You can just review things: A digital ethnography of informal peer review

TL;DR

This study explores informal peer review on open platforms, revealing diverse reviewer roles, self-organization patterns, evaluation strategies, and resistance faced, highlighting its potential as an emerging scholarly infrastructure.

Contribution

It provides the first detailed ethnographic analysis of informal peer review practices across multiple digital communities, emphasizing their diversity and fragility.

Findings

Reviewers are diverse and self-organize across digital spaces.

Informal peer review faces resistance from traditional scholarly gatekeepers.

It is an emerging, scalable evidence infrastructure for scholarly critique.

Abstract

Across scholarly communities, manuscripts face similar evaluative rituals: editors invite experts to privately assess submissions through formal peer reviews. This closed, loosely structured, and publisher-mediated process is now being supplemented by critiques on open, distributed platforms. We call this practice, a blend of three open peer review variants, informal peer review as it is accessible to outsiders, unmediated by publishers, and conducted across public platforms. Informal peer reviewers range from occasional error detectors to experienced sleuths who identify plagiarism, fraud, errors, conflicts of interest, and conceptual flaws. They may interpret methods, clarify jargon, assess value, and connect to related work. Here, we asked four questions: (1) Who are informal peer reviewers? (2) Where do they work? (3) How do they evaluate research? and (4) What are their impacts? To answer these questions, we conducted a cross-platform digital ethnography with participant observation. We traced discourse across communities over four months and revisited cases after nine and twelve months. From 15 communities, we selected 12 case mentions (10 unique cases) and 8 meta-commentaries from 26 reviewers. Using open and axial coding, we generated 1,080 codes and four themes: reviewers are a motley crew, they self-organize across subpar digital spaces, use deep, uncommon strategies, and they face resistance from authors, publishers, and editors. Informal peer review, we concluded, is a fragile, minimally governed patchwork of people, platforms, and practices, as well as an emerging evidence infrastructure that can be scaled up. We advise advocates and tool-builders to evolve informal review tools, communities, training, and governance by connecting to scholars' values, reducing participation friction, and rewarding attempts to extend the scholarly dialogue.