For years, universities have expected faculty members in the humanities and many of the social sciences to produce a university-press book to get tenure. But academe is undergoing significant change: Institutions are relying more on nontenured faculty, they are grappling with how best to diversify their faculty and provide support to interdisciplinary fields, and scholars are experimenting with digital publications that do not conform to the stability of a printed page. University presses, as the publishers charged in part with credentialing faculty in the humanities and social sciences, feel the effects of these seismic shifts. Presses must examine how our practice of peer review must adapt in order to accommodate the changes rapidly occurring within academe.
Any consideration of changing peer review for monographs (or other long-form scholarship) must begin with an understanding of how it is currently conducted. With this in mind, the board of the Association of American University Presses, on which I sit, commissioned a “Best Practices for Peer Review” handbook. All members of the association have had to show, as part of their application process, a commitment to peer review. For books, this means most projects are peer reviewed by at least two readers. They report on the work, and the author typically has a chance to respond before a faculty editorial board votes to approve or reject the project for publication. One of my authors referred to these steps as “flaming hoops” through which she had to jump to see her book in print.
In order to write the handbook, a special committee of acquisitions editors discussed the process among themselves before widening the conversation to include editors from a broad array of the university-press association’s membership. The peer review of the “Best Practices for Peer Review” handbook revealed many of the discussions that occur within editorial departments and with faculty boards behind closed doors at university presses. The committee found consensus with aspects of the process and created an accurate portrayal of it, in part to answer questions from scholars and university administrators. While the process allowed the committee to complete a very thorough best-practices handbook, it also revealed that the peer-review process is not a mere gatekeeper function, a yes/no answer that determines publication.
Now that we have this handbook as a baseline, the peer-review process can come out of the shadows.
It is a complicated piece of a changing scholarly ecosystem in need of attention. No one person involved in one part of the process may see just how complicated the process is. Now that we have this handbook as a baseline, the peer-review process can come out of the shadows, and we can engage in the tough, challenging discussion of how it can and should adapt to an ever-changing academic landscape.
Peer-review reports travel well beyond the desk of the editor who commissions them. They go to authors eager to hear support for work they may have spent years writing and editing. They go into job applications and tenure/promotion packets. They go to faculty editorial boards made up of scholars from a range of disciplines who will ultimately vote on whether to move forward with publication.
Amid the complicated life of the average reader’s report, the editor emerges as an important node in a rather complicated network of readers, authors, faculty boards, and hiring/tenure committees. What may seem like a flaming hoop on the way to publication becomes instead a complex set of interactions among individuals with varying interests.
So, what can we do better? The best-practices handbook notes the challenges in choosing appropriate reviewers, stating: “Some presses prefer tenured faculty; however, with decreasing numbers of scholars (including experienced ones) on the tenure track, this requirement may be difficult to meet. It is also important to note that in some emerging disciplines or areas of study, the thought leaders are often still junior faculty.” As many parties work to diversify the academy, the conservative aspect of the peer-review process, wherein only established scholars can determine who from the next generation of scholars in their field can contribute, must be examined and questioned.
The handbook also notes: “Scholarly digital initiatives are producing new modes and forms of publishing, and the dynamism of these developments requires continuing assessment of conventional peer-review processes.” These are seeds planted in the handbook for future discussion, by editors, scholars, and anyone invested in moving scholarship forward in an equitable and technologically savvy manner.
Scholars in the field of new media and in other areas have also encouraged publishers to consider a more open peer-review process in which feedback is provided online, perhaps without anonymity, and the author makes updates to a “living” digital edition of the work. What might this mean for tenure packets?
The power of the critiques of the handbook demonstrate the importance of evaluating this process, not just in this case but for all university presses and their authors. As much as we might need to hide names of reviewers in various circumstances, we do not need to hide how we as scholarly presses conduct reviews. Now it’s time to get scholars, publishers, and administrators all invested in supporting and promoting cutting-edge research that moves our scholarly conversations forward, for the benefit of our faculty and our students.
Brian Halley is senior editor at the University of Massachusetts Press, based at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.
