From Content to Location (?): Academic Publishing and the Problem of Authority

Last updated on: May 27, 2013 at 8:17 am by Guest Contributor

From Content to Location (?): Academic Publishing and the Problem of Authority 2013-05-27T08:17:00-05:00 Guest Contributor

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The medium for evaluating the suitability of a future publication is the peer-review process. This is known to the academic world for decades and all junior or senior scholars go through such a process after submitting a paper to an academic journal for consideration. However, the process is often not regulated by what we all understand peer-review to be, especially when it comes to articles that challenge long-established ideas and/or theories. Ever since I obtained my PhD three years ago, I have been engaged – like so many other young scholars all over the world – in academic writing, testing my theories and ideas by submitting them in the form of articles to various journals, in my case in the field of ancient Greek religion and the reception of ancient theories of religion in the early Christian period. In the process I have received peer-review reports ranging from positive to extremely hostile – nothing surprising here; I imagine there is not even a single scholar who has had only positive or only negative (even hostile) reviews. However, what in many cases has struck me is the reluctance of anonymous reviewers to accept a new theory or approach solely on the basis that it does not conform with what is taken to be an ‘authoritative’ interpretation/theory/approach in the field.

Given the anonymity that governs the principle of a ‘fair’ peer-review, the writer has no knowledge whether the reviewers of her/his article are specialists in the respective field or not. However, one can easily discern if the reviewer is making her/his criticism based on solid and detailed knowledge or on a vague idea that s/he has on the subject. In the first case, one can profit from the review, since comments are informed, bibliographically well-established, and pose questions that can indeed enhance the quality of the paper – or even change it considerably if the author is not well qualified. In the second case, however, the review seems like a defense of other theories, most often based on secondary literature. By that I mean that for scholars like myself, who work on ancient sources, reviewers are often not acquainted with the sources at hand and base their own reviews on other scholars whose work they actually know.

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