Marie-Gabrielle Verbergt and Sjang ten Hagen, in their introduction to a recent Minerva special issue:
This Special Issue aims to bring these present-day discussions in a productive dialogue with the past, by exploring the relatively recent invention of the anonymous pre-publication “peer review” of research outputs as part of a longer history of scholar-to-scholar evaluation in the humanities.
The history of all aspects of scholarly publishing—peer review, yes, but also the journal and its funding system—should be harnessed against resignation, the sense of nothing-can-change and it-was-always-thus. Verbergt and ten Hagen make the point in their intro:
In a climate of much skepticism and critique of the contemporary peer review process, bringing a broad array of past evaluative practices into view can potentially inspire the future of peer review. By revealing the broad spectrum of evaluative practices that have historically been employed within the humanities, we challenge the present sanctified status of academic (double-)blind and external peer review as the gold standard for quality control in the humanities.
History can, and should, ventilate our imaginations of what’s possible in scholarly publishing.