Peerless

Via Facebook, this essay by Mieke Bal advocating against the current system of peer review.  In the essay's numerical spirit, some thoughts:

1) Are "only the less active and less brilliant scholars" really the ones primarily involved in peer review? This seems an overstatement (and, perhaps, rather inadvertently insulting...).  Ironically, there are reasons that you might not want active and brilliant senior scholar X peer to referee a paper, for the same reasons that, as I discovered when working at Mod Phil, you might not want them to review a book--the activity meant nothing on their CVs and was valued accordingly.  For someone more junior, peer review is proof of both reputation and professional service.  In any event, see my initial caveat.

2) I'm not sure who ought to be having the "quality discussions" (the editors? the editorial boards? acquisition editors? publisher's review board?), although I agree that "duration" is an issue.  

3) On the one hand, I'm sympathetic to the argument that requests to cite X can be burdensome, irrelevant, or even reactionary.  (On more than one occasion, I have had to write a footnote that, in effect, serves to announce "Here is X.  X has no relation to the argument.  Nevertheless, X is here.")  On the other hand, I have seen so many articles that would not exist if the author had shown signs of reading X--because X had already written that article (or book)--that my sympathy boomerangs in the opposite direction.  In fact, there have been times when I wanted to be told to do more reading, because I knew there had to be something out there I was missing but couldn't find.  Over the years, I've developed a rule for myself that if I suggest more reading, it's incumbent on me to explain how the reading will help develop the argument.

4) There appear to be multiple levels of "know" here.  There is "know" as in "I will send this to my buddy to referee," and then there is "know" as in "help, it's an article about religious fiction, I haven't the slightest clue who Frederick Robinson is, let's send it to MB because we know she writes about this stuff."  Further, there's "we've sent articles to MB to referee before, let's keep her in mind for later work."  Most of the time, I've been approached to referee solely on the grounds that I've written something that was vaguely in the immediate near ballpark of the topic, not because the editor had ever spent time in my company.  One edited collection in which I appear did, we were told, run into the "turf policing" issue, so I'm aware of the problem--but I'm not sure there's a good solution (even just reducing things to an editor and editorial board won't eliminate the risk of an author inadvertently stepping on somebody's sprained toe, figuratively speaking).

5) I suppose you could up-end the "hierarchy" somewhat by leaving the authors anonymous and forcing the referees to sign their names, but there again you would have a different set of problems (not least because like doesn't necessarily referee like--what if a more junior referee fears retribution if they write a negative report about a senior scholar's work?).  However, here I began to wonder if our academic contexts are different enough that there are unwitting conflicts at stake in how we respectively understand the peer review process...

6) How do we define "adequate"? I have sudden visions of all the scholars working on religious fiction (all...ten of us or so?) being stuck refereeing each other, in a vicious circle.  The JBS article I published last year had extremely helpful referees, but it was clear that the editor had had to assemble multiple people from different walks of life to deal with the manuscript, and some people had never heard of the periodical at the center of my argument.  Even a reviewer who isn't up on the finer points of mid-Victorian Scottish anti-Catholic periodicals, though, can still assess whether or not the article makes logical sense, identify where the author appears to be confused, or catch holes where something has clearly been under-researched.

7)  No argument that peer review is slow.  The only way to fix that, quite frankly, is for editors to keep a close eye on their timelines, pull back articles from referees who don't get the job done, and then expedite another review--keeping the author in the loop along the way.* 

8) This problem--graduate students needing to publish for in-house reasons during the three or four years allotted for doctoral work--does not seem applicable to the United States (not least because the timeline is considerably different).  Most graduate students publish one or two articles prior to finishing the dissertation and going on the market, but that's a different can of worms; slow peer review is much more anxiety-provoking when it comes to tenure, especially when some prestigious university presses have been known to take up to a year to offer a contract (or remember the manuscript's existence, even).

9) And this makes even less sense in the United States, where humanities refereeing is double-blind.  It's difficult to wage scholarly vendettas against other scholars (let alone their students) if you haven't the slightest idea whom you're reviewing.  I suppose it's more possible with books, which may be refereed single-blind, and of course it's always possible to figure out by internal clues, as Bal points out, who the reviewer or reviewee is; I (correctly) identified the Ashgate referee for my first book, for example.  But this isn't a universal problem with peer review.

10) Bal appears to mean by "authoritative mentality" something akin to a herd mentality, which goes back to her critique of peer review's "conservative" pressures in #3.  But surely eliminating the peer reviewers and, say, keeping everything in-house (all decisions made by an editor and editorial board) doesn't eliminate this problem along with it? Publishing still implies that somebody is going to make a judgment call somewhere, and the editorial board is no less suspect to the temptations of ego &c. than random referees, even if more easily discoverable.  

*--Which reminds me that I need to write the final paragraph of a book review that was due on the 1st.  Whoops!