Abstract
Although established forms of peer review are often criticized for being slow, secretive, and even unfair, they are repeatedly mentioned by academics as the most important indicator of quality in scholarly publishing. In many countries, the peer review of books is a less codified practice than that of journal articles or conference papers, and the processes and actors involved are far from uniform. In Sweden, the review process of books has seldom been formalized. However, more formal peer review of books has been identified as a response to the increasing importance placed on streamlined peer-reviewed publishing of journal articles in English, which has been described as a direct challenge to more pluralistic publication patterns found particularly in the humanities. In this study, we focus on a novel approach to book review, Kriterium, where an independent portal maintained by academic institutions oversees the reviewing of academic books. The portal administers peer reviews, providing a mark of quality through a process which involves reviewers, an academic coordinator, and an editorial board. The paper studies how this process functions in practice by exploring materials concerning 24 scholarly books reviewed within Kriterium. Our analysis specifically targets tensions identified in the process of reviewing books with a focus on three main themes, namely the intended audience, the edited volume, and the novel role of the academic coordinator. Moreover, we find that the two main aims of the portal–quality enhancement (making research better) and certification (displaying that research is of high quality)–are recurrent in deliberations made in the peer review process. Consequently, we argue that reviewing procedures and criteria of quality are negotiated within a broader discussion where more traditional forms of publishing are challenged by new standards and evaluation practices.
Highlights
Peer assessment, in more formalized peer review procedures and in less codified contexts such as seminars, is the main evaluation procedure in academia
With an eye towards the contested role of the scholarly book that prompted the development of Kriterium in the first place, we have looked for instances in the review process where inherent tensions existing in the social sciences and the humanities might become visible
The second theme addresses how peer reviewers approach the task of assessing edited volumes; here we find the navigation between the parts and the whole volume interesting
Summary
In more formalized peer review procedures and in less codified contexts such as seminars, is the main evaluation procedure in academia. An increasing share of publications marked as “peer-reviewed” has been documented in several countries, including Sweden (Hammarfelt and de Rijcke 2015) and Austria (Gumpenberger et al, 2016) It remains unclear exactly what peer review denotes in the social sciences and humanities, in the context of journal publishing (Pölönen, Engels and Guns 2020; Ochsner et al, 2020). In the Anglo-Saxon countries and among publishers working on an international market, it is common for book proposals to be peer reviewed by one or two scholars before a contract is signed, with a second peer review round often taking place once the full manuscript has been submitted (Adema and Rutten 2010; Ferwerda, Pinter and Stern 2017; Jubb 2017) This is a practice introduced by university presses in the 1960s (Pochoda 2012). Sweden has a very well-developed internal seminar system in academic departments where texts by doctoral candidates and faculty can be scrutinized before being submitted to various publication outlets
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