From: Ari Belenkiy <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 2 Mar 2014 14:55:55 -0800

Well, let me share my story as well.  Trying to publish with humanities
journals for almost 10 years, I observed that there exist a formal process
behind which is emptiness.

You wait for 3-4 months, getting thereafter a refusal either on general
grounds, such as style of references or appropriateness for this journal,
or because you don't quote some "important" secondary literature. The (low)
quality of referees' 2-3 brief remarks don't warrant for such a long wait!
(I can share some reviews - quite a fun to read. Actually, I have received
only one serious (though negative) assessment of my work - from Vigilae
Christianae - on 14 pages).

Though the originality of the paper is often stated inter alia, the editor
lurks behind any negative remark done by a referee - of course as a pretext
to reject the paper.  In fact, these remarks are key words, signals that a
referee sends to the editor as a sign that s/he does not want this paper be
published.

I have never seen that the editor looked deeply in the matter afterwards.
 The editor never goes back to access the quality of referee (the well-
recognized practice in exact sciences), which I believe is a malfunction
detrimental to the humanities.

In humanities, publishers and editors have no initiative to publish
something unusual and original. The goal is to put through the journal pipe
as many papers of their PhD candidates as journal pages permit.

Instead of OA hysteria, its proponents should rather address the quality of
the referees' duties in humanities.

Academia is about the quality and originality of published materials, not
about OA.

Ari Belenkiy

SFU
Canada


On Sun, Mar 2, 2014 at 11:50 AM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> From: Anthony Watkinson <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2014 09:28:58 +0000
>
> Dear Zac
>
> I was talking mainly about the past. In my experience over forty years
> is that publishers work much harder now to make sure that the
> editorial structure is doing its job of peer review and that they are much
> more concerned with the mechanisms of peer review including quality. I
> really meant to instance online editorial systems is that they enable an
> insight for publishers into how long reviewing is taking, how many
> reviewers are used etc. When I started in this business editors were
> appointed and were then left to their own devices. There was no proper
> contract outlining roles and responsibilities and the editors could go on
> until they were very out of touch and very old. The assumption was that
> every academic knew how to ensure good and timely peer review. Now there is
> much more ongoing interaction between publishers and editors over standards
> and processes.  Then journal publishing was seen as a mechanical process. I
> can think of a very major journal edited by a long dead Nobel Laureate. The
> peer review process for him was that his secretary went to a very top
> international laboratory on a weekly basis and went round the labs throwing
> a selection on the desks of younger researchers.
>
> I do not know what happened then but I suspect that there was very
> little control from on top or any sort of proper instruction.
>
> Anthony
>
> -----Original Message-----
>
> From: Zac Rolnik <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2014 22:26:25 -0500
>
> Anthony,
>
> I agree that it is hard for the publisher to really know the quality
> of articles we publish since we are usually not academics in those areas,
> but I think we have a sense when the quality is there and when it is not.
>  The idea that the publisher relies on the editor who relies on the guest
> editor seems like we are distancing ourselves from our responsibility
> as publishers.  Furthermore, I don't see how online editorial
> systems necessarily improve quality control and I might even argue the peer
> review is declining as the number of articles increase beyond the available
> pool of high quality reviewers.  This was not just bad science, but
> "computer generated gibberish".  Unfortunately, I happen to believe that
> there is a lot of human-generated gibberish also getting published.
>
> Zac Rolnik
> now publishers
>