This is the first in a series of posts about scholarly peer-review in journal publishing.

Much has been written about peer review in scholarly publishing—much more than we need to detail for the purposes of this post. But one thing we’ve noticed as we talk about Kairos and scholarly publishing in general to new audiences is that emerging or early career scholars—be they students in our classrooms or folks who have completed a graduate degree and are starting to work professionally in a discipline—often don’t know what peer review actually is. It’s a phrase that is tossed about so implicitly in academia that this fundamental knowledge often isn’t made explicit to those just entering a field. So we’re going to get down to basics in this post. 

Scholars may already be familiar with the process of peer review through other names it uses in classrooms and professional work settings: feedback loops, crits/critiques, workshops (or workshopping), and usability testing, among others. In the discipline of writing studies, the difference between workshopping a student’s paper in a class setting to peer review at a scholarly journal is fundamentally pretty slim—they’re essentially the same process, and even the stakes for an author might feel the same (just at different points in their life/career—a grade on a first-year composition essay might be the difference between keeping or losing a scholarship just as the peer-review decision from a scholarly journal might be the difference between keeping or losing a job).

But if authors haven’t had the benefit of thousands of workshops over the course of their student careers (and being a student who becomes a scholar isn’t the only way to encounter peer review for the first time), we still need to answer the question: what IS peer review?!? 

Peer review is a process where peers engage with a text that an author has drafted for a specific venue so they can provide feedback that will improve it.

Some people will say this definition of peer review is too generous and not based in reality, especially when this definition is applied to the history of peer review in scholarly journal publishing.¹ We get that. Peer review has a (notoriously and often rightfully) bad reputation as being a gatekeeping method to prevent scholars from publishing their research. We’re not going to spend much time on the historical uses of peer review in this post, because we want to focus on what peer review has become more recently. Let’s start by breaking down the parts of this definition. 

Who Are “Peers”? 

Peers in the journal publishing process are similar to peers on a jury—an ideal—where we humans hope we can get close enough to provide a fair and equitable read. (For the moment, we will table the problems with providing fair and equitable reviews.) Peers are considered expert readers, although what they need to be expert in depends on the journal and its needs, whether that’s disciplinary, technological, cultural, historical, or other areas relevant to a journal’s mission and readership. 

Peer reviewers are experts who draw on their relevant knowledge and wisdom to help evaluate a journal submission for publication.

Reviewers draw on the knowledge and wisdom of that expertise to help evaluate whether a journal submission is suitable for publication as-is or whether it needs additional refinement/revision to fill gaps in a scholar’s argument. This is where the gatekeeping method of being a peer reviewer has come into play historically. Contemporary peer review methods are trying to re-envision peer review as a mentoring process so that scholarly publishing can become less scary and more inclusive. We'll discuss how this transition happens in a post on peer-review methods as part of this series. 

For typical journals in many areas of the humanities, the disciplinary expertise will be the most important criteria for selecting a peer to review a submission. But for digital-only journals, particularly those that foreground the possibilities of media-rich web-based publishing, expertise extends far beyond the confines of disciplinary borders. And we’re not just talking about interdisciplinary work here. We’re talking about journals who have reviewers whose expertise lies in their cultural experiences and identities, historical contextual knowledge (which may lie outside of academic disciplinary categories), and—for Kairos particularly—technological and design know-how. As we publish webtexts that require authors to create tight, rhetorical pieces melding written arguments within a web-based design, we need peer reviewers whose understanding of the technologies and media of the Web can pinpoint areas of problems and praise within such submissions. 

It can be a challenge to journals to contain the multitudes of reviewers they might need for any type of submission that comes in. And this is where the idea of peers, or who serves as a peer reviewer, is often a point of confusion for authors and new editors starting journals. In part, this confusion is because there are several roles, with different but similar titles, that a peer might fill. The three most common are Advisory Board members, Editorial Board members, and External Readers or Reviewers. So let’s quickly explain these: 

Kairos uses the phrases “editorial board reviewers” and “external reviewers” synonymously because our ed board reviewers are external reviewers (compared to the internal reviews conducted by the journal staff). They do, however, get listed on our masthead, as we draw our reviews almost exclusively from the editorial board, and only on occasion supplement those with a review from someone else who doesn’t currently serve on the editorial board. 

In other posts, we will 

• Describe the rhetorical situation of peer review and why knowing the publishing venue is important in that process, 
• Discuss the type of peer review feedback that’s possible for most scholarly journals, and what that looks like to authors
• Overview the entire peer-review process, from submission to acceptance, including specifics on how Kairos’s process is slightly different from most journals
• Discuss the variety of peer-review models that journals might use.  

Stay tuned for links to these additional posts in this peer-review roundup!

Footnote

1. The history of peer review dates back to 1665, although its current instantiation is much more recent, starting roughly in the 1970s. See https://mitcommlab.mit.edu/broad/commkit/peer-review-a-historical-perspective/