Abstract
In this response to the editorial, I consider the challenges currently faced by the peer review system. These challenges include both the state of the history profession, especially as it interacts with the economics of academic journal publishing. I also consider the impact of the transition to Open Access (OA) publishing. Finally, the issue of transparency in peer reviewing is discussed.
I want to state immediately that I retain faith in the peer review system, even as that faith confronts multiple challenges. As reviewers and authors, we see only those parts of the review process in which we are directly involved. As an editor, I see it through from start to finish, and as an active agent, orchestrating how it unfolds. From this privileged position, I have too often seen the immensely positive and constructive development a paper – and its author – can experience during the process to have become cynical about peer review and what it can achieve. Thus, I do not subscribe to the commonly stated maxim that the system is ‘broken’. Frayed, yes; broken, no. Still as I said, there are multiple challenges. Thus, I welcome this editorial as a timely intervention and salute the editors’ desire for constructive, collaborative, and collective dialogue, as witnessed in the commentaries they have sought from myself and other editors, as well as from the readership of the journal. By opening up these questions, and in making the review process, its purpose and criteria so much more legible, the editorial does an important service.
What challenges is peer review facing and why is it facing them now? I think there is a background sense of malaise in academia, one that is especially pronounced in the humanities. Across the world, budgets, programs, and whole departments are under threat. There is a widespread sense of crisis in the history profession as a profession. Career prospects for emerging scholars in history have all but collapsed in some markets. At the very moment politics is becoming ever more historicised academic historians have seen their prestige under assault and their expertise derided. The response of professional associations has, at times, appeared weak and uncomprehending. Many emerging scholars, understandably, feel they have been sold a bill of goods. I think it is important to acknowledge this.
Peer review is central to our status and self-regard. But seen from some angles, peer review is part of a status quo that is no longer fit for purpose. In computing and network scholarship peer-to-peer indicates flat, non-hierarchical and collaborative systems in which power and resources are equally distributed. Peer review is not like that. With academia riddled with entrenched hierarchies, inside networks, systems of patronage and status, and the common human emotions of envy and simple dislike, peer review can appear as integral to and an enforcer of a culture of privileges. With the gratification of a worthwhile career seemingly eternally delayed for many, peer review can appear as just another brick in an exploitative, exclusionary barrier. There is no doubt that the Covid 19 pandemic, which led many people to reassess their priorities, exacerbated this feeling. Every editor acknowledges that it became much harder to obtain reviewers and that has remained true even as the pandemic has faded. As this editorial notes, ‘peer review is a community practice and can only survive if the community buys into it’. That buy-in is weakening.
An important driver of these feelings, and one not mentioned in the editorial to which I am responding, is the economics of academic publishing. If this was a ‘proper’ peer review report this would be the first critique I would advance. It is a significant omission (though the editorial does note that peer review is, in effect, an issue of opportunity costs). Academic publishers make a lot of money and they do so on the back of a lot of unpaid labour. In a true reciprocal, peer-to-peer system reward for services rendered comes in the form of services rendered to you. In academia that means having your own articles reviewed and (hopefully) published and your career advanced. Under managerialist and transactional publish-or-perish regimes dependent on a profit-driven publishing industry (and with career progression stalled for many), it can feel as though that bargain is not being honoured. The only ones benefitting, it can seem, are the publishers, whether wholly commercial or university presses.Footnote1 Debates around peer reviewing on social media often see calls for monetary pay. We probably should not hold our breathe waiting for presses to agree.Footnote2 If we perceive we are being treated transactionally perhaps it is no surprise when we respond transactionally. Thus, the economics of academic publishing also infer an ethics. Is it ethical for journals to expect reviewing to be done by colleagues in adjunct or otherwise non-tenure track career paths? Is it ethical to expect the same of graduate students? As an editor I have called on the free labour of both groups, but perhaps I was wrong to have done so? At Enterprise and Society, we have for a number of years acknowledged by name all the reviewers who worked for us over the preceding 12 months in the final issue of the year. It is important we do that, but it does not pay anyone’s rent.
