Culture Machine on Open Peer Review

Culture Machine has always been a peer reviewed journal. The peer review process is organised by guest editors in collaboration with principal editors, who help to identify potential peer reviewers, analyse their reports or evaluations, and make final decisions on whether to accept or reject revised contributions. Peer reviewing has been, in sum, done in accordance with scholarly convention, which includes anonymity.

As a journal of culture and theory that belongs to a scholarly network with an increasingly critical view of the capitalist dynamics of scientific communication and with an awareness of the need for a radically different future for work in the humanities, in its Vol 22 ‘Anthropocene Infrapolitics’ Culture Machine started experimenting with the peer review process, turning it into a non-anonymous writing collaboration and/or an intellectual debate, trying thus to divert the established meaning of peer reviewing as routine ‘quality control’ towards a decisive questioning of the existential task of the contemporary humanities.

Always interested in experimentation, intellectual risk, critical responsibility, and the radical democratisation of knowledge creation processes, Culture Machine has now decided to follow up on that earlier gesture with a fully-fledged open peer review process in ‘Publishing After Progress’. Here, the aim of open peer review is to enact the analyses and questions developed by academic communities regarding the standards and parameters of peer review as an expert guarantee of scholarly quality, relevance, or value.

Culture Machine will continue to be a peer reviewed journal, and the decision whether to make the process for a given issue either open and experimental, or more conventionally anonymous, will be taken jointly by principal editors and guest editors, whose own diverse experiences, practical contexts and reflective arguments on peer review will hopefully nourish and expand the critical proposal of ‘Publishing After Progress’.