The Care-ful Reviewer: Peer Review as if People Mattered

Abstract

Peer review is generally understood as the hallmark of scholarly communication, the point of distinction between serious, research-informed publishing and less-trustworthy, ephemeral, or even spurious sources. And yet, a close examination of peer review practices and the growing literature reveals peer review as a kind of black box concealing a tangle of differing rationales, spectres, and imagined standards, often mutually incompatible. Peer review is not monolithic and indeed scholarly societies and discourses would do well to come to a more explicit agreement about what they mean by peer review and what they exactly want it to do. In the context of open social scholarship as it has been defined by the INKE community, what do we want peer review to be, and to do for us? This essay proposes a version of peer review that places care and care ethics at the centre of its operations, serving a more generous model of scholarship that values people and relationships.