Open Review at ...Qualitative...Criminology

At …Qualitative…Criminology (QC), our values guide how we take submissions, review them, and publish them. We value openness, innovation, inclusivity, democracy, efficiency, authenticity, and transparency.

Those values led QC to do open peer review: authors are not anonymous; referees are strongly encouraged to sign their reviews; and, reviews are published on CrimRxiv—criminology’s open archive.1

To date, however, we have not facilitated “open participation”: reviews by the wider community, not just people selected by the journal as referees. To be clear, it has been (and still is) possible to do post-publication review, but that is true for any published paper.2

What has not been possible, at least not as part of the QC review process, is open participation in pre-publication review. One problem stands—or, rather, stood—in the way: When QC receives a paper for publication consideration, it has not been made public. Without that, open participation is handcuffed.

From now on, therefore, papers will be submitted to QC via CrimRxiv.3 The details are on our How To Submit page and our dedicated CrimRxiv page.

That change solves the aforementioned problem and thereby enables open participation in pre-publication review. Furthermore, it increases the sharing of preprints and the concomitant benefits to authors, the field, and public.4 All of this promotes our values. Please join us in putting them into action.