Q: Do we take everything?
A: No, no we do not. If your reports mostly agreed that your piece is (some variant of) “just not ready yet” our editors may agree too. If you find yourself with reports like this, we would urge you use those reports to revise, or take your piece back to your own network for ideas about how to “get it there.”
If, on the other hand, you got at least one strong report, but others show evidence of any of the following, and you are all but ready to throw your piece onto your blog, you might consider Medieval Leavings first. Just remember that we peer review, but not in a standard way, and so it may or may not count toward your annual metrics. It is indexed, however, and so potentially more findable (“discoverable”) and citable than your blog.
- Editorial Baton-Pass Fail: You got an R&R. You submitted your revision and the new editorial team refuses to accept peer reviews ordered by the old editorial team, and wants to start your piece over from go.
- No Room for R&R: You got 3 positive reports that requested substantial revision. You’d be happy to do that revision, but the editor chose to reject.
- R&R&R: You revised. You resubmitted. Then journal sent it to (apparently) new reviewers, whose recommendations were 180-degrees from the first reviewers’, and since the journal policies allow for only one R&R, the journal rejects your piece.
- Reviewer 2ing: You got two positive reviews, and one 10-page single-spaced ad hominem screed, and feel that the rejection may have taken that screed into greater account than was warranted.
- Not-a-Mind-Reader: You got positive reviews, but one or more reviewer dinged you for the lack of bibliography that was not yet published or indexed (therefore not discoverable) when you submitted the piece
- Mystery Withdrawal: You got the reports. You got the acceptance. You withdrew your article. We don’t need to know why–if it got to that point, we trust that you had good reason. Even accepted pieces can find themselves in hairy situations.
- Collection Crash and Burn: We’ve all faced these–you’ve got a piece placed in a collection, and something happens (dinosaurs, possibly), leaving you with the piece completed and peer-reviewed, but the collection has disappeared.
- The Interdisciplinary Blues: The editor noted that since your piece was interdisciplinary, instead of the usual 2 reviews, they would be requesting a 3rd (or 4th, or…), to cover more of the subdisciplines involved. Reviewer(s) dinged the piece for not following the method of a single, specific subdiscipline.
- As with most jazz songs, variants of the Interdisciplinary Blues are many, and can include, but are most sadly not limited to the following:
- reviewer(s) rejects due to the lack of a complete bibliographic apparatus/critical/historiographical review appropriate for a full piece in that subdiscipline
- reviewer(s) demands work to be done/bibliography to be applied well outside of your time period
- reviewer(s) simply doesn’t see how work in x subdiscipline could be significant or worthwhile
- As with most jazz songs, variants of the Interdisciplinary Blues are many, and can include, but are most sadly not limited to the following:
All of these and more can drive us straight up a tree as authors. In some of these cases, editors may have dropped the ball. In other cases, editors’ hands were tied by association rules, or seniority and politics intervened in ways we may never understand from the outside. We recognize that editors are not paid for this vital work, are academics and humans just like we are, and are as overworked as any of us. We can recognize that traditional academic journal publishing is cracking under many pressures and functioning less and less as we wish it would without pointing fingers. Medieval Leavings is about moving on in a positive way, getting scholarship into readers’ hands so that it can be used by other scholars.
Q: So how does Medieval Leavings handle peer review?
A: We’ve got a whole post about it here!