Update from The Digital Press

The Digital Press has been quiet lately, but don’t read this as a sign of inactivity! My plan is to write some short posts updating folks on what we’ve been up to and what we’ve been thinking about over the last few months.

There’s been a ton going on behind the scenes with a record number of books in various states of production from the proposal stage to final review. That means, this late summer and fall will be busy with new book releases and announcements.

That also means that I’m learning a good bit about the managerial roles in the publishing business, the concept and practice of workflow, and thinking more seriously about how The Digital Press can contribute to the changing world of scholarly and academic publishing.

Peer review is fundamental to the academic publication process, but it also has seen some significant recent critique. Among the critiques that I found most intriguing comes from the Peer Review Transparency report sponsored by the Open Society Foundations. The report is here. 

One of the key aspects of The Digital Press’s workflow is close collaboration with the authors. This often involves a commitment on the part of the authors and the Press to see a project through to its publication. Unlike a typical academic press that might not commit to a project until it has received positive peer reviews, for many Digital Press projects, peer review does not have a “gate keeper” function that some imagine, but it part of the production and revision process. 

As a result, I became interested in the way in which the Peer Review Transparency report articulated the variations in peer review and I was charmed by their clever little icons that signaled the kind of review that a work underwent. They aren’t entirely straight forward, of course, but they do demonstrate the range of kinds of peer review present in academia today. Lever Press, a new and apparently very well funded, open access venture has already started to use these symbols to represent the level and kind of peer review present in their works. (This update from Lever is really interesting, by the way. I can assure my authors and readers that I won’t become a bishop any time soon!)

I’m thinking of experimenting with these little symbols in an effort to be more transparent about not just whether a particular volume is peer reviewed but the kind of peer review that the books we publish receive.