Final report of WG1 on Peer Review Practices in the SSH

This report identifies the challenges particularly relevant for the SSH, such as different
and thus often conflicting research paradigms or epistemological styles of reviewers
and applicants or authors; difficulty in many SSH disciplines to define and evaluate research
methodology compared to STEM disciplines; the lack of the idea of linear progress
and a much longer time span necessary to evaluate academic impact of publications; the
diversity of publication outputs and specific importance of books or monographs; the importance
of local languages; challenges related to recent developments in research and its
evaluation related to growing interdisciplinarity and Open Science turn. To this, the general
challenges of peer review are added, such as the risk of gender bias, conservative bias,
work load for all parties involved.