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Short abstract:

I analyze peer review practices in psychology, a field said to be in the midst of a replication crisis. I focus on how experimentation with publishing workflows, review formats, and business models reconfigure the mutual obligation dynamics between researchers that underpin the peer review economy.

Long abstract:

Peer review is currently said to be in crisis, in the sense that many journals – even very reputed ones – find it difficult to recruit sufficient numbers of reviewers in a timely fashion. A common response by analysts and academic practitioners is to call for more incentives to take on peer review work, which is typically not formally acknowledged and rewarded by institutions. In this presentation, I challenge the behaviorist notion that there are simply insufficient incentives for peer review. While there is undoubtedly a mismatch between rewards for publishing and rewards for peer review, I argue that peer review is carried out in the context of a surplus of already existing but often invisible and undertheorized incentives on the level of academic communities and the political economy of publishing. Understanding their interaction is crucial to developing a better understanding of peer review systems. The empirical basis for my research is a set of 40 interviews with researchers in the field of psychology. Some ten years ago, many observers began to state that the field is in the midst of a so-called reproducibility crisis, which has in turn fueled significant experimentation with publishing workflows, review formats, and novel publishing business models. Concrete innovations include preprint review, registered reports, soundness-only review, various types of open peer review, and new APC models. I will show how such innovations configure experiences of mutual obligation between authors, reviewers and publishing venues, which I argue are central to the workings of peer review systems.