About Re-Imagining Peer Review

A Mellon Foundation grant project

CELJ, a project of its fiscal sponsor K|N Consultants, Ltd., has been awarded a grant of $555,000 from the Mellon Foundation to advance equitable and inclusive practices in peer review and scholarly journal publishing within the humanities. This project will survey key stakeholders—editors, authors, peer reviewers, and publishers—to examine peer review models, methods, and experiences, while identifying ways to improve them. Guided by a diverse advisory board, CELJ will release a public dataset and report based on the findings. The project will also develop workshops and toolkits that explore collaborative, inclusive, and open peer-review practices, providing actionable alternatives to traditional double-anonymous models. By aligning peer-review processes with principles of diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI), and knowledge justice, CELJ seeks to reshape scholarly publishing for the humanities.

Re-Imagining Peer Review Survey

CELJ is working on a large-scale survey of peer review in humanities journal publishing, especially as it intersects with principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion. The project team is soliciting survey question suggestions from editors, publishers, reviewers, and authors in humanities and HSS disciplines. Are there areas of peer review (even those not necessarily related to DEI efforts) and of journal publishing more broadly for which you would like to see data collected?

If so, we encourage you to submit those questions—as many as you would like—by February 15, 2025, for consideration as we build out the survey.

Project Team

  • Cheryl Ball

    PI, Executive Director of CELJ and Secretary of K|N Consultants, Ltd.

  • Sarah Salter

    Co-PI, Professor of Pedagogy and Director of the Writing Program at Emory University

  • Eugenia Zuroski

    Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University

  • Debra Rae Cohen

    Professor of English Emerita at University of South Carolina

  • Christina Cedillo

    Associate Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at the University of Houston-Clear Lake

  • Emma Vecellio

    Assistant Project Manager

Advisory Board

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Press Release

The Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) has been awarded a grant of $555,000 from the Mellon Foundation to advance equitable and inclusive practices in peer review and scholarly journal publishing within the humanities. This initiative will conduct a survey and create resources and workshops aimed at transforming conventional peer-review processes to better align with principles of diversity, equity, inclusion (DEI) and knowledge justice.

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