‘Scholars, especially in the humanities, know surprisingly little about the academic publication system in which they participate’.[1] So suggests a recent article on high prestige journals in North America, noting that although humanities scholars have been long been fascinated by historical systems of knowledge production, the actual mechanics of publication, including peer review, have rarely been thought to merit much attention. It is probable that for both the reader and the author of this article, any sense of the precise conditions under which it was reviewed and accepted for publication will be largely a matter of gossip and guesswork. And yet publishing is the economy through which the discipline of art history functions. At its most idealised art historians rely on it to disseminate research, to provide a forum for public exchange and debate, and in doing so to uphold standards of scholarly practice that allow publication to function, irrespective of political stance, as an implicitly democratic forum for the free exchange of ideas, on which a general sense of the advancement of disciplinary knowledge is based. 

Although it is often said that ideals of this sort are increasingly under threat – from the marketisation and metrification of higher education, the worsening job market and the decreased commercial viability of publication – discussion of the practicalities still tends to be found in isolated studies of particular areas, or in editorials or other shorter pieces, such as those in The Burlington Magazine in recent years.[2] In order to better understand the forces that shape our field, this article attempts to draw together much of this literature in order to offer a brief account of the history of peer review and its current role in art-historical publishing. Using a mixture of writing on particular areas of art history, accounts from other disciplines, first-hand research in journals and conversations with art historians, it charts the rise and current status of the practice in the United States and the United Kingdom. The aim is to open up work and discussion on this area and about the future of publishing in art history and in the humanities more broadly. 

The history of peer review 

Peer review is an old but multifarious practice. It needs to be understood as having a long history that shows the apparently unchanging ideal to have taken a number of different forms and served several purposes in the past. According to some accounts, peer review ‘started as an early modern disciplinary technique closely related to book censorship’.[3] More widely agreed upon is the role of scientific societies such as the London and Edinburgh Royal Societies and the Académie Royale in Paris, and in particular the eighteenth-century move to a committee-based system of review for their journals. The London Royal Society took its Transactions in house in 1752, with a ‘Committee of Papers’ meeting every six weeks to vote in secret ballot on the suitability of papers, based on abstracts.[4] By 1832 it was felt that publishing an article in Transactions had gained enough importance to demand a more careful system of evaluation; papers would now have to be read in full by an individual with expert knowledge in the subject before being approved.[5] By 1849 refereeing practices had ‘stabilised’ into a system that foreshadows that of the present day: the entire fellowship could be drawn on for review, with papers usually sent out to two reviewers (one after another, to save the effort of recopying a manuscript).[6] Similar practices were increasingly adopted by learned societies in the United Kingdom and the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, suggesting that in those societies some form of refereeing had become a standard part of the idea of a ‘scientific journal’ that published ‘research articles’ (comprising an original contribution to knowledge, a named author, and proper citation of the works that the article relied on).[7] Scholars have nonetheless cautioned against associating this system too closely with present-day peer review. For one thing review was neither always primarily external nor gatekeeping in function, instead taking multiple forms and allowing readers to play roles ‘including that of publicist, advisor, synthesizer, and judge’.[8] Reasons for the reluctance to adopt review included the extremely slow and cumbersome element that the review process introduced into publication, suspicions that peer review offered a system of quality control no better than the longstanding use of editorial expertise, and even the problem of creating multiple copies of articles to send out (as subsequently simplified by the typewriter in the 1890s and the photocopier in the 1960s).[9] 

The late 1800s saw the rise of the scholarly journal connected with a learned society – Mind (1876), the Law Quarterly Review (1884), English Historical Review (1886), Classical Review (1887), and the Economic Journal (1891), for example – but this did not go hand in hand with the dominance of formal peer review. At the turn of the twentieth century by far and away the best known art-historical journal in English, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, operated from its founding in 1903 with a combination of an editor or co-editors and a large (and not necessarily ‘professionally’ art-historical) Consultative Committee.[10] As in many earlier journals, the editor was given the power to solicit, select and even write articles as they pleased. This was not just a case of the slightly maverick organisation of a newborn, amateurish discipline. In its privileging of editorial decision over formal review process and the swift rate of publication that could result, the Burlington was in line with the thinking of the time that did not see formal peer review as a ‘sine qua non of scholarly journals’.[11] In the sciences more broadly, in fact, peer review did not become standard practice until after the Second World War and developed into its current state only between the 1950s and 1970s.[12] Science (1880) and the Journal of the American Medical Association (1883), for instance, did not use outside reviewers until after 1940, while Nature (1869) did not adopt external peer review as standard until 1973 and the British medical journal the Lancet (1823) adopted it only in 1976.[13] 

