All scholars who wants or must publish some piece of work in a scientific journal or some special book of a well-known publisher is familiar with the term of peer-review. There is an endless debate for and against the institution of peer-review, which is facing nowadays major challenges.

However, before analyzing these challenges, let us define what does peer-review mean: it is basically the evaluation of work by one or more people with similar competences (peers) as the producers of the work. It is based on self-regulation by qualified members of a particular profession. Peer review methods are used to secure certain quality standards. Scholarly peer review in the academia is used for checking the suitability of a paper for publication.

One of the major critics against peer review is that peer review is biased against the provincial and those from low- and middle-income (and often non-English speaking countries) countries. Another point is that, many journals take months and even years to publish and wasting so the researcher´s time. Furthermore, there is a lack of transparency in the peer-reviewing process (as the peer-reviewers are anonymous), and so it is also very questionable who sets the quality requirements. Is there a mutual agreement in the particular academic field? Or this quality check is dictated and controlled by certain well-ranked institutions and scholars employed for instance by ivy - league universities? However, due digitization and growing influence of open access, also the demand for open peer review had been articulated in the academic community.

This means that the comments and the identity of the reviewers are visible to readers. The idea and the practice of open peer review is well-known in the field of e-teaching as well, where the assessment of the student´s work is realized by open peer-review often in the frames of a mutual digital platform (such as a blog).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOCQZ7QnoN0

https://www.nature.com/news/monument-to-peer-review-unveiled-in-moscow-1.22060

Sources:

Alison McCook: Is peer review broken? Submissions are up, reviewers are overtaxed, and authors are lodging complaint after complaint about the process at top-tier journals. What's wrong with peer review? The Scientist; http://go.galegroup.com/ps/anonymous?id=GALE%7CA142096626&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=08903670&p=AONE&sw=w

Pontille, David; Torny, Didier (2014). "From manuscript evaluation to article valuation: the changing technologies of journal peer review". Human Studies. 38: 57–79.