than the author. Furthermore, reviewers are supposed to be protected from professional repercussions in cases where, for instance, the author is a prominent figure in his or her field. Often, however, this is utopian, in the sense of ‘naïve’. In many small fields where work may have been presented in early versions at conferences, where authors are known for adopting a specific stance, or simply through flawed metadata erasure and/or slips of self-citation, the identity of the author can be ascertained. While it is less often that slips occur the other way around, it is sometimes possible to guess the most likely reviewer of one’s work simply by dint of his or her expertise and by the idiom of his or her returned report.
Furthermore, anonymity can be problematic. The lack of accountability of readers, as above, can lead to harsh, penalising reviews, rather than to feedback that, while rigorous, intends to work in community to elevate a work to a publishable standard. Additionally, there is also something strange about the perseverance of anonymity after publication. As noted earlier with respect to the role of citation, universities and academia function on genealogies of validation; that is, on hierarchies of prestige that trace the flow of academic ‘capital’ and authority through publications.7 As explored in earlier chapters, journals and presses are primarily only as valuable as the genealogies that validate their work as high quality, through submission quantity/quality and rejection rate, underpinned by the labour of peer review. However, in the current way of working, what remains is a situation where, instead of the process of review being visible in order to validate the work, the quality of the review process must be inferred from the perceived post-publication quality of the research.
To extend this argument: there are only two ways, both flawed, in which the quality of the review can be ascertained under current practice. The first of these is through trust in nominal journal or publisher brand; the problems of prestige to which much of Chapter 2 was dedicated. The second way in which journal or publisher quality is crudely measured and the one that surely most affects scholars’ perceptions lies in the duplication of labour when reading an article or book; a type of second review in which academics bring their own evaluative skills to bear on already published work. During this constant re-evaluation, the blame for poor quality is often put down either to the author or to the journal/press brand. This is
