In this short commentary, Mieke Bal sets out her ten objections to the peer-review system in academic publishing.
When the academy turned “neo-liberal” world-wide, rules were established that have become a “system”, no longer debatable. No consultation, no trial period, revision, or reconsidering. Rules rule, overruling people. One of those rules is the unquestioned system that all respectable, serious academic journals and book series have to obey the requirement to have all submissions for publication “peer-reviewed”. This seemed a good idea at the beginning – to get feedback to optimize quality – but became problematic when generalized into a rule. It has become a term, even part of ordinary language, and I have had it thrown at me many times in totally wrong contexts. I would like to offer no fewer than ten arguments, intricately related yet distinguishable, that make the peer-review system (PRS) highly problematic, and, in my view, ready for abolition. Only when the rule is reregulated – stripped of its rule-character – can alternatives be considered that preserve the positive aspects but eliminate the ten objections I am highlighting here.[1]
The peer-review system is deeply wrong, firstly, because it entails a heavy burden on scholars who should spend the little time they have to do their own work. Their available research and writing time is under pressure by all the new rules anyway, which increase the administrative workload uselessly. As a result, only the less active and less brilliant scholars will be willing to do this, and this has consequences for the quality of the reviews. Sometimes the colleagues who take the job on do make the sacrifice and offer excellent criticism, helpful for the author. But many times, the critique is superficial and routine. I can’t blame this on the reviewers, who get no credit whatsoever for this labour.
A second drawback is that the procedure and its formalism and duration win over quality discussions involving the coherence and originality of a journal issue, collective volume, or book series. This situation diminishes the quality of the end product, which can become meagre, incoherent, and belated in terms of both the subject, if this is contemporary, and other scholarship.
A third objection is that the system is fundamentally conservative. Since the judgments are asked from people established in a field, these may not welcome innovations that can potentially challenge their fixed views. I have often seen comments of the order of “why doesn’t the author quote so-and-so, a major figure in the field?” Without naming names, it seems fair to say that an article on a post-colonial subject that lacks the two most-cited names in that area will be taken to task for it, as I have personally read in a review. This ignores the obvious fact that such omissions may be purposeful, an attempt to open the field for a thorough reconsideration of what is “post-” about the current state of the world in relation to colonialism. I assume the founding predecessors in question would not object to such revisions, but their less-alert adulators might find it inconceivable. These can be proponents who, in haste due to the first reason mentioned, mostly check if the bibliography is “correct”.
A fourth reason to deplore the imposition of the system is that the result is often the opposite of what the system aims to achieve. When asked to review a submission, one tends only to accept reviewing papers or books either by friends or people with whom one agrees, more or less; or by people with opposed views, so that one can trash it. It is against this tendency that the system was put in place, but in fact the system promotes it. Publishers and editors choose reviewers on the basis of whom they know, and what they expect from those people, not on “objective” grounds – if such grounds exist at all. I have had both experiences from the beginning of my career. Just one example: A book submission was sent for review to someone the editor, who liked the book, assumed would like it too; especially since I had returned the favor earlier and recommended a book by this anonymous reviewer. The editor was mistaken, however. The opposite happened, doubtlessly due to turf-policing or worse, a claim to ownership over the field, and when, after I spent two years revising – and writing the next book – he finally approved it, I was ready to change publishers. This reviewer couldn’t stand that I had walked into a territory he considered his property. This happens all the time, not even necessarily consciously. (I figured out his identity through stylistic properties of the review, as well as specific opinions and mentions of missing references, which supports my point.)
A fifth problem is the effect it has on the academic world in general. For, the system reinforces hierarchy. This discourages especially as yet unknown young authors who feel subjected to a Big Brother they don’t know. Through the anonymity, it may lure people to be nasty, to fight out their personal dislike of people or approaches. But on the authors, it has the effect of abject surrender – long gone are the days there was a semblance of democracy in the academic organization. The feeling of “why bother” comes up easily. And, so, the intellectual world may lose valuable future colleagues.
And related to this, problem six: On the other side of the power divide, the system disempowers editors, who are no longer in a position to select the articles of journals or the books on their list in connection to one another. This makes the painstaking job of editing less attractive for excellent people, for people with a vision who are interested in negotiating the fine line between imposing a theme and letting the publication grow more or less spontaneously on the basis of the articles submitted. As a result, the publications either lose coherence or substance. I have had to propose two peer-reviewers for some fifty good-enough submissions for a special issue of an online journal. Of course, I didn’t know one hundred people working in the area. The problem was solved by the permanent editors of the journal who asked some buddies to do a quick turn-over. A case of problem four. But this doesn’t solve the problem of how to select adequate reviewers.
A seventh problem appears practical, but it has profound intellectual consequences: Peer-reviewing slows down the already slow system of publishing, so that especially contemporary subjects suffer a backlog. This makes choosing such subjects less appealing to scholars, which produces yet another conservative effect. Analyses of contemporary cultural issues are obsolete by the time they appear. This has been one of the reasons that have pushed me to begin making video documentaries on issues of migration. Not only was it possible to empower the people “in” the films, instead of writing about them. But it was also an exercise in true contemporaneity. More generally, and, more strictly, academically, the published text will have to be based on research which is, in turn, made available belatedly. I have often had to wait two years before an article came out. As a result, everything that had appeared since I wrote it was not taken into consideration. This delay has, again, a huge impact on the quality the system is supposed to guard.
