Publish or be damned II

Last time, I talked a bit about different types of academic publication – and how much they matter for people like me who are paid to work in a university. I said that there are three main types of academic publishing: monographs, journal articles, and chapters in edited volumes. This aims to explain a bit about the process of publication. What you’ll see is that having your work examined by other people isn’t something that stops once you’ve done your last term paper; professional academics are locked into an endless cycle of having other people read and criticise their work, with anything written either passing (being published) or failing (not being published).

Most academic books are published as part of series. When someone wants to publish a book, they look around for a series that matches their interests. A series is just a group of people who are interested in the same sorts of things – so, for instance, I run a series with the publisher Brepols about stories and how they change. If someone sends a book proposal to Brepols, one of their publishing managers looks at it first. If they think it looks promising and it sounds like it’ll fit my series, they send to me (as the series editor). If I like it, I share it with my colleagues on the Board (that sounds more impressive than it is: it’s five people who email one another occasionally) to see what they think. If we all like it, the author gets the go ahead.

Then, of course, the real work happens: the author writes the book.

Once they’re done, they send it to me, and it goes through the same process: everyone on the Board reads it (some more, some less, closely) and raises any concerns. That’s an “internal review”. If we’re all happy to publish it, we identify one or more people who could provide an “external review” for the book – that is, someone not on the Board and not connected with the author, but with relevant expertise. They read the book very thoroughly and send a review back to me, which includes a recommendation (usually saying something like “This should be published, but first the author should...”). If I have a real issue with the review, I might argue with them a bit about it, but most often I’ll just send it to the author to see what they say.

Then the author revises everything in line with what the reviewer has suggested (or not, depending on whether they like the ideas or not) and sends it to me again. In the best case scenario, at this point I sign it off, check with my Board colleagues, and Brepols start the work of printing it. But sometimes there are still issues, and a book can cycle back and forth between Board members, external reviewers, and authors before we all agree that we’re happy to put our names to publishing it.

After all of that, a whole other process of real work begins at the publishing house: the book is typeset (so it looks like a book rather than like a Word document); final corrections are made to these “proofs”; and images and page numbers and the index all get sorted out. Publishers have permanent teams of professionals who work on producing proofs out of documents, so their work has to be queued up months in advance (so any delay in the process above means a project loses its place in that queue). From the moment I email a finalised version to the moment I receive an email back with a full pdf, months can pass of (from my perspective, outside the black box) ·· nothing ·· happening.

Finally, it gets published and we all hold our breath to see if the wider academic community agrees with our view: different scholars write reviews of the book which are themselves published.

The same process happens with the two other forms of publication I mentioned last time: articles in academic journals and chapters in an edited volume. In the first of these, a journal editor plays the role of the series editor, and the more highly regarded journals often have top scholars in their fields as external reviewers. They’re even reviewed, though with more of a focus on what they say than on how good (or not) articles are. Edited volumes are so-called because a person (or team of people) bring the project together as editors, meaning that they function as yet another form of reviewer, discussing and revising each author’s contribution with them before submitting the whole volume to the series editor for the rounds of internal and external review.

So, as I hope you’ve seen over these two blog entries, there are lots of negatives with and challenges in this system. But one consequence of it is that, while academic life often looks like lone working, in reality every publication takes a whole lot of time, and comes about as a result of the input, support, criticism, and expertise of a whole community of people.