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Several major problems with peer review exist in the related humanities disciplines of rhetoric, communication, and composition studies: a preponderance of incompetent reviewers, a lack of constructive criticism and the maintenance of orthodoxy, relative ease in identifying blinded authors, editorial passivity, and long waits to receive reviews. We propose five solutions: training for reviewers and editors, reviewers signing their reviews, payment for reviewers, thirty-day review turnaround, and guidelines for reviewing promoted by collective action. Before such solutions could be implemented, however, the existing problems must be acknowledged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores an issue that has been neglected in Australia, the intertwined fates of the scholarly book and the university press. These institutions face two significant threats: the commercialization of the university, which has left academics with less time for the patient research and writing needed to produce a monograph, and the 'tyranny of the journal article' (in contrast to that of the monograph, which has been noted in American debates), which has devalued the monograph and thus reduced some of the incentive for academics to write one. After examining the decline of university presses in Australia, the article concludes that they, and the monographs they publish, will best flourish with increased philanthropic, governmental, and university funding; careful list diversification; creative commissioning; cross-subsidization; and the savvy use of electronic and traditional forms of publishing and dissemination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today's peer-review process for scientific articles is unnecessarily opaque and offers few incentives to referees. Likewise, the publishing process is unnecessarily inefficient, and its results are only rarely made freely available to the public. This article outlines a comparatively simple extension of arXiv.org, an online preprint archive widely used in the mathematical and physical sciences, that addresses both of these problems. Under the proposal, editors invite referees to write public and signed reviews to be attached to the posted preprints, and then elevate selected articles to 'published' status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the roundtable discussion held by members of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ) at the Modern Language Association meeting in December 2008 in San Francisco, California. The author explains that topics included the future of scholarly publishing, the electronic consolidation of scholarly journals, and the regulation of scholarly content by libraries.

The advent of online journals has opened a vast opportunity for small journals published by a variety of institutions. It also has given scholars many more options, from more general publications to far more journals addressing very narrowly defined subjects, and it suggests that in the near future the role of online journals and peer review will radically change. The author proposes roles for user-generated content and university libraries in the evaluation and publication of research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the modern culture of online submission and review systems, are peer reviewers being exploited and undervalued? What was once a simple process of accepting to review a paper, receiving it in the mail, and, eventually, returning it to the editor now requires passwords, usernames, printing off a hard copy, electronic reminders, and, tediously, entering all review comments electronically. Why not just say no? The hard work of the review process should be judging the paper, not fighting the program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rapid development of scholarly publishing and the internationalization of academic journals in China, peer review has begun to gain ground as well. After briefly summarizing the recent academic debate on the validity of peer review and the function of peer experts, the authors look into the major problems with the existing peer-review practices of academic journals in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]