Peer Review and Institutional Certification

Criteria for Academic Publication

Peer-reviewed printed works published by reputable presses (or e-books that mimic printed books) are still the gold standard for academic promotion. However, the advance of digital technology and its ubiquity in our lives has brought us to an inflection point in the history of scholarly communication. Online publications of research results that break the bonds of the printed codex will increasingly play an important role. What will those publications look like and how will academic gatekeepers come to accept them as valid?

Traditional printed publications still serve as the vehicles of academic distinction because they have qualities that digital publications have hitherto lacked. Printed books are durable, citable, stable, discoverable, attributable, and evaluable. It is unrealistic to expect scholars to rely on published works that lack these qualities, so CORPUS ensures that its publications possess them.

See the Guidelines for the Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship by Historians of the American Historical Association and the essay by van der Weel and Praal in Digital Technology and the Practices of Humanities Research, edited by Jennifer Edmond.

The Need for Peer Review

Academic presses have played a central role in ensuring that scholarly publications have the qualities listed above, not least by conducting peer review of the work prior to publication. The CORPUS publications staff are guided by experienced senior editors at the University of Chicago Press, which is represented on the CORPUS editorial board. Regardless of the medium of publication, institutional certification via peer review is necessary to ensure that a published work meets the standards expected in the field of study to which it pertains.

Following best practices in academic publishing, CORPUS conducts peer review both of the initial publication proposal, to determine whether the work should be accepted for publication, and of the final product before it is released on the Web. Once a publication proposal has been approved by the CORPUS editorial board, the author(s) of the proposed work sign a legal publication agreement with the University of Chicago that spells out the terms and conditions of the publication. This agreement is modeled after the agreements authors sign for printed books published by the University of Chicago Press.

Particularly salient for digital works is the question of the origin of the published material. It is easy simply to copy and paste digital data, raising the issue of authorial attribution. However, this can be determined in the course of peer review and professional editing by the institution that undertakes to publish the work. In the process, the publisher (in this case CORPUS) also ensures that authors have the legal right to reproduce material they did not create themselves. Scholars who are skeptical of the quality or originality of digital content published on the Web can rely on the institutional certification of CORPUS publications, which is the product of a rigorous editorial process.