The rise of double-blind review 

Although accounts of peer review in the humanities are scarce compared to the sciences,[14] a window is provided by the investigative work undertaken by the principal literary studies association in the United States, the Modern Language Association (MLA). By the 1960s it could report that of over 150 journals surveyed, 

Only sixteen publications indicated that a single reader, usually the editor, passes upon an accepted article. Twelve journals submit an item to five or more readers before it is accepted, but the general rule seems to be two or three readers before acceptance [. . .] Twenty editors have acknowledged that it takes as much as six months or longer to evaluate many of the articles they receive. The average time required is closer to three months’.[15]

 Despite this early and strong acceptance of peer review, it was not until the late 1970s that, under pressure from areas such as the MLA’s Commission on the Status of Women in the Profession, the adoption of author-anonymous or ‘double-blind’ peer review was accepted by the association as standard practice (the need to tackle gender discrimination has been a key driver of double-blind peer review in a number of elds). It was agreed by the MLA’s Delegate Assembly in 1978 and applied by the PMLA (Proceedings of the Modern Language Association; 1884), arguably the most prominent literary journal in the United States both then and now, from 1980.[16] The Historical Journal, founded in 1923 – to mention an equally prominent history journal – did not adopt double-blind review until 1990.[17] There was much controversy and some vocal dissent. The critic Stanley Fish, for instance, argued repeatedly that knowledge of the author was a fundamental factor in assessing an article’s worth and potential interest to the field – that ‘merit is not in fact identifiable apart from the “extraneous considerations” that blind submission would supposedly eliminate’.[18] Nonetheless, every member survey of the following decades confirmed that double-blind review (what Fish called ‘blind submission’) was generally seen as the correct choice.[19] As well as double-blind peer review swiftly becoming standard practice in the 1980s, this was the decade when the stricture on submitting an article to multiple journals at the same time was generally instituted as official editorial policy by English literary journals.[20] By the early 1980s, in literary studies at least, the practice of single-journal submission and double-blind (‘author-anonymous’) review as it is known today was firmly established. 

As an academic discipline, art history did in some notable cases make early use of peer review. The full recognition of art history in universities in the United States and the United Kingdom in the first half of the twentieth century was accompanied by such journals as Art Bulletin (1913; publishing articles from 1917) and the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes (1937) from the 1930s at least operating systems of review via their editorial boards. Then as now the publication process could be painfully slow: in 1964 the waiting time for publication in the Art Bulletin was around a year and a half.[21] Despite this early adoption, formal peer review was not standardised in the discipline for many years. In the 1960s it was possible for an art historian such as Michael Fried to make his name publishing articles and even (exceptionally) his doctoral dissertation in the editor-controlled magazine Artforum (1962).[22] Although by the 1980s the academic capital of Artforum and similar journals such as Art in America (1913) had waned, other journals more firmly associated with academic art history continued to operate outside the system of multiple-reader-based peer review. Under the editorship of John Onians Art History (1979), the journal of the Association of Art Historians, rejected peer review by external readers as standard until 1988. Onians pursued a policy intended to foster radicalism and originality by which he would personally review submissions and decide about external peer review on a case-by-case basis, sometimes sending out articles for review and sometimes publishing without any further consultation.[23] This proved contentious. In an exchange of letters in which Fried wrote to the editor to complain that an article published in Art History had not referenced his own work on a topic, he added that ‘Naturally I think the editorial policy you express [. . .] is absurd’.[24] 

