DESCRIPTION

Disciplines include: digital humanities, economics, geography, history, interdisciplinary qualitative research, law and criminology, library and information science, literature, media studies, philosophy, public policy, sociology

A form of process openness, open peer review is defined by Ross-Hellauer (2017, 3) as 'an umbrella term for a number of overlapping ways that peer review models can be adapted in line with the aims of Open Science, including making reviewer and author identities open, publishing review reports and enabling greater participation in the peer review process.' While open peer review is less established in AHSS areas than STEM disciplines (Perković Paloš et al., 2023, 4708; Seeber, 2022, 74), it does exist as an emergent practice, with experimentation taking place in distinct and discipline-specific ways (Karhulahti & Backe, 2021, 2). As we outline below, open peer review in AHSS is often explored in terms of open participation and open interaction, in contrast to the dominant emphasis on open identities and reports within STEM disciplines (Ross-Hellauer, 2017, 7-9). We focus largely in this account on the peer review of research publications (articles and monographs) rather than other outputs such as datasets.

The use of open identities (in which the identities of authors and reviewers are known to one another) is used in a small number of AHSS journals including The Qualitative Report (TQR) and the Journal of Information Architecture, and is available according to author choice in such journals as History of Media Studies and the University of Ghent's Law & Criminology Journal. Both open identities and open reports (in which review reports are published alongside articles) are used in journals and platforms including the collective writing section of Educational Philosophy and Theory (Peters et al., 2020; for an example, see Stewart et al., 2023) and Wellcome Open Research, which publishes research by Wellcome-funded authors, including in the fields of sociology and social care. The latter platform also provides an example of post-publication peer review, a form of open peer review in which articles are openly available prior to and during the process of review, with reviews published alongside articles once they are conducted (Skains, 2020, 948-9).

The use of open participation in review (in which review takes place not, or not solely, by expert invited peer reviewers, but by broader communities or readerships who are invited to comment on a submitted paper) is used by the World Economic Association journal Economic Thought, which follows a process in which '[o]nce submissions have been vetted by the editors [...] [,] [p]apers (with named authors) [are] posted on the journal's Open Peer Discussion forum for a minimum of eight weeks in order to solicit comment and debate' after which editors reach a decision (for a discussion of this approach, see Ietto-Gillies, 2012). A similar approach has also been used in one-off experiments in other journals, such as the Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas's 2019 special section on 'DR2: Distant Reading and Data-Driven Research in the History of Philosophy' (Bonino, 2019) and special issues of Shakespeare Quarterly (2010) and the Journal of Media Practice (2018) (see Examples section). This approach has also been used for books, with notable examples including Kathleen Fitzpatrick's Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (2011a - for a discussion, see Fitzpatrick, 2011b, 196-7) and Dougherty and Nawrotzki's Writing History in the Digital Age (2013). The interest in such experimentation within digital humanities fields might be seen as a logical extension of these disciplines' interest in the possibilities and affordances of digital scholarship. Approaches to open participation in review is often enabled at a technical level by open annotation tools such as Hypothes.is (Bertino & Staines, 2019; Skains, 2020), enabling highly localised feedback and author response.

AHSS disciplines have also seen the adoption of and experimentation with interactive forms of open peer review, in which 'reviewers interact online with the authors [...] for a more open and collaborative review' (Barroga, 2020, 3). In Fennia: International Journal of Geography, the review process includes 'a discussion between authors and reviewers, facilitated by the responsible editor' (for a discussion, see Kallio, 2023); while the Public Philosophy Journal uses a Community Collaborative Review process in which a review team comprised of authors, editors and reviewers work collaboratively to develop each piece. A similar approach was taken in a long-form context in the COPIM/OHP Pilot Project Combinatorial Books: Gathering Flowers (Adema, 2023). Other forms of interactive peer review include the symposium process used by LSE Public Policy Review and the process of peer review by podcast that has taken place in disciplines including library and information science (Sewell, 2023, 2025), benefitting from the possibilities for generative discussion offered by this medium. Such approaches highlight the fact that in open peer review, especially in an AHSS context, openness often takes place within and between specific groups and communities rather than necessarily in a universal sense, although as in the podcast examples, both can be the case.

The long tradition of publishing academic book reviews has also been considered a distinctly AHSS form of open peer review by scholars including Hones (2025), Knöchelmann (2019, 12) and Manning (2025), for whom 'book reviewers worked as peer reviewers to participate in historiography for wider, albeit qualified, publics' (n.p.). Book reviewing may be considered a form of open post-publication peer review where book reviews are openly accessible and/or placed in publications that reach audiences outside academia.