This delay effect entails an eighth problem that I find particularly objectionable: It is unfair to PhD candidates or other young scholars, whose position in the “flexibility” cult of the “neo-liberal” university – which is neither new nor liberal, in case you misunderstand the term to mean what it says – who often are required or expected to publish before they can hand in their PhD dissertations or be appointed to a postdoc. This pressure is itself already a “rule”, of which the tension with the peer-review rule remains unnoticed. But as part of the three years they get – already much too short to research and write a PhD thesis in many cases – they have to wait months and months to hear if their article is accepted, and then at least another year before it is published. This wait raises anxiety, which is counter-productive for the larger project.
I witnessed one such case from close-by. A brilliant PhD student submitted an article after barely two years of PhD work, hence, a year before it was expected to be published. Before the system, this might have worked out. I read it and thought it was excellent. The editor of the special issue for which it was written also admired it. The peer-reviewers took forever. But then, when this student’s time was up while the acceptance and, in principle, even the appearance of the article was a requirement for him getting a fourth year to teach and thus get crucial teaching experience, things went awry. On the basis of a second round of peer-reviews, this time of the special issue as a whole, the journal rejected the entire issue, not on the basis of the quality of the articles but because they disapproved of the topic. So, even this diligent person, who had obeyed the rules to the letter, saw this crucial fourth year jeopardized for no fault of his own at all. He was lucky enough to have an understanding and empathic supervisor with enough clout, so he did get that year, but this could have cost him basically his academic career, and thus would have cost the academy an outstanding member. For, let’s not forget it: getting the best people on track is in the interest of the entire intellectual world.
A perverse side-effect of my fourth objection is a ninth problem. The system is an instrument for turf policing, not even solely aiming at the conservation of a field as unchangeable, but including worse, acting out resentment towards colleagues whose students will suffer from bad will among their seniors, with which they have nothing to do whatsoever. This I have experienced and witnessed. Of course, colleagues disagree all the time; there is nothing wrong with that. This should lead to debate, which is productive, and one of the pillars of good academic practice leading to intellectual gain. But professors are not selected on the basis of a saintly personality. Moreover, envy is actually strongly encouraged by the academic system itself, and worse since that other requirement, to solicit and get large subsidies, has been implemented. What is considered “healthy competition” frequently leads to unspoken partialities. A student can suffer from having chosen a supervisor against whom a colleague bears a grudge. Sometimes the intellectual positions, too frequently reduced to a binary opposition, are even called “schools”, with antagonists calling the other position “dogmatic” and their own ideas “discoveries”. With the anonymous peer-review system, this offers the grudge-bearing one a tool to get back at the hated and despised colleague by denying their students the opportunity to publish and thus increase their reputation. Too bad for the student, who is just trying to do the best intellectual work. Again, the loss is also on the academy.
Lastly, the most devastating effect, is the tenth problem. This is a more general social aspect of the system: It is anchored in an authoritative mentality. This entails a serious social danger: it promotes a tendency to collective insecurity, hidden behind authorities. This is how it works: only if others approve, a work deserves approval. As per objection six, this kills the stimulation for excellent scholars to cultivate their own opinion.
There are alternative possibilities to achieve what the system is meant but fails to achieve: quality control, or rather, quality stimulation. Valuable feedback from peers is something an author can seek out herself. On behalf of the journal or the book series, the good old editorial board can be activated. Once editors have made their selection, a round of discussion with board members can help to assess if the choice is good for the quality of the publication. This includes the coherence of special issues and the appropriateness for a book series. This is happening anyway. It should be enough. Trust in their capabilities and judgement is in order. All this can be organized in relation to the purpose of academic publications, and what the PRS precludes: a constructive production of the tools, the basis for debates, made available for the workers in academic research.
Notes
[1] The ten arguments against just one element of the current catastrophic situation I am advancing here can be usefully assessed against the backdrop sketched, for example, by Chris Lorenz, “If You’re So Smart, Why Are You under Surveillance? Universities, Neoliberalism, and New Public Management” in one of the best journals in the Humanities, Critical Inquiry 38, 3 (Spring 2012), 599-629. For more arguments of my own against the current situation, see my article “Power to the Imagination!” in Krisis, special issue “Perspectives for the New University”, 2, 2015, 68-76.
A founder of ASCA, the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, Mieke Bal’s primary commitment is to develop meaningful interdisciplinary approaches to cultural artifacts. She is a cultural theorist, critic, video artist and occasional curator. She works in cultural analysis, literature and art, focusing on gender, migratory culture, psychoanalysis, and the critique of capitalism. Her 38 books include a trilogy on political art: Endless Andness (on abstraction), Thinking in Film (on video installation), both 2013, Of What One Cannot Speak (on sculpture, 2010). Her work comes together in A Mieke Bal Reader (2006). In 2016 appeared In Medias Res: Inside Nalini Malani’s Shadow Plays (Hatje Cantz), and in Spanish, Tiempos trastornados on the politics of visuality (AKAL). Her video projects of documentaries on migratory culture have been exhibited internationally, including in the Museum of the History of Saint Petersburg in 2011. After this she embarked on making “theoretical fictions”. A Long History of Madness argues for a more humane treatment of psychosis, and was exhibited internationally, including in a site-specific version, Saying It, in the Freud Museum in London. In Fall 2017 it was combined with Reasonable Doubt in Warsaw. Madame B, with Michelle Williams Gamaker, is widely exhibited, in 2017 in Museum Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova in Turku, in the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago de Compostela (2017-18), and combined with paintings by Edvard Munch in the Munch Museum in Oslo. It has also been exhibited in shorter versions, Cause & Effect (13 screens) and Precarity (5 screens). Her most recent film and installation, Reasonable Doubt, on René Descartes and Queen Kristina, explores the social and audio-visual aspects of the process of thinking (2016). The installation of that project has premiered in Kraków, and was shown in Amsterdam, Brisbane, Warsaw and Berlin, and in 2018 in two exhibition-specific installations in the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem. www.miekebal.org
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