Peer review takes a lot of time. I am writing reviews for 5-10 journals and this takes a reasonable amount of my time. I try to the work correctly, as I would expect others to do for me. In particle physics, this is often the case. I like to believe we are leaders in peer reviewing: open access journals, open access reviews, development of platforms like inspire or the arxiv, etc. It is possible to track citations and interest gathered by papers well before they are accepted by a journal today, at least in my field.
I would like to add that recognition is not only achieved through publications. Conferences, seminars, etc... everything counts to make you research work more visible and recognized by your respective community.
Let us hope, that biology and biochemistry will move in that direction as well! Many things you mentioned are not applicable yet, e.g. are the life sciences still in the tight grip of big journals, and although there is bioRxiv, it is frowned upon by many influencial people in the field.
And might I add something to the "Recognition"-list: Education! The ability to teach and explain should be an actual criterium for some kind of recognition and reward, as this ability is lacking in many places. Researchers, lass able in this respect, should aspire this as much as they aspire papers and findings, but without reward, it is often disregarded.
In my university, we have special (monetary) prizes for people investing their time in education. This is something I found particularly great, as usually lecturers and professors are paid to teach but evaluated through their research.
It would be even better if the evaluation was done through looking at their quality in education. Money is a nice incentive, but all too often I witness that people with poor teaching skills are hired because of their better scientific output. But at least at a university, both is important!
Yeah, this is not very common, unfortunately :(