No Peer Review? No Problem.

E(i)ditorial — February 2016

I’ve been told repeatedly by senior scholars that Eidolon will never be taken seriously as scholarship because our articles aren’t peer-reviewed. I object to the assumptions behind this criticism — to me, it’s like saying that an orange will never be taken seriously as an apple, when the point is that they’re both fruits (fruit, in this analogy, standing for ‘meaningful scholarly work’). Nevertheless, I’d like to use this editorial to respond to the idea that the peer-reviewed apple is inherently superior to the public intellectual orange.

Peer review has been the subject of a great deal of criticism lately. Although its raison d’être is to ensure the high quality of published work, in reality it often ends up confirming the biases and inequities that pervade academia more generally, including sexism. Double-blind peer review, shielding the identity of the writer as well as the reviewers, might help rectify these issues — but it would make the process even more time-consuming and costly than it already is. Some argue that peer review has no place in a digital world, and we should all be doing post-publication review.

I think that’s unnecessarily extreme. There’s room for both apples and oranges in the fruit bowl. My goal here isn’t really to critique peer review, although I believe the critiques deserve consideration. I also suspect that the near-fanatical devotion of humanities scholars to peer review is a symptom of our desire to make our work resemble science as much as possible. Nevertheless, I think peer review has a great deal of value. That doesn’t make it the only system that can produce interesting, useful scholarly work.

As I’ve mentioned in the past, one of the main differences between Eidolon and peer-reviewed journals is timeliness. In theory, peer-reviewed articles are meant to have timeless value to the study of their topic (although few may achieve that lofty goal in practice). Our editorial process at Eidolon allows us to publish articles about issues that are relevant right now. This month contained more such articles than we’ve ever had before, including Kathryn Topper’s article on suspicion of female voters and Verity Platt’s analysis of the classical resonances in the empty chair dedicated to victims of gun violence at Obama’s State of the Union address.

But there are other benefits to our model beyond the compressed timeframe, even beyond the ability to reach hundreds — if not thousands — of interested readers in a matter of days. I would argue that our editorial process itself is a benefit. There’s no denying that it’s different from peer review, but that doesn’t mean it’s always weaker.

Peer review has a tendency to produce a certain conformity in journal articles. After all, if you’re going to dedicate a significant chunk of your time to writing a journal article, you want something that will be approved of by a majority of possible reviewers. In the case of Eidolon, the only people whose approval you need are our editorial team.

That’s not to say that we love everything that’s sent to us. But we do enjoy elements that might alienate reviewers, such as stylistic quirkiness and personal anecdotes. And we actively work with writers to shape their ideas into the form best suited to reach their readership. It’s a more intensive and less passive process than receiving reader reports, and we’ve encountered some resistance from writers who felt our suggestions detracted from their articles. Academics are notoriously difficult to edit. But, for the most part, my impression is that writers seem to enjoy our editorial process and the feedback they get from us. (Writers who feel this way should feel free to comment on this editorial to give me some evidence!)

I don’t think the criticism that Eidolon needs peer review to be taken seriously has ever been leveled at me by someone who had spent a lot of time working behind the scenes with the peer review process as a journal or academic press editor. In fact, those people have been some of the first to admit that Eidolon has unique benefits — and also that peer review isn’t as perfect as many would like to believe.

Finally, I often wonder when someone calls Eidolon unserious what they think seriousness is. As a scholar of Greek comedy, I’ve put some thought into what it means to be serious or unserious. In English we use the word to describe two interconnected but separable concepts, one tonal and one substantive. There are two different antonyms for serious: ‘light-hearted’, and ‘lacking substance’. Humor isn’t always levity. Many brilliant comedians are at their funniest when they’re being deadly serious.

Is Eidolon unserious? Maybe, in the sense that many articles have a light tone, like Norman Sandridge’s Socratic dialogue. Some peer-reviewed articles do too. Does it lack substance? That’s for you to decide. But decide on your own — don’t outsource your assessment to two anonymous people.

This month, Eidolon published nine articles:

Yung In Chae, Eidolon’s Assistant Editor, created a guide to best practices for comparing the ancient and modern world in Apples and Oranges, Ravens and Writing Desks
Prudentia, Eidolon’s advice column, offered suggestions to a reader for how to respond to a tenured professor who insisted that adjuncts need to ‘tough it out’ in The Appalled Dinner Guest
Verity Platt illuminated the ancient rhetorical practices that explain the power of President Obama’s gesture of leaving an empty seat for gun violence victims at the State of the Union address in The Empty Chair and the Silent Voice
Norman Sandridge utilized the form of a Socratic dialogue to interrogate the idea that the goal of a university is to produce leaders in The Uniprez
James Romm reviewed the Coen Brothers’ latest homage to both classical antiquity and Hollywood in Hail, Caesar! A Classical Scholar’s Review
Kathryn Topper explored the roots of our distrust of female voters going back to the founding of Athens in Pandora’s Ballot Box
Brandon Bark examined the debate about monuments to problematic individuals through the lens of the Roman custom of damnatio memoriae in Their Writing on Our Walls
Jessica Evans argued that constructions of masculinity are playing a significant role in the Republican presidential race in Alcibiades’ Trump Card
Rachel Lesser problematized the comparison between The Force Awakens and the Aeneid, and the similarities between the Star Wars films and the epic cycle, in How Epic is Star Wars?

We’re also thrilled to announce our upcoming special anniversary issue on Helen and Her Eidolon. If you’re interested in contributing, the announcement is here.

Happy reading!

Donna Zuckerberg received her PhD in Classics from Princeton in 2014. She is the founding editor of Eidolon and teaches Greek drama at Stanford Continuing Studies and online for the Paideia Institute. Her first book, currently titled Classics Beyond the Manosphere, is under contract with Harvard University Press. Read more of her work here.