Open Peer-Review as Multimodal Scholarship

In contrast to the vaunted double-blind peer-review process, regarded by many as the gold standard for ensuring academic rigor, [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies’ reviewers know the names of the scholars whose work they are evaluating—and even more important, they sign their names on those reviews, which appear alongside the videographic works accepted for publication. The effect is not just to remedy the double-blindness of both parties (authors or producers and reviewers) but also to provide the ultimate “consumers” of research, the journal’s readers or viewers, with insight into the process as well.

Indeed, the transparency of evaluative standards to outside parties is a key component of [in]Transition’s effort to achieve what the journal’s “About” page refers to as “disciplinary validation” for videographic work.¹ For without making the process visible to the outside, there is nothing to guarantee that publication decisions are made fairly and according to principles that, although they might not be shared in all particulars by all scholars in the field, at least are capable of receiving consensus from a broad community of scholarly peers. Of course, the advantage of the double-blind process is that (anonymous) reviewers are free to express their honest opinions, candidly and without fear of retribution or other negative consequences, while also ensuring that (temporarily anonymized) authors are judged on the basis of their scholarship rather than their past achievements, current standing, popularity, or power. Clearly, compromising the anonymity of either side potentially compromises the value and reliability of the review process itself. Unless, that is, the review process as a whole is opened to a further instance of public scrutiny or community “review.”

Whether or not open review is the ideal process for all scholarship is open to debate. I tend to doubt it. But it is clear how the process contributes to [in]Transition’s goal of “creat[ing] a context for understanding [videographic work]—and validating it—as a new mode of scholarly writing for the discipline of cinema and media studies and related fields.” For at stake is not just a new method for validating a familiar form of scholarship, but a method for validating a new form of scholarship as scholarship in the first place. The publication of reviews, signed by the reviewers—whose own scholarship can be tracked down and whose authority to evaluate the work can thus be verified—is an important part of this enterprise, because it initiates a conversation (rather than providing the “final word”) on what we can expect from this new type of scholarship, what constitutes valuable work, and why we should take notice of it at all. In this way, the journal’s readers and viewers—a public consisting of students, practitioners, established researchers, and the scholarly community at large—are invited to “engage . . . in this stimulating and important dialogue concerning the future of videographic work as a scholarly form.”

So much for the journal’s own argument for the open peer-review process, implicit in the journal’s public-facing statements about itself and its guidelines for contributors. But while I agree wholeheartedly with this account of open review and its merits, it should be noted that what it accounts for above all is indeed the public-facing significance of the process—its significance for the public already described here. Beyond this, however, the open-review process has important implications for the relations that authors and reviewers maintain with respect to one another—and above all for the experience of the reviewer who agrees to perform this role in public.

The latter impact was not at first evident to me, but it is just as important to account for this transformation, which takes the formerly invisible labor of the peer reviewer and makes it eminently visible. The open review, and the experience of writing one, sits somewhere between the “private” existence of the traditional peer review and the public performance of a commissioned book review—or even original scholarship itself. Having written several of these reviews for [in]Transition, I can attest to the...