All About Peer Reviews

What exactly is an external, confidential peer review?
 
Peer review is an integral part of the commissioning process for all monographs at Bloomsbury Academic. It is the assessment of an author's proposal by independent reviewers who are leaders in the field. We ask them to consider the quality of the proposal and to advise us on the suitability of the proposed project for publication.  

How does this work in further detail? 

At Bloomsbury, all book proposals are initially assessed in-house by the Commissioning Editor or Publisher for the relevant list. This assessment focuses on the quality of the work, the commercial viability of the proposed book and its ‘fit’ within the list. If the editor decides that a proposal meets these criteria it will be sent out for review. Our reviews are ‘single anonymous’, this means that reviewers will know who the author is and their affiliation, but they won’t know who the reviewer is (unless the reviewer decides to waiver anonymity, which does sometimes happen). We won’t review proposals which have been sent to other publishers - we always ask for ‘exclusive submission’. 

For academic monographs, we usually require at least two reviews, and we generally try to complete the process within three months. We review textbooks and reference works as well but we tend to require more review reports for these  and the process might take longer. Once the reports are in, we will share the feedback with the author before taking next steps. 

How does a commissioning editor select an appropriate reviewer? 
We approach experienced and recognised experts in the research area. We actively look for diversity in our review panels, both in terms of gender and geography.  

What criteria is the reviewer looking for? 

We send our reviewers a questionnaire and this covers a range of criteria: 

•    Whether the proposal makes a significant and positive contribution to the field.
•    How it differs or complements existing books in the area of research. 
•    Whether it is representative of the research landscape in the field. 
•    Whether the proposed structure of the book works well, whether anything is missing or superfluous. 
•    Whether the book’s intended readership is correctly identified – both in terms of subject area and global reach. 

Can an author respond to the review? 

Following the review process, we will normally send the author the reviewers’ reports and ask them to respond. The reports may contain suggestions for revision, re-organisation, abbreviation or enlargement of the author's manuscript. What happens next will depend on the review reports themselves. We might ask the author to prepare a revised proposal in light of the review feedback (this is called a ‘revise and resubmit’). Or we might ask them to write a response to the reviewers’ comments.   We don’t expect authors to agree wholeheartedly with all reviewers’ comments but if they don’t agree we like to understand why. Whatever feedback the author is given, we ask authors to give the recommendations made by the reviewers, serious consideration. 

We will consider the reviewers’ reports and the author's response to them and at that point we will decide whether to take the proposal forward to the Publishing Meeting. If we decide a proposal is not suitable to be taken forward, we will let the author know promptly. Once a decision is taken to decline a proposal, we ask authors to understand this is a final decision.  

How do editors ensure the process is fair and without bias? 

We work hard to choose the most appropriate reviewers for all our proposals. We look for leaders in the field who will know the landscape of the subject area and will be familiar with existing literature and the most recent research.  Ensuring the process is fair and without bias is very important to us. So, for example, we won’t ask examiners or supervisors to review proposals for revised PhD proposals. And we wouldn’t ask colleagues who we know work closely with the author, or, for example, are at the same institution.