A couple of people have written to ask about the Journal of Popular Music Studies case mentioned in my last blog: how could anyone possibly know if a "third party referee" report was in fact written by a journal editor? The simple answer, I’m afraid, is that you couldn’t. All you can do is try and get a feel for what ordinary publishing practice is like, and then look out for any anomalies. Anomalies in themselves don’t prove editorial corruption, but may indicate that something is not as it should be.
In this case, there were a few red flags. Initially, I simply heard from an editorial assistant, saying I should receive the results of a review in 3 to 4 months. So after 5 months had passed, I wrote to ask when I was likely to hear something. No reply. A few weeks later I wrote again. Again, no reply. But when I wrote a third time, now seven months after the initial submission, I received a reply from one of the two editors in just an hour. This reply stated:
Apologies for the delay in responding to your inquiries. Since the earlier days of JPMS, we’ve tried to encourage a more thorough review process for each of our submissions. We also have a substantial backlog of essays awaiting reviewers, which can be difficult to secure depending on the range of sub-specialties addressed in each essay. We wanted to make sure we found someone with expertise in Victorian culture and 19th-century popular musics, which took some time given our usual pool of reviewers focus on the 20th-century and beyond. We finally had the opportunity to have your essay read by someone who is a trained Victorianist and a scholar of popular music.
The email included a report by this “trained Victorianist.” On the surface this all seemed clear enough, but there was certainly something odd about the report suddenly being available just after I’d enquired about it. Reputable journals also, on the whole, solicit two readers’ reports, and I knew that had been how the Journal of Popular Music Studies had worked in the past (I’d published in the journal under a previous editorship). But the really big red flag was the reader’s report itself. It was a single short paragraph just crudely dismissing the article. There was no sign of expertise in the area of the essay. The idea that a big effort had been made to find someone qualified to write such a dismissal seemed quite absurd! It didn’t occur to me that the report may have been written by the editor, as I couldn’t think any prestigious journal would sink that low, but I was pretty sure that the story about the difficult hunt for an appropriate reviewer was complete BS.
So I wrote to complain that the reviewer selected was clearly not the sort of “expert” advertised. And this was a case, it turned out, in which a villain’s pride would prove their undoing, for I now received a reply:
Our review process is blind, and we cannot divulge the identity of your reviewer. Suffice it to say that your reviewer received a Ph.D. in English from UC Berkeley for writing a dissertation on Victorian literature with Catherine Gallagher and Sharon Marcus, and also published an essay in the volume, THE IDEA MUSIC in VICTORIAN FICTION published by Ashgate.
And THAT gave the game away completely, though remarkably both editors still took the line that nothing was amiss, and that the essay had simply fallen short of their high standards!! I would bet a sizable sum of money that the "reader's report" was written in the one hour period between the arrival of my third enquiry and the editor's reply.
I should add that the editorship of the journal has since changed again, thank goodness.