What to Do with Reviewer 2?

Ball, Cheryl E.; Ball, Cheryl E.

This session was generated by a call for proposals that asked editors and authors to rethink the use of anonymous feedback from so-called “Reviewer 2”--that notoriously persnickety scholar who supposedly has nothing but unkind things to say about an article manuscript—within scholarly publishing. This session continues the ongoing promotion by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals and its mission to provide editorial education, mentoring, and outreach to its editors and scholars in the humanities and related disciplines through inclusive MLA panels. In 2023, our goal is to take up the idea of how reviewing works (and doesn’t work) in our disciplines, what parts we might keep, how we might make reviewing better for both reviewers and scholars receiving those reviews, and how we can make the process of publishing more inclusive without losing whatever the notion of “rigor” might imply to the scholarly record. The topic for this session covers a range of scholarly and editorial practice in inclusive editing, publishing pedagogy, open peer review, rhetorical listening, and generous thinking, as espoused by scholars such as Cana Uluak Itchuaqiyaq, Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Cheryl Glenn, Rebecca Walton, Alex Ketchum, Rich Shivener, Laura Micciche, Agata Mrva-Montoya, Cindy Selfe and Gail Hawisher, Nick Sciullo and Mike Duncan, and the authorial collective of “Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices: A Heuristic for Editors, Reviewers, and Authors,” among others. Yet there is much more practical work to be done. Pinning all inappropriate feedback on the specter of Reviewer 2 highlights our supposedly outdated ways of conducting peer review, reducing review to a binary between generous and cruel. Instead, this panel's presenters seek models of peer review that can be as useful and inclusive as possible in our fields. Three panelists will each speak for 15 minutes to provide hypotheses and examples that can help us change scholarly journal publishing for the better. The moderator will ensure 20 minutes for Q&A at after the presenters speak.

The first presenter will begin our panel by discussing the benefits of a certain kind of gatekeeping that is supported by a double-blind peer review process. They will also argue that the double-blind review process can support and enhance an editorʻs mentoring relationship with essayists. Their journal (like many others) receives a majority of submissions from graduate students or new faculty. This is, in fact, one of the reasons they sought out the editorship, since they teach at an undergraduate only institution. They truly value the opportunity to bring papers from promising to publishable. This presentation will focus primarily on the way the editor can take on a mentoring role with the benefit of blind gatekeeping by peer reviewers. It will also touch briefly on the approach the presenter has started to take with some peer reviewers, so that there is collaboration “behind the curtain.”

The second presenter will speak from their experience as a Kanien'keha:ka scholar to describe some of the ways (all too familiar to Indigenous scholars) that traditional academic review processes run counter to fundamental principles of knowledge sharing and exchange in Indigenous knowledge communities. In particular, they will address anonymous peer review—which intends to preserve the integrity and validity of published scholarship—as a practice often incompatible with how Indigenous work frames and validates itself as meaningful. Not only are new review practices needed if academic journals want more participation by Indigenous scholars, both as authors and reviewers, but models of review based on Indigenous principles of relationality will help all scholars and publishers rethink whether current conventional practices are actually serving our objectives as collective thinkers.

The third presenter offers a model for peer review that eliminates our ability to roll our eyes at the collective “Reviewer 2” trope. This presenter discusses an open, collaborative peer review model, which varies widely across its usage over the last 30 years, but does exist within the humanities, in a handful of journals, and is widely used in the sciences. What was once an experimental review process, involving multiple editorial board members discussing a work collaboratively, has become a benchmark approach for providing critical and helpful feedback to authors through a mentoring, pedagogical approach that ultimately saves time and labor for overburdened peer reviewers.

326 What to Do with Reviewer 2?: Calls for Papers