That the same writer who had made his career publishing via Artforum’s single-editor-based system of review now rejected such a model as ‘absurd’ is telling. At this time Fried was publishing (by his own account) not ‘criticism’ in journals such as Artforum, but ‘art history’ in journals that included New Literary History and Eighteenth-Century Studies (in the 1970s) and Critical Inquiry and October (in the 1980s).[25] There is a definite shift here, as with journals such as October former art critics now working in universities attempted to create academically respectable periodicals for the publication of their semi-art-critical work, bringing what might previously be considered mere criticism under the banner of ‘academic’ art-historical scholarship. And as this blurring suggests, the difference in mode of review between 1960s ‘criticism’ and 1980s ‘art history’ should not be overstated. October (1976) and its more recent derivatives, together with broader journals that became prominent venues for art-historical writing, such as Critical Inquiry (1974), New Literary History (1969) and Representations (1983), tended to operate (and often continue to operate) via a system of ‘peer review’ that was not double-blind and would be largely handled by the editorial board.[26] Peer review is a relative concept in these circumstances; many found that the way to both support the journal and publish innovative work was to place their writing primarily or almost exclusively in the journal of which they were an editor or member of the editorial board. 

Smoke and mirrors? 

Since the 1980s peer review has become increasingly standardised in United Kingdom and United States art history, although in multiple forms that include what might be termed: ‘mostly editorial board non-blind’ (October, Representations); ‘editor and author-nominated external reviewer non-blind’ (Journal of Art Historiography); ‘board and external’ (Oxford Art Journal); or full ‘external double-blind’ (Art History and Art Bulletin).[27] The ‘triple-blind’ or ‘blind submission’ system, where even the journal editor does not know the identity of the author, adopted in certain philosophy journals such as Mind, Noûs, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research and the Philosophical Review, at least in part in response to issues with gender discrimination and implicit bias, has to the present author’s knowledge yet to be adopted by any journal primarily publishing research in art history.[28] The UK Research Excellence Framework (REF), which is used to determine the distribution of government funding between university departments, has played an important role due to its attempt to force university staff to prioritise quality rather than quantity in their ‘outputs’. On the REF 1* to 4* ranking scale, neither 1* (‘recognised nationally’) nor 2* (‘recognised internationally’) research is deemed worthy of ‘quality weighted’ funding, while 4* (‘world leading’) research is funded at four times the level of 3* (‘internationally excellent’).[29] In requiring just one to four publication ‘outputs’ per scholar over each approximately five-year cycle, REF seems to place value on journal publishing only in the form of a very few long articles in ‘major’ journals for which formal peer-review is a basic requirement, with some humanities departments attempting to restrict or altogether prevent their academics publishing in small, low ‘impact factor’, or non-blind peer-reviewed journals (aside from those well-established enough to confer prestige without blind review). Some universities now require faculty members to first submit their article to an internal peer review, to assess its REF eligibility. The future cost of such policies for small journals and the diversity of the academic publishing world is something yet to be fully reckoned with in art history. 

All of this brings the United Kingdom even closer into line with the United States system, where tenure cases largely require a set and relatively low number of peer-reviewed publications, strongly favouring high-end journals (sometimes ranked internally) when assessing the case. For early career researchers in either country the ‘major’ journal article remains one key element of a successful fellowship or job application. For those new journals that need to make claims to prestige status – whether for REF, tenure or job-getting suitability – there seems to be little way around the system of double-blind peer review. 

There remains a great deal of dissatisfaction with peer review. For many the increasingly formalised and restrictive process of double-blind review for journal articles, combined with the immense wait for publication – sometimes over a year for acceptance, then another year or two for the article to appear – means that it is no longer a sensible option for many increasingly time-pressed academics. ‘Journals, you mean those places in which people who don’t get asked to contribute to books have to publish their work?’, one leading philosopher has commented. This attitude is especially prevalent among senior scholars, less concerned about tenure or promotion cases, who feel there is little sense submitting to journals with blind review and acceptance rates as low as their publication waiting times are long, when the edited collection, catalogue essay or solicited journal contribution are all readily available.[30] For those not connected with a particular journal this is compounded by a sense that the peer review system is something of a red herring – that journal editors will in any case control the process either through sending the article to reviewers likely to be more or less sympathetic or through the level of weight they choose to give to readers’ reports. Maybe it is all just ‘smoke and mirrors’ anyway, in the words of another senior academic. 

