September 14 to 18 is Peer Review Week and the team at Penn Press wishes to thank the many scholars who serve as peer reviewers for our books and journals, ensuring that the work we publish is accurate, reliable, and merits becoming part of the durable scholarly record. Peer review is often an unrecognized task, but it makes a difference to our editors, who rely on reviewers’ expert guidance; to our authors, whose work peer review validates; and to the global community of researchers, who know they can trust the work we publish.
We asked our books acquisitions editors to describe the importance of peer review to their process. Editor-in-Chief Walter Biggins writes, “Peer review is the lifeblood of scholarly publishing, and a significant part of what distinguishes such endeavors from general-interest publications. The process ensures that scholarly rigor is maintained, and that arguments are strengthened and refined so that new work meets the highest standards possible for all readers.”
Kim Guinta, Director of the APS Press, a Penn Press publishing partner, writes “a robust peer review program is essential to maintaining the quality of work we do at the APS Press, for both of our journals, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society and Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, and for our interdisciplinary book program. As a publisher whose list ranges from astronomy to zoology, and includes the social sciences and humanities too, we rely on the reviews we receive from our reviewers since we can’t possibly be experts in all academic fields. The help they give us is tremendous, and we wouldn’t be able to publish new scholarly work if it wasn’t for them.”
When we speak with journal editorial offices, many of them stress how challenging it has been to find peer reviewers in recent years. Despite often hearing no several times before getting an acceptance, editors persevere in ensuring that this critical step in the publication process is completed. The editorial team of the Eudora Welty Review emphasizes the value that the peer review process holds not just for the author but also for the reviewer: “peer review provides the opportunity to have intentional scholarly conversations—veteran mentor to new scholar, colleague to colleague, across international boundaries. We forge ties through the exploration of ideas. And, this vital exchange is the engine that advances sound, new knowledge, an intellectual labor that requires a particular finesse for journals focused on the life and work of an individual author, like ours.”
We are grateful for the often unsung work of our book and journal peer reviewers, who are key to our work as a university press. If you’re interested in continuing the conversation and are a member of AUPresses, you can join panelist and Penn Press editorial assistant Alessandra Liller for AUPresses Hangout: Peer Review in the Age of Overload. On September 18 at 12 pm, this Art of Acquisitions Hangout will consider the increasing challenges facing peer review.
