Medieval journal launches second phase of open peer-review project

Palgrave Macmillan's postmedieval, a journal of medieval cultural studies, is launching the second phase of its online, open, crowd-review project on MediaCommons. 

The crowd review will run from 6 November to 15 December 2013, and will enable anyone who would like to constructively review a special issue of the journal to do so, in an open and transparent way, says the publisher. Part of this approach aims to get input from multiple perspectives, amateur to professional, non-specialist to specialist.

The crowd review process will build on the success of the first open peer-review trial, which was run through Wordpress. The first trial generated over 6,000 visits, and 33 unique commenters (excluding contributors), who submitted a total of 45 sets of detailed comments. 

Eileen Joy, who is co-editor of postmedieval, said: 'We definitely need to be moving in the direction of more open peer review, which includes not just the specialised experts of one’s narrow sub-fields but also members of the more broad intellectual community, from all levels of academia, within and outside the university.'