Background: There are currently numerous innovations in peer review and quality assurance in scholarly publishing. The Research on Research Institute conducted a programme of co-produced projects investigating these innovations. This literature review was part of one such project ‘Experiments in peer review’ which created an inventory and framework of peer review innovations. The aim of this literature review was to aid the development of the inventory by identifying innovations in the external peer review of journal manuscripts reported in the scholarly literature and by providing a summary of the different approaches. This did not include interventions in editorial processes. Methods: This review of reviews is based on data identified from Web of Science and Scopus limited from 2010 to 2021. A total of 291 records were screened, with six review articles chosen for the focus of the literature review. Items were selected that described approaches to innovating peer review or illustrated examples. Results: The overview of innovations are drawn from six review articles. The innovations are divided into three high-level categories: approaches to peer review, reviewer focussed initiatives and technology to support peer review with sub-categories of results presented in tabular form and summarised. A summary of all innovations found is also presented. Conclusions: From a simple synthesis of the review authors’ conclusions, three key messages are presented: observations on current practice; authors’ views on the implications of innovations in peer review; and calls for action in peer review research and practice.

Purpose:We aim to provide an analytical overview of current innovations in peer review and their potential impacts on scholarly communication.Design/methodology:We created a survey that was disseminated among publishers, academic journal editors, and other organizations in the scholarly communication ecosystem, resulting in a dataset of 95 self-defined innovations. We ordered the material using a taxonomy that compares innovation projects according to five dimensions. For example, what is the object of review? How are reviewers recruited, and does the innovation entail specific review foci?Findings:Peer review innovations partly pull in mutually opposed directions. Several initiatives aim to make peer review more efficient and less costly, while other initiatives aim to promote its rigor, which is likely to increase costs; innovations based on a singular notion of “good scientific practice” are at odds with more pluralistic understandings of scientific quality; and the idea of transparency in peer review is the antithesis to the notion that objectivity requires anonymization. These fault lines suggest a need for better coordination.Originality:This paper presents original data that were analyzed using a novel, inductively developed, taxonomy. Contrary to earlier research, we do not attempt to gauge the extent to which peer review innovations increase the “reliability” or “quality” of reviews (as defined according to often implicit normative criteria), nor are we trying to measure the uptake of innovations in the routines of academic journals. Instead, we focus on peer review innovation activities as a distinct object of analysis.