There is a great irony in these cynical attitudes towards the peer review system, for in rejecting systems of double- or triple-blind review scholars are often not rejecting peer review altogether. Although Fish was widely criticised for stating that blind peer review was the problem rather than peer review as such – that the reputation and past work of the author should be taken into account – this is the position that a great many senior academics have tacitly adopted.[31] There are large numbers of academics whose only peer-reviewed journal articles are those in edited issues or in journals where non-blind peer review operates among the editorial team: in short, in cases where it is accepted that the author’s standing and past work will be taken into account by their peer reviewers. For this reason, networks remain central to a certain form of academic freedom in art history. Truly risky or innovative work might have to live outside the channels of the double-blind review yet only those with insider access to certain journals and their editorial boards will be able to publish such work in a venue prominent enough for an REF, tenure or promotion case without the possibility of a one or more year wait and rejection, which is too stressful and disruptive for early-career scholars to risk. 

Peer review and book publishing 

The journal process should not be allowed to obscure the less visible situation of academic book publishing, as it has tended to do in the recent spate of re-examinations of academic publishing outside of art history.[32] Although on some accounts the increasingly formalised processes of academic review means that the peer-reviewed article is more important than ever, it is still overshadowed by the significance of the (university press) published monograph.[33] In the United Kingdom it may have been intended – or at least hoped – that REF would allow for a focus on high quality articles, but in fact the major academic monograph is now widely regarded as the only ‘safe’ way to two 4* outputs for an individual: it is safe at 4* because the difficulty of putting together such a publication is a guarantee of quality and is two outputs because such a publication can be ‘double-weighted’ and thus count as two submissions rather than just one.[34] The move in the current REF cycle to an average of 2.5 outputs per staff member (and a minimum of one) in fact threatens to all but wipe out the journal article in art history in the eyes of senior university members, as the ideal submission becomes one that consists of nothing but books. REF eligible staff members are now expected to contribute one double-weighted book per cycle as standard, with their extra 0.5 output given over to those staff members able to contribute two or more books. In the United States, research universities tend to stipulate a monograph (or sometimes even two) as an indispensable condition of tenure cases. Whereas in the United Kingdom having a university press as publisher is widely desired for the implication of a ‘safe’ 4* REF rating, in the United States it is often mandated absolutely. ‘It has to be a university press, it doesn’t matter which’, a junior colleague at a United States research university was recently told by their department chair in a meeting about their future tenure application. 

One of the most surprising, dramatic and yet little known elements of the influence of peer review results from the discipline’s unblinking commitment to the academic monograph. In double-blind journals acceptance rates can be as low as five to ten per cent. The percentage of articles rejected by the editors without review also tends to be fairly low, and certainly below fifty per cent. However, in academic art-historical book publishing 

by far the largest proportion of manuscripts (and proposals) [are] rejected at the stage of initial receipt; just 15% were sent out for formal review. Of those submitted for review, about 85% were accepted for publication. In other words, the winnowing process is very much ‘front-loaded’. For every fifty manuscripts or proposals submitted, eight will be sent for review; seven of these will survive the review process and be published.[35] 

The selection of art-historical books for publication, in other words, is determined far more by press editors than academics. The vast majority of books are rejected by press editors without being sent for peer review and those that make it to review by academics (in which case double-blind review is essentially an impossibility) are usually successful in making it to publication. To an extent this statistic is misleading, as proposals are subject to either in-house or external peer-review and therefore a rejection before the manuscript itself is sent for formal review may still involve feedback from university academics. Nonetheless, it shows that the gatekeeping function in the world of book publishing is largely in the hands of press editors rather than academics, whereas peer review operates more as a means of ensuring academic quality through the forms of correction and reworking that an attentive peer-review can bring about. 

