Peer review: “The coin of the realm”

On Monday of this week, librarians from Duke, North Carolina Central, NC State and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill gathered for the Triangle Research Libraries Network’s (TRLN) annual meeting.

We librarians always look forward to the opportunity to catch up with colleagues from area libraries and learn more about the innovative things going on at their institutions, but the highlight for me this year was hearing from keynote speaker Diane Harley of the Center for Studies in Higher Education, lead author of “Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines.”

The study conducted by Harley and four others was comprehensive: It involved over 160 scholars from 45 elite research universities and includes 12 case studies representing as many disciplines (anthropology, English language literature, law economics and biostats, to name a few), in addition to an extensive literature review and daily environmental scans of issues in higher education.

As you might imagine, Harley and her colleagues gleaned an amazing amount of extremely rich data from their interviews of faculty, administrators, publishers and librarians. One surprise to Harley was the amount of time she and her colleagues spent discussing tenure and promotion (T&P) with their interviewees. Let’s consider just a few of Harley’s findings related to T&P and the role that scholarly publication plays in it:

– The most important aspect of T&P is a stellar publication record — service, teaching and public engagement are important but secondary to publication

– New journals and genres are acceptable — so long as they’re peer reviewed

– Peer review is the “coin of the realm” — it is the sole value system in academia, but…

– Peer review has problems: lack of speed, conservatism, bias, low quality reviews, non-scholar editors, cost to the institution to subsidize peer review via faculty salaries, lack of fraud and plagiarism detection

– T&P should be supportive of non-traditional forms of publication (e.g. Open Access journals)

– Publishers may say that they “do” peer review, but that’s not the case — faculty “do” peer review, at a cost to their institutions, NOT at a cost to the publisher

Do these ring true for you? Are these issues that you face in your work as a librarian, faculty member or aspiring scholar? How does the culture at Duke fit into this picture of T&P and scholarly communication? What can or should Duke Libraries do to support non-traditional forms of publication?