dissemination in the scholarly community and the desirable discourse associated with it. Selection (presumably by an editor or editorial team) of a book for review in a prestigious journal is probably worth as much as dozens of citations.
Table 3.1: Comparing book and journal publishing
Access
Acceptance rates
Review process
Journals
The norm is unso- licited papers – oc- casionally journal editors will request or solicit manuscripts for special issues of jour- nals. It is generally accepted, though that all manuscripts irrespective of how they ‘arrived’ at the journal are treated the same and sub- jected to peer re- view.
The acceptance rates of three promi- nent American jour- nals are as follows: for the AER it varies be- tween 10 and 12%
(between 1984 and 1993), around 12 – 13% for the ASR and between 10 – 15% for the APSR.
Journal editors do lit- tle evaluation on re- ceipt of a manuscript with review processes highly routinised so that the main issue is the selection of re- viewers. Journals dif- fer in the number of reviewers but it is usu- ally 3 or 2.
Books
Book publishers treat solicited and unsolicited manuscripts very differently. Roughly 75%
of all book manuscripts are unsolicited. The more person- ally involved an editor is in ac- quiring a manuscript, the more likely it is to be pub- lished. At one major publish- ing house, of 3 640 unsolicited submissions, only 27 (0.07%) were published; of 940 submis- sions where the author had some previous relationship with the publishing house 79 (8%) were published and of the 100 manuscripts that edi- tors had personally solicited, 35 were published (35%).
Acceptance rates for books are more difficult to come by but the following rates are known for Columbia University Press (2.5% in 1976), Princeton University Press (5.3% in 1981) and Penn State University Press (17% in 1990).
Book editors do a lot of evalu- ative work up front. They need to know or establish which in- tellectual communities would be attracted to the book, whether the book is well writ- ten and much work will be in- volved in publishing the book.
For assistance in evaluation most editors turn to the schol- arly community for a provi-
This comparison of the production of books and journal articles reveals certain differences in terms of access (a small percentage of book manuscripts are solicited); acceptance rates (book manuscripts seem to have lower acceptance rates than journal articles); review processes (book manuscript reviewing is much more individualised and time-in- tensive), review criteria (book manuscripts are assessed not only in terms
Distribution
Sponsored and contested mobility
The published discus- sion of articles, by contrast, is a rela- tively rare event, ex- cept in the case of a published response.
Journal evaluation is a more open com- petition, a contest of resilience and re- peated effort.
sional review. If a favourable review is received, the editor moves to provisional accept- ance. Later, when a complete manuscript is received, many commercial publishers and most university presses will re- turn to the original reviewers to assess the manuscript. A negative initial review usually dampens a publisher’s inter- est. Unlike in journal publishing, a book editor is less interested in summing up a variety of re- views. Current best practice is to use three reviewers both at the proposal and at the man- uscript stage.
Books are not routinely distrib- uted to many members of a discipline, but they continue to attract attention selectively after publication in reviews and advertisements. Com- mercial book publishers are concerned with marketability, a consideration journal edi- tors, and at times university presses, can eschew.
The book evaluation process is a system in which reputation and patronage can be key;
projects are nurtured on the basis of promise and the re- wards of accumulative ad- vantage accrue to those who are productive.
of their quality but at times also for their purposes, including marketabil- ity) and mobility (book reviews can be conducted within a system of patronage and reputation). It is evident that the expanded and adapted roles of editors are the key difference, and much depends on the expertise, judiciousness and meticulousness of these participants.
The Panel is of the opinion that quality assurance in book publishing, especially in the case of collected works, requires the three levels of ex- aminationto be clearly separated and addressed. The overall publish- ing decisionis based on a mix of the work’s market positioning and intrinsic quality. The latter depends on the other two levels of assurance:
the collecting, editing and coherence-making functionusually exer- cised by one or more editors and/or an editorial board, and theinde- pendent peer review of individual chapters. Where the editor(s) or editorial board members can legitimately carry out chapter-specific, independent peer review (for example in works with a strong disciplinary focus), there is generally no need for outside review, as long as the two levels are addressed separately in the processes and records leading to the publishing decision at the first level. Where these persons cannot adequately provide journal-type peer assessment at the individual chapter level (for example in works that bring together authors from widely differing areas or disciplines), outside peer experts are needed in order to bring the quality assurance level up to that of peer-reviewed journal articles.
The case for this approach includes the likely recognition by ‘genuine’
peers of pre- or re-publicationof the essential content of book chapters in journals. While this is not a scholarly ‘crime’ in the same league as pla- giarising the works of others, it should certainly require public acknow- ledgment in the texts concerned, motivations in respect of possibly differing roles and intentions in publishing journal articles as opposed to book chapters, and honest declarations in reporting and rewarding sys- tems. Another argument in the case for systematic three-level quality assurance is the likely resolution from this approach of the key questions of originality, primacy, citability and archival valueof particular findings and discoveries. Book chapters characteristically leave out full descrip- tions of methods, background information, and assorted data, in order to strengthen and extend the main thematic narrative. In this sense, spe- cific, third-level peer review would provide a kind of guarantee for read- ers of the solidity of that narrative. It would also help to attenuate the consistently lower value usually assigned to book chapters in scholarly evaluations (of which the research outputs weighting model of the DoHET is a good example – see Chapter 4).