This is hardly news to art historians who have experienced such review processes, though many junior scholars will be curious and surprised. What is significant in relation to peer review in general is that, to the extent that the dominant system of REF, tenure or general prestige values the university press-published book above all other publications, those systems are also placing the shaping of the discipline of art history beyond the hands of academics who carry out peer review. This is not to suggest that the prominence of scholarly book editors in the world of academia is a problem. However, university presses are being increasingly subject to financial constraints, are ring editors well-loved by academics in the service of taking a more commercial direction or are threatened with actual closure.[36] Susan Bielstein, executive editor and art history editor at University of Chicago Press, has recently called the drop in art history book sales ‘precipitous’. Reflecting on the end of the golden days of academic art-historical publishing, when departments were not only expanding art-historical programmes but also demanding physical book purchases to match, she notes that monographs and specialised ‘first books’ that used to sell around 2,000 or 700 copies now sell fewer than half that number.[37] 

The pessimism from university publishing needs to be set against the general growth in art book publication, with a 2005 study noting definite growth in university-press published art books since the early 1990s (although slowing in the 2000s)[38] and a large-scale 2013 quantitative study even more optimistically recording a year-on-year increase of 5.3% between 1991 and 2007.[39] Nonetheless, Bielstein’s words are a reminder that things are growing increasingly difficult. In this situation it is not a fault of the presses that their interests are no longer so clearly in line with the interests of the discipline, rather it is a matter of publishing economics. But that is all the more reason to worry when pressures on the former may shape or drive the latter. 

A recent editorial in The Burlington Magazine pointed to the still impressive sales of exhibition catalogues and popular history books and suggested that the low sales of academic art history books may be ‘a matter of supply as much as demand’, the fault of poor writing and academic obscurity by art historians in universities.[40] Yet while ‘the precedent of colleagues in literature departments’ might once have driven university art historians to write a certain way, in the present day the adoption of certain kinds of writing is surely as much a sign of a need to keep up with the professionalising and disciplining demands of REF, tenure, academic promotion and their associated systems of valuation.[41] Calls for art-historical book publication to popularise once again in part recall a pre-1970s world, in which the majority of academic art-historical book publishing was orientated to a more popular market and sold far more, while on the other hand the best articles were attributed a scholarly seriousness and forms of recognition equal to those of books. 

With the demands of book publishing and the health of art history as a discipline now somewhat misaligned, a return to this situation might be tempting. This would remodel art history as closer to philosophy, in which it is not problematic for a professor never to have published a book or even to be able to state in opening their first book ‘When I finished my doctoral dissertation I resolved that I would never write anything as long as a book again’.[42] In a revived situation of this kind books could become something that one wrote either if one desired to reach a wider audience or if a subject for intellectual reasons truly needed to take the form of an academic book. Since the latter would not be the rule for every scholar, articles would be on the same level as books as the currency of academic life, with the different forms used when appropriate to different communicative purposes and books weighed on their intellectual merits rather than look, heft and brand. 

This is, however, unlikely. The model is possible in analytic philosophy because it values citation of the most significant recent publications over lip service to long-accepted books in the field. Until a revolution in art-historical citation practice means that a peer reviewer is more likely to chide a writer for omitting reference to a recent article rather than a major book on the topic from the 1980s, there will be no move beyond the REF and tenure reliance on the book as currency. 

A new financial model? 

What about the future? Given the continued reliance on the book in art history there is a need for a wider range of options for art-historical book publication, something that cannot come about until art historians embrace a more diverse conception of what prestigious book publication actually means. There are now various new and innovative publishing outlets that combine established forms of peer review with lowered publication costs, often building open access into their models and prioritising online publication in order to do so: Courtauld Books Online, University College London Press, Open Book publishers, and (beyond art history) initiatives such as the Sustainable History Monograph Pilot and the possible open access Scottish Universities Press.[43] In order for early career scholars to be able to publish innovatively in this way without fear of issues arising with REF or tenure, the discipline needs senior scholars to leave behind their deals with their usual or own-university presses in order to publish major works with these outlets. 

This is, however, unlikely ever to be practicable without a change of attitude in art history to image fees, which are still paid by almost all book publishers despite CAA’s advice that images used in scholarly writing come under ‘fair use’ and should not incur charges.[44] Clearly not all senior figures in the university and prominent ones outside it are going to lead the way in the shift from established presses and journals to newer venues and forms. They could, instead and at least, lead the way in refusing to have image fees paid for their books and articles and if necessary divert some of their hefty subventions to fighting for this right – and with it for the future health of art-historical publishing – in the courts. 

