Readers interested in the role of peer review in the evolving world of scholarly communication may want to look at the newly released edited volume, Peer Review In Academic Promotion And Publishing: Its Meaning, Locus, And Future . Produced by the Future of Scholarly Communication Project at UC Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education, this volume contains four working papers that consider the state of peer review in academia and its role in scholarly publishing. Topics covered in the working papers include:

  • which forms of peer review are used for which specific academic purposes (e.g., tenure and promotion, publishing, extramural funding, national and international stature)
  • the considerable costs to universities in subsidizing the entire peer review process through faculty salaries, and
  • the perception that, although peer review represents the best available system, there are nonetheless a multitude of problems with it…”

The four working papers were developed and circulated as read-ahead material for a series of recent meetings sponsored at the Berkeley Center. The authors review the various costs leading to unstainablilty of today’s schaolarly publishing entrprise, and assess the most commonly cited reforms and alterntiatrves to the system. They conclude with a recognition that there is a need to improve the current system:

“there is a need for a more nuanced academic reward system that is less dependent on citation metrics, slavish adherence to marquee journals and university presses, and the growing tendency of institutions to outsource assessment of scholarship to such proxies.”

Yet the authors also concede that reforms and alternates to the current peer review system introduce their own shortcomings, noting that “the current system is.. .generally cited as successful, warts and all, insofar as it ‘picks out the best and gets rid of the worst.’” Ultimately, then, Peer Review In Academic Promotion And Publishing: Its Meaning, Locus, And Future raises many questions about the sustainability of the current peer review system; offers few proven solutions; but provides much food for thought and debate.

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