Publish a monograph on 19th-century literature and have it reviewed within 90 days of its publication? That’s crazy talk — or was, until the debut of New Books on Literature 19, or NBOL-19. The site, which went live on September 1, is an online-only journal dedicated to reviews of new scholarly books on 19th-century literature. It’s edited by James A.W. Heffernan, an emeritus professor of English at Dartmouth College. (Read more about the frustrations that prompted him to test a quick-turnaround editorial model.) Mr. Heffernan put together a team of scholarly reviewers, including graduate students. More than 100 recent monographs have been assigned for review, with 20 or so reviews posted on the site so far. Is this the metabolic fix that the achingly slow world of scholarly reviewing has needed?
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4 Responses to From Publication to Review in 90 Days
robertjudd - September 10, 2009 at 8:49 am
This is great news, but not a first. The Review of Biblical Literature (sponsored by the Society of Biblical Literature) is an online-only review system that has been working very well for at least five years. See http://www.bookreviews.org for full details. Bob Judd
davidwrobinson - September 10, 2009 at 1:01 pm
I’d agree that this is not a first, Bob. The International Community of Christians in Teacher Education (ICCTE) has been publishing an entirely online peer-reviewed, scholarly publication, the *ICCTE Journal*, for four or so years now.To visit the publication and learn more about what we are doing, please go to http://www.icctejournal.org. David W. Robinson
hjar3588 - September 11, 2009 at 9:25 am
Similarly, our Anthropology Review Database (ARD) has been fast-track publishing reviews of anthropological books, films, and software since 1997! (Although our roots actually lie in the Gopher era.)ARD is a free, online, non-serial publication, publishing reviews as soon as they are written. To learn more about our publication, please visit http://wings.buffalo.edu/ARD .Cheers, Hugh Jarvis
11159995 - September 11, 2009 at 3:31 pm
And don’t forget the pioneer in online reviewing, the Bryn Mawr Classical Review. Probably every field now has one or more journals that review books quickly. Philosophy has the Notre Dame Review, among others. And there are all those H-Net review fora also.Sandy Thatcher, Penn State Press