Jess (Blog Post #2)

Maybe it’s a failure of imagination on my part, but I don’t see the nature or importance of peer review in the humanities changing significantly anytime soon. Yes, there will probably be a day when journals are almost exclusively electronic, but that won’t change the functional necessity and prevalence of the peer review tradition. As long as the “publish or perish” dictum remains the pithy rule of thumb governing professional success in academia, peer review will continue to be the organizing principle around which all scholarship is produced.

We have to remember, then, that articles are products—products you want to sell to the highest bidder, by which I mean publish in the best journals. It’s not good enough to merely publish an article because you’re competing with a pool of scholars who are all publishing articles, who are all vying for the same tenure-track positions. As we all unhappily acknowledge there aren’t very many of those going around these days, so the competition becomes even grimmer. This is why I disagree with Phillips when he says that, “a possible future development is a decline in emphasis on the journal title and brand.” Given the current and enduring scarcity of tenure-track jobs, brand is, and will continue to be, everything. As such, peer review is not just a way to legitimize scholarship, but also to commodify it— to give it a value on the intellectual market. Again, this is why the whole idea of open access articles seems a little bit like a pipe dream to me. Like Mike, I worry that OA would potentially lend itself to poor, lazy scholarship.

To be clear, I’m not saying that the current system of peer review is not sometimes completely arbitrary. The system certainly has flaws. But unless there’s a fundamental change in how we think of and conduct higher education in America, I can’t imagine the future of peer review in a very different light. It’s a pebble in a pond. I don’t think you can change the core of how we understand scholarship without changing the scholarly institutions.

As far as finding out about important works in my field, I ask my professors. I talk with them about who to avoid, who to seek, and what essays and articles are considered foundational in my line of study. Although I’ve only been to one major conference, I found that it was a very positive environment for discussing my own work, and learning from my peers about theirs. Ultimately, however, I think I may be a bit too new to graduate study to truly be a part of an invisible college.