Book refereeing and journal refereeing

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

On Wed, 23 Jan 2008, Sandy Thatcher wrote:

> "Books are not peer-reviewed." That's an astonishing statement. 
> Every book published by every university press that is a member 
> of the Association of American University Presses has to be 
> peer-reviewed because the guidelines of the AAUP require that 
> member presses maintain such a practice as a condition of 
> membership.  Any scholar with a book published by a university 
> press would most certainly list it under "peer-reviewed 
> publications."
>
> It may not be universally true that books published by 
> commercial publishers are peer-reviewed, simply because no such 
> peer-review practice is mandated for them as it is for 
> university presses. But I know that many commercial publishers 
> do conduct some type of peer review also (though perhaps with 
> more of a focus on identifying viable markets than on the 
> niceties of scholarship). Others representing such publishers 
> on this list can speak for their own houses.
>
> P.S. Notice that I said "published" rather than "distributed." 
> Not all books distributed by presses are necessarily peer 
> reviewed by the press distributing them--as the recent 
> imbroglio surrounding Michigan's distribution of a book from 
> Pluto Press vividly demonstrated.
I've just responded to Jim O'Donnell's comment on this off-list. 
Because of the phase-lag, I hadn't seen Sandy's follow-up 
posting. So now I might as well post my off-list reply on-list! 
Chrs, Stevan

Subject: Off list

> Date: Wed, 23 Jan 2008 21:44:27 EST
> From: James J. O'Donnell <provost -- georgetown.edu>
> To: liblicense-l -- lists.yale.edu
> Subject: books
>
> Stevan Harnad wrote:
>
> > Yes, all Green OA self-archiving mandates should specify that 
> > they apply to articles published in peer-reviewed journals and 
> > peer-reviewed congress proceedings, to be clear that they do 
> > not apply to books. But academics know this. Books are vetted 
> > for publishability, but they are not peer-reviewed. In an 
> > academic CV, one does not list one's books under 
> > "peer-reviewed publications."
> I will save Sandy Thatcher, seasoned and admired university 
> press publisher, from the burden of defending his honorable 
> profession and say that the assertion that "Books . . . are not 
> peer-reviewed" is wild, ludicrous, and entirely untrue.  There 
> are surely book-publishing outlets that have weaker peer review 
> standards than others, just as there are journals likewise, but 
> the standard of peer review on reputable university press books 
> is very high.
>
> Jim O'Donnell
> Georgetown U.
Hi Jim,

I won't reply on list, because I think it's all a tempest in a 
teapot.

I think it is incontestably a fact (rather than an opinion) that 
in research assessment, peer-reviewed publications are treated as 
a separate category in most if not all disciplines.

This does not mean that they are "better" than books; it is not a 
slur on books, or on more book-based disciplines.

And whereas I do agree with you that both journal peer review and 
vetting can be (and are) done with varying degrees of rigor, I do 
not believe that the kind of page by page tooth-comb scrutiny 
that is given by the referees of the most rigorously refereed 
journals is matched by the referees of book manuscripts. There 
may be some exceptions, but they are that: exceptions. Whereas 
for the top peer-reviewed journals, that sort of close scrutiny 
-- and, I might add, substantial revision rate and even more 
substantial rejection rate -- is the rule, rather than the 
exception.

This too is not an aspersion on either books or book refereeing. 
Journal articles are short presentations of original findings, 
requiring minute quality control of a sort that would be 
prohibitively time-consuming for book-scale writing.

(Having said that, I would add that journal peer review is not 
all it could or ought to be in many cases. The system is not 
quite broken, but shaky, probably because of overload, and 
insufficient recognition for doing a conscientious job as a 
reviewer, given the demands it makes on one's time. Ditto for 
book refereeing. (The "fees" are risible for the amount of time 
spent refereeing a book.) Only post-hoc, published book reviews 
give sufficient satisfaction and credit for the effort invested.)

But the point of the exchange was not the relative merits of 
books and articles anyway, but whether or not books are or should 
be subsumed under self-archiving mandates.

(And my own view was that they cannot and should not be, because 
most book authors still don't want to give away their books free 
online, hence including them within the scope of a self-archiving 
mandate either invites non-compliance with the mandate or 
non-consensus on its adoption in the first place. I personally 
support, strongly, the self-archiving of scholarly monographs 
too, but I would not be ready to impose that on authors who feel 
otherwise. There is absolutely no homologous obstacle in the case 
of peer-reviewed journal articles: All authors would want OA for 
their articles -- if they weren't (groundlessly) worried about 
copyright, or the degree of time and effort required to 
self-archive. Hence the need for university and funder mandates 
-- natural extensions of their existing "publish or perish" 
mandates.)

Chrs, Stevan