There are a variety of kinds of peer review, depending upon the circumstances of disciplinary practice, the particular form of scholarly work, and the approach that the author(s) wish to pursue concerning the nature of their work. Anonymity is an important, and contested, issue in conversations around peer review. Ableist terminology (“blind” peer review) is no longer preferred. Here is a quick overview of the types of peer review routinely used by scholarly publishers to evaluate work (from ACP’s Peer Review Commitments and Guidelines):
Partly-Closed Review: Reviewers may be informed of the author’s identity, but the author is not informed of the identity of the reviewers. Publication occurs after the author’s revisions in response to reviewers’ comments satisfy the editors and the Editorial Board.
Fully-Closed Review: The identity of the author is not disclosed to the reviewers, and the identity of the reviewers is not disclosed to the author. Publication is contingent on the author responding to the critiques and commentary offered by reviewers to the satisfaction of the editors and the Editorial Board.
Peer-to-Peer Review: The identities of both author and reviewers are disclosed each to the other. The process may result in more substantial exchanges and revisions to the work. Such a review process may eventuate from a process that began as Fully- or Partly-Closed; in other cases it may be employed for interdisciplinary work in which authors collaborate and review each other’s contributions. Choosing to employ such a review process is always done with the advance approval of the Editorial Board.
Open Review: The work has been made publicly available through some accessible platform, and comment has been invited from a community of scholars. Various platforms (such as CommentPress or hypothes.is) may be utilized for organizing and curating the comment process; and each case may stipulate the terms by which reviewers may contribute to the work (e.g., anonymous, with names, with names and institutional affiliation). The selection of platforms and processes is undertaken on a case-by-case basis, and is shaped by those considerations that will best serve the work.
The history of peer review is deeply tied to the emergence of academic disciplines and also, as Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Mario Biagioli, and others have argued, to state censorship. Before the advent of scholarly societies that assessed the value of articles and scholarly contributions, royal licenses required for the printing of any material had to be sought and these were obtainable only if works didn’t contain anything heretical or seditious. “Gradually, however,” Fitzpatrick notes, “scholarly societies facilitated a transition in scientific peer review from state censorship to self-policing, allowing them a degree of autonomy but simultaneously creating… a disciplinary technology, one that produces the conditions of possibility for the academic disciplines that it authorizes” (Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, 21).
These origins continue to shape peer review, and perceptions of the process, in myriad ways. Questions of expertise and evaluation are never neutral: who is recognized as an authority, and by whom; which forms of language are legitimized; what kinds knowledge and from which groups are amplified by scholarly publications; which readers and reading communities research and scholarship draw on and circulate among--all of these issues require sustained interrogation and action on the part of scholarly publishers if systemic inequities in knowledge production can begin to be addressed.
Alice Meadows has identified eight ways to tackle diversity and inclusion in peer review, including addressing personal and institutional biases, rethinking closed and open review practices, and collecting data on reviewers. Similarly, the Race B4 Race Executive Board has issued a call for publishers to re-examine processes around editorial board membership, anonymity of readers, and evaluative criteria. These and other voices are seeking to reframe peer review as a collaborative process rather than a gatekeeping mechanism in the hopes of charting a more just and equitable future for scholarly communications.