for-profit publishing houses. An alternative system might return publishing to university libraries and scholarly societies. The system would be funded by the hundreds of millions of dollars that academia currently transfers to commercial enterprises.