Sustainable Musicology

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The End of Peer Review? It Might Be Time.

I have had some surreal experiences with peer review. On one occasion, an anonymous reviewer wrote the following: "Before writing this article, the author should have consulted the work of Marco Bizzarini."

Sound advice, at least in theory. There was just one small problem: the author of the article was me, Marco Bizzarini. One would assume I had at least a passing familiarity with my own work.

This was not an isolated case. A colleague - let’s call her Joan Stevens - received a review noting that the style of her article closely resembled that of Joan Stevens, scandalously absent from the references. A serious breach of scholarly ethics, apparently. The only issue was that Joan Stevens and the author of the article were the same person, and she had simply chosen the perfectly reasonable elegance of not citing herself.

One might dismiss these episodes as amusing anecdotes. But beyond the anecdotes, something more troubling emerges. Increasingly, reviews are not merely rigorous: they are shaped by strong biases and dangerous automatisms. Anonymity, which is supposed to guarantee impartiality, often produces the opposite effect. It frees the reviewer from consequences and, not infrequently, from responsibility. The result is a familiar figure: the hyper-specialised, hyper-territorial scholar - not unlike certain cats - fiercely defending their micro-field as if it were a private hunting ground. Anyone who dares to enter without permission is treated as an intruder. This mechanism is not so different from what we see every day on social media: the so-called “keyboard warriors” thrive under the (perceived) protection of anonymity.

To all this we must now add another factor, one that is bound to change the rules of the game: artificial intelligence. We are all overloaded with work, and the time available to read others’ research carefully is shrinking. It is inevitable - and, to some extent, already happening (even if no one says it out loud) - that reviewers will begin to delegate this task to AI systems. When this becomes the norm, peer review will be truly “blind”. Not because the reviewer does not know the author’s identity, but because there will no longer be a human being behind the judgement.

It is no coincidence that more and more scholars either circumvent this system or endure it as something stifling, rather than recognising it as a genuine guarantee of quality. So the question remains: does it still make sense to defend it?

Perhaps the time has come to take the next step - not to improve or reform peer review, but to abandon it altogether.

If we truly want to preserve the quality of research, we need to return to something both simpler and more demanding: explicit responsibility, open debate, natural intelligence. Peer review, as we know it, is no longer a guarantee: it has become a bureaucratic ritual - one that significantly slows down the publication process. And when rituals stop working, they should be left behind.