Open Access (OA) is further changing the economic dynamics of academic publishing. I support the principle of open access to scholarly research. Paywalls impede knowledge dissemination. OA is here. A majority of articles at Enterprise and Society are now published OA. But open does not mean free. Someone still has to pay. OA impacts very differently on different groups of scholars, according to geography, discipline, and career status. It excludes as much as it includes, even as publishers continue to reap profits. Emerging scholars are often those without access to the institutional funding necessary to OA publishing, putting them in double-bind. Under these conditions the unpaid labour of peer reviewing looks even more like a rigged deal. We must talk about the economics of academic publishing in general and of peer review in particular. Creative responses may be possible, however. In many STEM subjects, for example, the democratising potential of the internet is being harnessed by colleagues to circumvent publishers and create entirely online OA journals.
In the space left to me I want to address a second issue: transparency. The editorial asks ‘should business historians be encouraged to disclose their identities in the review process?’ As an editor, one of my duties is to maintain and uphold the practice and the principle of double-blind peer review. But as an editor who also sometimes writes reviews, I occupy a paradoxical position because in early 2022 I took the decision to identify myself in the reviews I write.Footnote3 Inspired by friends working in STEM disciplines, I took this decision because I wanted to heighten my accountability. I believe it has worked. That was brought home to me the first time, post my decision, I felt I had to make a reject recommendation. I had to think seriously about what I was committing my name to. It is a complex decision though. At least one journal has declined to share my identity and at least one author has been discomfited by knowing my identity. This was my choice, however, and I think it should remain a choice. Emerging scholars must always have the shield of anonymous reviewing available to them.
We should acknowledge that anonymity is often more honoured in the breach. We are a small field and often write repeatedly on the same actors and institutions and from the same archives. Authors can be easy to identify, and the name of a reviewer sometimes easily guessed. Moreover, blind peer review can also cloak a darker side. Reviewers can use the shadow of anonymity as an opportunity to exercise grievances or to fiercely guard gates. In such cases a heavy weight of maintaining accountability and fairness falls on editors.Footnote4 But none of these flaws change the fact that many authors and reviewers value the shield anonymity provides. Authors hope it will help ensure their work is assessed on its own merits. Reviewers feel freer to be honest in their judgements, unafraid of repercussions. As already noted, this is particularly important for early career scholars, especially those not yet in secure employment, and still in need of the various forms of patronage that remain so important in academia. Thus, I view maintenance of the availability of double-blind reviewing to be critical, but urge all scholars, especially those more senior or established, to reflect on their own engagement with its precepts.
My comments might seem almost dystopian. Why do I continue to play my role as an editor in a system I view in such bleak terms? Because I believe the positive still strongly outweighs the negative. As an editor, I am floored time and again by the generosity – with time and intellect – of the unnamed and unremunerated colleagues who review for us at Enterprise and Society, or that review the papers I submit elsewhere. But I do think we have to be alert to how the landscape of academic publishing is changing and how that might, in turn, be changing how colleagues engage with the peer review process. We are prone to fetishising peer review as the ultimate mark of our probity and rigour. But, as this editorial very usefully shows, peer review as we know it today is a relatively recent phenomenon. We have rethought it before, and we can rethink it again.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Andrew Popp
Andrew Popp is Professor of History in the Department of Business Humanities and Law, Copenhagen Business School.
Notes
1 Some titles are owned by scholarly associations. Enterprise and Society, of which I am Editor-in-Chief, is, for example, owned by the Business History Conference and, in a profit sharing agreement with publisher, Cambridge University Press, generates a significant stream of revenue for the association.
2 But see an interesting proposal on ‘Sustainable Peer Review’ from Any J. Ko here: https://medium.com/bits-and-behavior/sustainable-peer-review-via-incentive-aligned-markets-a64ff726da56. I want to thank Stephanie Decker for bringing this article to my attention.
3 I now end all reviews I write with the simple formulation: ‘I choose to identify myself as Andrew Popp, Copenhagen Business School’.
4 The reviewers I call on are overwhelmingly scrupulous in alerting me to instances when they think anonymity cannot be upheld or where there is a genuine conflict of interest.