I don’t have much news to report here at the beginning of 2018. I am extremely gratified by all the fine submissions that we received in 2017 and we are off to a good start so far in the New Year! Thanks to all the readers, authors, and referees who have participated in making Lithic Technology what it is.
I wanted to take this opportunity now to briefly talk about an issue that strikes me as being increasingly problematic and difficult: that is, peer review and, in particular, the difficulty of asking scholars to volunteer as referees for journal submissions. I don’t think it is that much of a secret that finding referees and badgering them into action is becoming more and more difficult. I mentioned that I was going to write this editorial to a friend of mine, who also edits an academic journal, and he joked, “Ah, so you are using ‘Editorial Template 1B,’ then?” I admit, it’s a bit of a journal editor cliché to complain about participation in the peer-review process, but I think I do need to say some words about it now.
The question is, in the modern day of academic publishing, why should anyone waste their time refereeing a paper for a journal? I can think of many reasons why not: we’re all busy; there’s no reward in it; you can’t take credit for it; other people make money off of it; it can be awkward to criticize someone else’s work; there can be conflicts of interest; etc. I’m well aware—painfully aware—of the calculus involved on the part of working people who have to make tough decisions about whether to donate their time peer reviewing a paper for a journal versus doing some other professional activity that might help them find a job, keep a job, get promoted, and so on. I’ve seen people come and go in the field of archaeology and I know exactly how the dogs can eat other dogs in our world. Professional archaeology can be a scary place to exist and it is as scary now as it ever has been before. Most definitely, that I understand.
With all of that said, we really do need peer review in order for this whole business to work properly. A lot of ink has been spilled on the necessity of journal referees as gatekeepers in assuring the quality of publications and in making judgements about publications that have great consequences for the careers of authors. I don’t want to completely deny that this is true but I would like to downplay this aspect of it here. What is much more important is the role of referees in improving that quality of publications with their feedback and in keeping at least the most disastrously erroneous content out of print. In my own work, I can’t count the number of times referees have saved me from saying unforgivably stupid things in print, not to mention contributing enormously to my broader arguments.
We need peer review because it makes the discourse in our field enormously better. In my time as editor, I’ve seen vanishingly few reviews of papers that were truly malicious. The vast majority of the reviews that I have read have been generous, sensitive, and insightful. This is one of the ways in which being a journal editor can help one maintain at least a little faith in humanity. And the other funny thing is that even the very few malicious reviews, which might have been intended as “hatchet jobs,” have actually had the presumably unintended consequence of improving the quality of the paper in question once it did appear in print! Even when peer review doesn’t work right, it still works in helping us learn and communicate important ideas resulting from our research.
I’m not going to make an appeal to the explanation or justification of altruistic behavior as somehow indirectly beneficial to those doing it. If you review a paper, it’s time that you are never going to get back and it will probably never benefit you directly very much—probably not at all. Yet, as editor, I would like to ask you to open yourself up to the generosity of doing something selflessly that will benefit the work and careers of others and that will ultimately improve our understanding of the past. If I ask you to review a paper, please at least give it a second thought. I will guarantee that your efforts have major positive impacts and they most definitely do not go unnoticed!
Let me conclude now by thanking everyone who has served as a referee for Lithic Technology in the past and those who will do so in the future. While we spend a lot of time focusing on readers and authors, it is the referees who make all the difference in helping the journal do its job.