a quick thought on peer review

Something this morning prompted this thought. There has been some bad press recently on the usual “peer review” feedback system, partly on the grounds that the system enforces thinkalike professional mediocrity. A few alternatives have been proposed as a result.

While I can understand the sentiment, in practical terms I’m not sure I agree.

Do people really get the sense that the profession has been held in a state of conformity as a result of the peer review system? That’s not the sense I get.

If you’re in this business long enough, you’ll get your share of nasty feedback from anonymous reviewers. (Usually it’s not super-nasty, just unnecessary little haughty digs that don’t help much, but may make the reviewer feel more important.) But I’ve found that to be a small percentage of the feedback. Most people are trying their best to help. And most of the time, you’re not going to be a victim of conformist scholarly consensus. This does happen from time to time (it happened once to Tool-Being, for instance, where some mainstream Heidegger people succeeded in torpedoing the book) but then you just go elsewhere (and in the case of Tool-Being, it was an analytic philosopher who recommended publication, in a wonderful irony– the SPEP people wouldn’t have it, but the hardcore philosophers of mind would).

I still stand by the advice Alphonso Lingis once gave me, which is not to worry who might publish anything you write. There’s a huge demand for material out there, and any good manuscript, no matter how unconventional, is probably going to get published eventually. You may face “mainstream” resistance a few times, but someone will take a chance on it.

So, the real function of peer review, I would say, is simply the gatekeeper function of obstructing the stuff that’s either really cracked, or the stuff that just isn’t quite ready yet. It’s a way for journals/publishers to be able to protect their reputations by making sure that nothing truly awful gets through.

And sometimes they make mistakes, and reject things that they should have accepted. And vice versa. But I’m not yet convinced that the peer review system itself is in any sort of deep crisis. There are parts of academia where crisis is hard to ignore, but I don’t yet see that this is one of them.