All information not referenced in this article is from communication conducted during research for this article between 2013 and 2019. Beyond anonymous sources I am pleased to be able to thank Sam Bibby, Paul Binski, Karen Collis, David Peters Corbett, Whitney Davis, Jack Hartnell, Dmitri Levitin, Scott Mandelbrote, Bence Nanay, John Onians, Sarah Victoria Turner, my colleagues in the St Andrews School of Art History, and especially Camilla Mørk Røstvik and Aileen Fyfe. I am currently a member of the editorial board of Art History and have experienced forms of peer review with Art History, The Burlington Magazine, Visual Culture in Britain, Visual Resources, nonsite.org, Image and Narrative, New Literary History, Critical Inquiry, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Tate Papers, Oxford University Press, Penn State University Press, Yale University Press, Blackwell, Routledge, and Palgrave Macmillan. 

[1] C. Wellmon and A. Piper: ‘Publication, power, and patronage: on inequality and academic publishing’, Critical Inquiry, available at https://criticalinquiry.uchicago.edu/publication_power_and_patronage_on_inequality_and_academic_ publishing/, accessed 27th June 2019. 

[2] ‘Editorial: Publishing art history’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 160 (2018), p.715. 

[3] M. Biagioli: ‘From book censorship to academic peer review’, Emergences: Journal for the Study of Media & Composite Cultures 12 (2002), p.31. 

[4] N. Moxham and A. Fyfe: ‘The Royal Society and the prehistory of peer review, 1665–1965’, The Historical Journal 61 (December 2018), pp.870–72. 

[5] Ibid., pp.874–75. Moxham and Fyfe note that (although usually oral and rarely used) provision for this practice had been in place informally in the Royal Society since 1752. 

[6] Moxham and Fyfe, op. cit. (note 4), p.878; on this history see also A. Csiszar: The Scientific Journal: Authorship and the Politics of Knowledge in the Nineteenth Century, Chicago 2018, pp.119–58. 

[7] Ibid., pp.4–5 and 156–57. M. Baldwin: ‘Scientific autonomy, public accountability, and the rise of “peer review” in the Cold War United States’, Isis 109 (September 2018), pp.541–42. 

[8] Csiszar, op. cit. (note 6), p.157. For a sense of the range of practices at different points, see B. Newman: ‘Authorising geographical knowledge: the development of peer review in “The Journal of the Royal Geographical Society”, 1830– c.1880’, Journal of Historical Geography, https://doi.org/10.1016/j. jhg.2019.03.006); and I. Clarke: ‘The Gatekeepers of Modern Physics: Periodicals and Peer Review in 1920s Britain’, Isis 106 (March 2015), pp.70–93. 

[9] R. Spier: ‘The history of the peerreview process’, TRENDS in Biotechnology 20 (2002), p.358. 

[10] For this aspect of the early history of The Burlington Magazine, see H. Rees-Leahy: ‘“For Connoisseurs”: The Burlington Magazine 1903–1911’, in E. Mansfield, ed.: Art History and its Institutions, London 2002, pp.231–45; and C. Elam: ‘A more and more important work: Roger Fry and The Burlington Magazine’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 145 (2003), pp.142–52. 

[11] Csiszar, op. cit. (note 5), p.5. M. Baldwin: ‘“Keeping in the race”: physics, publication speed and national publishing strategies in Nature’, British Journal for the History of Science 47, no.2 (June 2014), pp.257–79. 

[12] J.C. Burnham: ‘The evolution of editorial peer review’, Journal of the American Medical Association 263 (1990), pp.1323– 29. F.H. Chapelle: ‘The history and practice of peer review’, Groundwater 52 (January/February 2014), https://doi. org/10.1111/gwat.12139. D. Pontille and D. Torny: ‘The blind shall see! The question of anonymity in journal peer review’, Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology 4 (2014), https://adanewmedia. org/2014/04/issue4-pontilletorny/, accessed 18th July 2019. 

[13] Chapelle, op. cit. (note 12); Spier, op. cit. (note 9), p.358; and M. Baldwin: ‘Credibility, peer review, and Nature, 1945–1990’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society London 69 (2015), pp.337–52. 

[14] A notable exception is D. Pontille and D. Torny: ‘From manuscript evaluation to article valuation: the changing technologies of journal peer review’, Human Studies 38 (March 2015), pp.57–79. 

[15] J. Lavelle: ‘Facts of journal publishing, IV’, PMLA 81 (1966), pp.3–12. 