Further reading / resources

Adema, J. (2023). ‘Experimenting with Workflows for Open Peer Review’. Blogpost. Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.b86d0b83

Karhulahti, V.-M. and Backe, H-J. (2021). ‘Transparency of Peer Review: A Semi-Structured Interview Study with Chief Editors from Social Sciences and Humanities’, Research Integrity and Peer Review, 6(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41073-021-00116-4

Knöchelmann, M. (2019). ‘Open Science in the Humanities, or: Open Humanities?’, Publications (Basel), 7(4). https://doi.org/10.3390/publications7040065

Pack Sheffield, J. (2013). ‘Open Peer Review: Collective Intelligence as a Framework for Theorizing Approaches to Peer Review in the Humanities’, Nano (New York, N.Y.) (3). https://nanocrit.com/index.php/issues/issue3/open-peer-review-collective-intelligence-framework-theorizing-approaches-peer-review-humanities

Ross-Hellauer, T. (2017). ‘What Is Open Peer Review? A Systematic Review’, F1000 Research, 6. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.11369.2

References

Adema, J. (2023). 'Experimenting with Workflows for Open Peer Review'. Blogpost. Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). https://doi.org/10.21428/785a6451.b86d0b83 [accessed 01/12/25]

Barroga, E. (2020). 'Innovative Strategies for Peer Review', Journal of Korean Medical Science, 35(20). https://doi.org/10.3346/jkms.2020.35.e138

Bertino, A.C. and Staines, H. (2019). 'Enabling a Conversation Across Scholarly Monographs through Open Annotation', Publications (Basel), 7(2). https://doi.org/10.3390/publications7020041

Bonino, G. (2019). 'Introduction to the Open Peer-Reviewed Section on DR2 Methodology Examples', Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas JIHI, 8(16), 4–5. https://doi.org/10.13135/2280-8574/4301

Dougherty, J. and Nawrotzki, K. (2013). Writing History in the Digital Age. 1st ed. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. https://doi.org/10.3998/dh.12230987.0001.001

Fitzpatrick, K. (2011a). Planned obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy. 1st ed. New York: New York University Press. https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9780814728963.001.0001

Fitzpatrick, K. (2011b). 'Peer Review, Judgment, and Reading', Profession, 2011(1), 196–201. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41714119 [accessed 01/12/25]

Hones, H.C. (2025). 'Post-publication Reviews, Peer Comments, and Discipline Formation in Art History', Minerva: A Review of Science, Learning and Policy, 63, 731-746. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-025-09600-3

Ietto-Gillies, G. (2012). 'The Evaluation of Research Papers in the XXI Century. The Open Peer Discussion system of the World Economics Association', Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience, 6, 54. https://doi.org/10.3389/fncom.2012.00054

Kallio, K.P. (2023). 'The Vital Importance of Being Open: Reflections on Peer Reviewing in Scholarly Publishing', Scottish Geographical Journal, 139(1–2), 150–159. https://doi.org/10.1080/14702541.2023.2187447

Karhulahti, V.-M. and Backe, H.-J. (2021). 'Transparency of Peer Review: A Semi-structured Interview Study with Chief Editors from Social Sciences and Humanities', Research Integrity and Peer Review, 6(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41073-021-00116-4

Knöchelmann, M. (2019). 'Open Science in the Humanities, or: Open Humanities?', Publications (Basel), 7(4). https://doi.org/10.3390/publications7040065

Manning, D. (2025). 'A History of Reviewing History Books: Post-publication "Peer Review", Historiography and its Publics, c.1700–c.2000', Minerva: A Review of Science, Learning and Policy, 63, 747-771. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-025-09603-0

Perković Paloš, A. et al. (2023). 'Linguistic and Semantic Characteristics of Articles and Peer Review Reports in Social Sciences and Medical and Health Sciences: Analysis of Articles Published in Open Research Central', Scientometrics, 128(8), 4707–4729. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-023-04771-w

Peters, M. A., Brighouse, S., Tesar, M., Sturm, S., & Jackson, L. (2020). 'The Open Peer Review Experiment in Educational Philosophy and Theory (EPAT)'. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 55(2), 133–140. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2020.1846519

Ross-Hellauer, T. (2017). 'What Is Open Peer Review? A Systematic Review', F1000 research, 6. https://doi.org/10.12688/f1000research.11369.2

Seeber, M. (2022). 'Efficacy, Efficiency, and Models of Journal Peer review: The Known and Unknown in the Social Sciences' in T.C.E. Engels and E. Kulczycki (eds), Handbook on Research Assessment in the Social Sciences. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar. pp 67–82. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781800372559.00011

Sewell, A. (2025). 'Giving Voice to Community: Embodied Scholarship, Generative Discussion, and Other Affordances of Scholarly Podcasting', The Journal of Electronic Publishing, 28(1), 143. https://doi.org/10.3998/jep.6036

Sewell, A. (2023). 'A Case for Open Peer Review Podcasting in Academic Librarianship', Portal (Baltimore, Md.), 23(4), 799–818. https://doi.org/10.1353/pla.2023.a908702

Skains, R.L. (2020). 'Discourse or Gimmick? Digital Marginalia in Online Scholarship', Convergence (London, England), 26(4), 942–955. https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856519831988

Stewart, G.T. et al. (2023). 'Surviving Academic Whiteness: Perspectives from the Pacific', Educational Philosophy and Theory, 55(2), 141–152. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2021.2010542