Open collaborative peer review report - Maxwell and Bordini - MORPHSS Peer Review Pilot - JEP Special Issue 2026

This document is the open collaborative peer review report for John W Maxwell and Alessandra Bordini's article entitled 'A Prototyping Renaissance: Form, content, and scale in open publication in the humanities', forming part of the forthcoming Journal of Electronic Publishing Special Issue on Open Research for the Humanities and Social Sciences. As part of the Work Package 4 of the MORPHSS (Materialising Open Research Practices in the Humanities and Social Sciences) Project on piloting collaborative open review practices, we set out to design a two-stage peer review process of 'opening out' the articles to different scholarly collectives and different kinds of feedback. The two stages were: a collective review process in which 2-3 peer reviewers were invited independently read each paper and then meet to discuss the work and provide a summary of their feedback in a brief, collectively written report; and the other an annotative process in which all the special issue authors were invited to read each other's work and interact with the papers in the form of annotations. The aim of this process was to investigate ways in which the peer review process can open onto more collaborative, constructive and collegial forms of feedback and co-creation than those permitted within traditional, 'closed' peer review processes. Peer reviewers were given the option to remain anonymous, where preferred. This record contains one of the collaborative peer review reports created as part of this process. MORPHSS is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Wellcome Trust, and UK Research and Innovation's (UKRI)'s Research England Development (RED) Fund.