[16] See J. Conarroe: ‘Editor’s column’, PMLA 98 (1983), pp.147–48; and E. Showalter: ‘Editor’s column’, PMLA 99 (1984), pp.851–53. On historic gender bias in peer review, see A. Fyfe and C. Mørk Røstvik: ‘Ladies, Gentlemen, and Scientific Publication at the Royal Society, 1945–1990’, Open Library of Humanities 4 (2018), doi.org/10.16995/ olh.265; on present day gender bias, see E. Ross: ‘Gender bias distorts peer review across fields’, Nature (21st March 2017), doi:10.1038/nature.2017.21685. 

[17] M. Goldie: ‘Fifty years of the Historical Journal’, Historical Journal 51 (2008), pp.821–55. 

[18] S. Fish: ‘Guest column: no bias, no merit: the case against blind submission’, PMLA 103 (1988), pp.739– 48. G. Galt Harpham et al.: ‘Forum: Fish on blind submission’, PMLA 104 (March 1989), pp.215–21. 

[19] D.C. Stanton: ‘Editor’s column: what’s in a name? Revisiting authoranonymous reviewing’, PMLA 112 (1997), pp.191–97. 

[20] Idem: ‘Editor’s column: on multiple submissions’, PMLA 109 (1994), pp.7–13. 

[21] M. Meiss: ‘The “Art Bulletin” at fifty’, The Art Bulletin 46 (March 1964), p.1. 

[22] See the autobiographical remarks on Fried’s early career in M. Fried: ‘An introduction to my art criticism’, in idem: Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, Chicago 1998, pp.2–15; and A. Newman: Challenging Art: Artforum, 1962:1974, New York 2000, pp.244–45 and 283–86. 

[23] J. Onians: ‘Letters to and from the Editor’, Art History 11 (June 1988), pp.155–56. 

[24] M. Fried, letter in Art History 11 (June 1988), p.157. 

[25] The distinction between criticism and history is discussed in Fried: Art and Objecthood, op. cit. (note 22), pp.47–54. 

[26] Information about review in these and other journals comes from correspondence with art historians who have engaged with their publication process. Princeton offers helpful discussions of individual journals, see ‘Reviews of peer-reviewed journals in the humanities and social sciences’, available at https://journalreviews.princeton.edu/ reviews-of-peer-reviewed-journals-inthe- humanities-and-social-sciences/, accessed 27th June 2019, while further information about more recent experiences with particular journals is available at the Humanities Journal Wiki, http://humanitiesjournals.wikia.com/ wiki/Comparative_Literature,_Cultural_ Studies_and_Theory_Journals, accessed 27th June 2019. 

[27] The Journal of Art Historiography system is outlined at https://arthistoriography. wordpress.com/peer-review- process/, accessed 17th July 2019. 

[28] See J. Weinberg: ‘A closer look at philosophy journal practices’, DailyNous (20th January 2015), http://dailynous. com/2015/01/20/closer-look-philosophyjournal- practices/, accessed 27th June 2019. According to Adrian Piper, as of 2018, 78.76% of English-language philosophy journals surveyed state no explicit commitment to double-blind review, see http://www.adrianpiper.com/ berlinjphil/philosophy-journal-papersubmission- policies.shtml, accessed 18th July 2019. For peer review in philosophy and its problems more broadly, see J. Katzav and K. Vaesen: ‘Pluralism and peer review in philosophy’, Philosophers’ Imprint 17 (September 2017), pp.1–20. 

[29] Research England Guide to Research and Knowledge Exchange Funding 2018–19 (Research England, May 2018), p.19. 

[30] P. O’Donnell, T. Dean, A.E. Singer, L.K. Horowitz, G.A. Stringer, J.L. Sammons, W.B. Hunter and B. Bowden: ‘The decrease in submissions to PMLA’, PMLA 116 (May 2001), pp.650–56. 

[31] Fish, op. cit. (note 18). 

