The Center for the Study for Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley, has just published the report of its project on peer review and its role in academic tenure and review and in scholarly publishing. The project included both extensive background papers and also a workshop (which I was fortunate to be able to attend). Full details in the release from CSHE reproduced below. I think this is a valuable look at a much under-explored area and should be of interest to many CNI-announce readers.

Clifford Lynch Director, CNI

We are delighted to announce the publication of:

Peer Review in Academic Promotion and Publishing: Its Meaning, Locus, and Future A Project Report and Associated Recommendations, Proceedings from a Meeting, and Background Papers

Authors: Diane Harley and Sophia Krzys Acord

The publication can be viewed online and downloaded at: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/1xv148c8#

Since 2005, and with generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE) has been conducting research to explore how academic values - including those related to peer review, publishing, sharing, and collaboration -influence scholarly communication practices and engagement with new technological affordances, open access publishing, and the public good.

This report includes (1) an overview of the state of peer review in the Academy at large, (2) a set of recommendations for moving forward, (3) a proposed research agenda to examine in depth the effects of academic status-seeking on the entire academic enterprise, (4) proceedings from the workshop on the four topics noted above, and (5) four substantial and broadly conceived background papers on the workshop topics, with associated literature reviews.

The document explores, in particular, the tightly intertwined phenomena of peer review in publication and academic promotion, the values and associated costs to the Academy of the current system, experimental forms of peer review in various disciplinary areas, the effects of scholarly practices on the publishing system, and the possibilities and real costs of creating alternative loci for peer review and publishing that link scholarly societies, libraries, institutional repositories, and university presses. We also explore the motivations and ingredients of successful open access resolutions that are directed at peer-reviewed article-length material. In doing so, this report suggests that creating a wider array of institutionally acceptable and cost-effective alternatives to peer reviewing and publishing scholarly work could maintain the quality of academic peer review, support greater research productivity, reduce the explosive growth of low-quality publications, increase the purchasing power of cash-strapped libraries, better support the free flow and preservation of ideas, and relieve the burden on overtaxed faculty of conducting too much peer review.

This latest report on the state and future of peer review is a natural extension of our findings in Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines (2010), which stressed the need for a more nuanced academic reward system that is less dependent on citation metrics, the slavish adherence to marquee journals and university presses, and the growing tendency of institutions to outsource assessment of scholarship to such proxies as default promotion criteria.

Links to the complete results of our ongoing work can be found at The Future of Scholarly Communication Project website.

======================================== Diane Harley, Ph.D., Principal Investigator and Director, Higher Education in the Digital Age Project, Center for Studies in Higher Education 771 Evans Hall, # 4650 University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720 http://cshe.berkeley.edu/people/dharley.htm email: dianeh /at/ berkeley /dot/ edu