Date: 28 January 2026
Time: 4 p.m. – 6 p.m. (CEE)
The academic publishing system has been in crisis for years. Publishers strive to make profits; academics have to publish works; reviewers are supposed to provide comprehensive feedback for free—and in the humanities especially these dynamics shape an overburdened, gatekeeping system, and largely opaque ecosystem. This round table, organized by The February Journal, will explore how the current institutional arrangements around peer review demand labor, enforce conformity, and reproduce barriers that are especially acute in the humanities, where norms of evidence, interpretation, and evaluation differ from those in the natural sciences.
What does it mean when peer review, an essential mechanism of scholarly legitimacy, becomes synonymous with delay, exclusion, and obscurity? Across disciplines, peer review was intended as a mechanism to validate quality and improve scholarship, but it now often functions as a bottleneck: manuscript volumes grow, but the pool of willing, qualified, and available reviewers shrinks, leading to fatigue and inconsistent evaluations. Scholars in the humanities routinely invest significant unpaid time in reviewing, yet the criteria for acceptance often remain unclear, and decisions can reflect entrenched hierarchies rather than substantive critique (Ghildiyal 2025).
The round table will examine the gatekeeping role of peer review: how editorial boards and reviewer networks control access to publication and academic advancement and how this power intersects with institutional prestige, disciplinary boundaries, and career incentives. We will interrogate the transparency deficit: blurred review criteria, anonymous decisions, and limited accountability slow knowledge circulation and obscure how judgments are made. Calls for transparency reform in other fields underscore the urgency of thinking across domains (Editorial: It’s about time for transparency… 2025). Finally, we will also discuss innovative approaches to peer review and their reception by academic communities, focusing on how innovations and changes in peer review processes may seem suspicious, for they might be seen as compromising rigor and watering down quality control (Bredenbröker et al. 2025).
Our discussion will bring together various perspectives to interrogate whether the towering expectations placed on peer review still serve their professed purpose, and what alternatives might look like. How can we reimagine peer review as a fair, inclusive, and transparent practice that supports robust scholarship without reinforcing existing inequities?
The event is organized by Maria Dębińska and Katerina Suverina as part of The February Journal's issue 'The Author is Dead, Long Live Co-Authors! Collaborative Work in the Humanities.'
Participants
Alonso Gamarra (PhD) is a Peruvian anthropologist who earned his PhD from McGill University in Montreal, Canada. His research combines visual, ethical, and medical anthropology to explore the techniques of governance and processes of subject formation taking shape at the margins of the state in post‑conflict Peru, focusing on the experiences of grassroots movements confronting the forms of extractivism and authoritarianism woven into liberal statecraft. Currently, Gamarra holds a postdoctoral fellowship from the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et culture (FRQSC) at the University of Toronto (2024‑2026), and he is a Curatorial and Design Fellow at Visual Anthropology Review (2025‑2027).
Ali Feser (PhD) is a cultural anthropologist and interdisciplinary artist. She teaches at Clarkson University and is co-editor of Visual Anthropology Review. Her current book project, Photochemical Life in the Imaging Capital of the World, is a historical ethnography of the U.S. twentieth century through the materiality of Kodak film.
Haseeb Irfanulla (PhD) is a biologist-turned-development facilitator, who often introduces himself as a research enthusiast. Over the past 26 years, Haseeb has been working for different international environment and development organizations, academic and research institutions, funders, and government agencies in different capacities. Currently, he is an independent consultant in environment, climate change and research system. Co-chair of Environment & Sustainability Committee of European Association of Science Editors (EASE), an editorial board member of Learned Publishing, an associate at INASP and Research Consulting Ltd., and a Chef of The Scholarly Kitchen, Haseeb advocates for justice, sustainability, climate action, and resilience of the scholarly publishing ecosystem. Haseeb has a PhD in aquatic ecology from the University of Liverpool, United Kingdom.
Jessica Rohmann (PhD) is an epidemiologist with a focus on causal inference from observational health data and on improving the quality of methods used in applied health research more broadly. She developed the Peerspectives peer review training program, where early-career researchers learn about and critically examine the publication system, develop skills needed for peer review practice, and perform real peer reviews for leading journals in small groups alongside an experienced editor-mentor. Jessica is also responsible for the ‘Responsible Research’ strategic area of Charité Strategy 2030 and a member of the Steering Committee for the Berlin University Alliance’s Objective 3, which is dedicated to advancing research quality and value.
Moses März (PhD) is a researcher, editor, and mapmaker based in Berlin. After studying political science at Freie Universität Berlin and African Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, he joined the editorial team of the Chimurenga Chronic in Cape Town. In 2018, he co-founded, together with Philipp Hege, the independent publication project Mittel und Zweck. März received a PhD from the University of Potsdam in 2021. In 2022, his work was exhibited as part of the 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art. He currently works at the Research Unit Collaborations, University of Potsdam, Germany.
Moderator
Katerina Suverina is a co-founder of The February Journal. She is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz, Germany. In her research, teaching, and museum work, she is concerned with critical theory, queer studies, medical humanities, and gender studies. She has also written on trauma, contemporary Russophone cinema, and young adult literature. Since 2020, she has been leading a research project on the cultural history of HIV/AIDS in the late USSR and contemporary Russia.
The February Journal is an independent interdisciplinary academic publication that is peer-reviewed and available in diamond open access. Published by Berlin Universities Publishing, it presents research that uses decentering, queer, feminist, decolonial, and autotheoretical methodologies to address urgent cultural, social, and political questions. The journal understands knowledge holistically and seeks to integrate artistic and activist-based research into academic practice. Open to professionals of all career levels, it puts special effort into helping less experienced authors publish their research. The journal also welcomes work in a variety of genres, celebrating innovative ways of presentation.
References
Bredenbröker, I., Suverina, K.; Zavadski, A. (2025) Introduction. The author is dead, long live co-authors! Collaborative work in the humanities. The February Journal, 05: 5–12. DOI: https://doi.org/10.60633/tfj.i05.132
Ghildiyal, A. (2025, July 17). Guest post: Gatekeepers of meaning — Peer review, AI, and the fight for human attention. The Scholarly Kitchen. Accessed 7.01.2026. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2025/07/17/guest-post-gatekeepers-of-meaning-peer-review-ai-and-the-fight-for-human-attention/
Editorial: It’s about time for transparency in peer review. (2025, July 28). Chemical & Engineering News. Accessed 7.01.2026. https://cen.acs.org/policy/publishing/Editorial-transparency-in-peer-review/103/web/2025/07