[32] The focus on journals is especially notable in the great deal of interdisciplinary scholarly literature currently attempting to rethink peer review, partly due to the stress on the sciences over the humanities, as in the thirty-three-author article J.P. Tennant et al.: ‘A multi-disciplinary perspective on emergent and future innovations in peer review’, F1000Research 6 (2017), https://doi.org/10.12688/ f1000research.12037.1, and the recent report on academic publishing resulting from the four-year Arts and Humanities Research Council project ‘Publishing the “Philosophical Transactions”: a social, cultural and economic history of a learned journal, 1665–2015’: A. Fyfe, K. Coate, S. Curry, S. Lawson, N. Moxham and C. Mørk Røstvik: ‘Untangling academic publishing: a history of the relationship between commercial interests, academic prestige and the circulation of research’, Zenodo (May 2017), http:// doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.546100. United States-based work on English literature and the humanities, interestingly, follows the same pattern, as in Wellmon and Piper, op. cit. (note 1), and A. Goldstone and T. Underwood: ‘The quiet transformations of literary studies: what thirteen thousand scholars could tell us’, New Literary History 45 (Summer 2014), pp.359–84. 

[33] J. Champagne: ‘Editorial policy and peer review’, PMLA 124 (March 2009), p.662. L. McGill: The State of Scholarly Publishing in the History of Art and Architecture, Houston 2006, section 5.5, see http://cnx.org/content/ col10377/1.2/, accessed 18th July 2019. 

[34] The reality of this view is hard to confirm given that results are not given for individual outputs. General information on REF book submissions and double weighting for the last (2014) round can be found in S. Tanner: ‘An analysis of the arts and humanities submitted research outputs to the REF 2014 with a focus on academic books: an academic book of the future report’, https://academicbookfuture.files. wordpress.com/2016/11/abof_academicbooks- ref2014-report_simon-tanner.pdf. 

[35] McGill, op. cit. (note 33), section 4.2. On book-publishing in art history, see also the forum C.M. Soussloff, ed.: ‘Publishing paradigms in art history’, Art Journal 65 (Winter 2006), pp.36–55. 

[36] The restructuring of Yale University Press and of museum publication departments is discussed in ‘Editorial: publish or be damned’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE 158 (2016), p.691. The University Press of New England (a collaboration between Brandeis, Dartmouth, New Hampshire, Northwestern, and Tufts universities) closed in December 2018. 

[37] S. Bielstein: ‘Letter from the editor: climate change in art history publishing’, Perspective: actualité en histoire de l’art 2 (2015), DOI: 10.4000/ perspective.6064. 

[38] McGill, op. cit. (note 33), pp.4–5 and 15. For comments on why this study may have underestimated the volume of art books, see H. Pisciotta and J. Frost: ‘Trends in art publishing from university presses, 1991–2007’, Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America’ 32 (Spring 2013), pp.7–9. This article is developed from a longer report, see H. Pisciotta and J. Frost: ‘Analysis of trends in art history publishing from university presses: report to the Kress Foundation’, Kress Foundation, June 2010, http://www.kressfoundation.org/ uploadedFiles/Sponsored_Research/ Research/Pisciotta_Frost_ ArtHistoryPublishing.pdf. 

[39] Pisciotta and Frost 2013, pp.2–19, at pp.7–11. As the 2010 study notes, however, we also need to consider that the growth rate of 5.3% is still 0.8% lower than that of book publication as a whole, that the boom in contemporary art publishing obscures the way that some subjects (such as nineteenth-century art) have levelled off or decreased, and perhaps above all that this rate is far lower than the growth of actual art-historical tuition and research in universities. 

[40] Editorial, op. cit. (note 2) 

[41] Ibid. 

[42] R. Holton: Willing, Wanting, Waiting, Oxford 2009, p.ix. 

[43] For the latter two see http://www. longleafservices.org/blog/the-sustainable- history-monograph-pilot/; and https://scurl.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/ 2019/03/SCURLScottishUniversitiesOAPressConsultancy2019. pdf. 

[44] Code of Best Practice in Fair Use for the Visual Arts (College Art Association, February 2015). http://www.collegeart. org/pdf/fair-use/best-practices- fair-use-visual-arts.pdf. The code builds on the major report Patricia Aufderheide et al.: Copyright, Permissions, and Fair Use among Visual Artists and the Academic and Museum Visual Arts Communities: An Issues Report (College Art Association, February 2014), http://archive.cmsimpact.org/sites/default/ files/documents/pages/fair_use_ for_visual_arts_communities.pdf.