Peer-Reviewing the Academic Journal: A Three-hour Workshop
I no longer teach this workshop, devoted to managing the editorial content of a peer-reviewed journal. That is, the task of reviewing and selecting articles to be published. Such tasks typically fall to the journal's editor and/or editorial board. They include notifying authors of the receipt of their submission, reviewing each submission for general suitability, selecting appropriate reviewers for each submission, asking potential reviewers if available to review, sending manuscripts to reviewers, nagging reviewers to return comments, collating reviewers' recommendations, making final decisions about acceptance or rejection, writing a cover letter to authors notifying them of this decision and making recommendations for revision, and reviewing revisions when they are returned. An important part of a good peer review is carefully tracking each submission through every stage of this complicated process. Only if you record and file all correspondence regarding the submission can you be sure that you are dealing with authors fairly. A final part of the peer-review process is creating a copyright agreement, sending it to authors, and filing the returned agreements in a safe, easy-to-find place.