It is no secret that many academics have major gripes about the publishers of their books and journal articles.

Take the case of one mid-career historian, who asked to remain anonymous. When she submitted a typescript to a publisher, it took many months and chasing emails even to get acknowledgement of receipt. And it was almost a year before another nudge yielded the readers’ reports – which, from the unusual speed with which the editor responded, she assumed had been sitting in the editor’s inbox for some time.

Although one of the reports was professional and helpful, the other reader seemed “irate” about “certain kinds of phrasing and minor stylistic matters” and asked the historian to include reference to “certain monographs that were highly problematic…by any responsible measure”.

She nonetheless put aside another project and rewrote her typescript. After another six months of waiting, the first reader “enthusiastically noted all of the changes” she had made and recommended publication, with a short list of minor suggestions. The second reader, however, declared that the typescript couldn’t be published on account of “the smallest of details” – but seemed to have “neglected to reread the revised text”, which directly addressed some of the concerns in additional footnotes.

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Given that this judgement felt “petty, arbitrary and irrational”, the historian wrote to the editor asking for an additional tie-breaker report, but was told that the press “had to go with what readers say and couldn’t evaluate the situation themselves”.

Nor was this the first poor experience she had had with the manuscript. Another press had previously “sat on” it and then “dismissed it out of hand after about a year and a half, without readers’ reports”. And, before that, the university press editor who had specifically requested it was disregarded by the publisher’s editorial board, which rejected the manuscript six months after submission – and after revisions has been made on the basis of readers’ reports. ( by Walter Biggins, editor-in-chief at the University of Pennsylvania Press, offers a good overview of the varied roles such boards can play at different publishers.)

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The typescript is now with “a fourth, maybe final press”, but the cumulative delays of five years mean that the historian has been “unable to go up for promotion”, which would have earned her an extra $10,000 (£7,460) a year. While she acknowledged she might have “pulled out and gone elsewhere” when publishers were so slow, she pointed out that “reply times are often not set in stone and I had little motivation to poke bears while I was waiting for responses I wanted from presses with good repute”.

The key problem is that “academics are kind of at presses’ mercy,” the historian reflected, “because [publication] is largely how our work gets evaluated when universities have increasingly abdicated any responsibility to understand our work and ask others to do so for them”.

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In 2022, Harvey Graff, professor emeritus of English and history at The Ohio State University, published two opinion pieces with Times Higher Education on this theme. The first, “Peer reviewing is becoming more cavalier, self-serving and ignorant”, describes an article rejected by a scholarly journal on the basis of two reviews that were “surprisingly brief, as well as unknowledgeable, confused and self-contradictory...One referred to unidentified literature and ‘experts’ that do not exist.” When Graff asked to speak to the editor, the latter “responded by patronising and then demeaning” him. He said such things did not use to happen.

Two months later, he published a further article, giving further examples: an essay “rejected...for a roster of contradictory reasons” and a review which was “scathing but gave no examples to document its wholesale condemnation”. In that article, he proposed an authors’ bill of rights that would, for example, require editors to “discard unprofessional reviews and commission replacements”; to be “open to collegial discussions with authors about reviews and publication decisions”; and to “respond professionally to legitimate questions”. 

All this leads to some obvious questions. Are problems such as long delays, poor communication and poor-quality reviewing reasonably common or highly exceptional? How would book and journal editors respond to such critiques? Do they have their own reciprocal gripes about authors? And, assuming that the above complaints have at least some validity, how should authors respond?

David Alexander, emeritus professor of emergency planning and management at UCL, was also the founding editor of the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, but has now “stopped editing after exactly 40 years of continuous work and about 17,000 manuscripts edited”.

It is clear, he said, that Graff had had “dealings with journals that do not reach the standards I would regard as proper and necessary...We were always scrupulous about acknowledging receipt, which nowadays is done automatically and immediately.”

In terms of delays, a core problem was “the huge difficulty of finding reviewers”, not to mention extracting reviews from those who agree to provide one but “then don’t do it, despite frequent reminders” or “withdraw at the last moment”.

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Furthermore, if commercial journal publishers now often “prioritise speed over quality” – which “makes life hell for editors” – it was worth remembering that this was at least partly “driven by demand from authors”, Alexander said.

In his experience, “most reviewers are responsible and try to be impartial and accurate”. But he always saw it as his role to “moderate, or modulate, the reviews. If they are inadequate, they can be disregarded” – though usually at the cost of “a loss of time”. And if an author disagrees with a reviewer and feels “short-changed by the editorial process”, they “can make a case for that...I always took the view that an author has as much right to an opinion as a reviewer does.”

That said, he firmly believed that “in many cases” authors’ complaints were “mere opportunism”. Furthermore, by the end of his time as editor, Alexander believed that “at least one in five manuscripts had some kind of authorial malpractice associated with it”. Such malpractice included different kinds of plagiarism, self-plagiarism, “theft of data and ideas” and forms of “‘automatic scholarship’ (a contradiction in terms)” driven by AI.

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On book publishing, a useful perspective is provided by Laura Portwood-Stacer, who describes herself as a publishing adviser and developmental editor for scholarly authors. She has published The Book Proposal Book and Making Your Manuscript Work, both with Princeton University Press, and she regularly interviews acquiring editors for her newsletter.

As someone who is very familiar with both sides of the business, “all of these complaints are quite familiar to me,” she said. The key issue, for her, is “lack of communication or unclear communication. Not replying to a submission which had been solicited literally just happened to one of my clients.” (In this particular case, the problem was that the email had gone into the editor’s spam folder.) “Authors feel powerless to get on the radar of the editors.”

Another common gripe from authors is about poor copy-editing – sometimes because presses subcontract the task to external freelancers. The historian, for instance, can recall some who had “introduced massive errors (sometimes grammar!) and irregularities”. And Portland-Stacer has herself experienced the problem. Moreover, she has recently “heard of presses using AI copy-editors, which my authors are unhappy with”.

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She also conceded that it was “rare but not unheard of” for submissions to be rejected even after an author has made serious revisions in response to peer review – though while such authors are “correct to be irate”, she suggested that they take some comfort in the fact the work they have put in is likely to make their manuscript easier to place with another publisher.

Even publishers themselves sometimes admit how unhappy many authors are with the peer review process.

In , titled “In Defense of ‘Reader 2’”, Rebecca Colesworthy, a senior acquisitions editor at the State University of New York’s SUNY Press, asserts that “peer reviewers are largely thoughtful, engaged, and constructive”. But she also reports the results of her “crowdsourcing on X to see what academics consider their Reader 2’s worst offences” – where “Reader 2” is “a generic nickname for a harsh or hypercritical peer reviewer”.

Her respondents flagged up four separate categories: those who are “plain vicious or even prejudicial”; those who are “insulting or condescending, focusing solely on what’s wrong”; those who “seem not to have read the manuscript”, to “have read a different manuscript” or focused on the minutiae of spelling and formatting; and those who “refuse to engage with the project on its own terms”.

But publishers are generally wary of speaking publicly about the friction that can arise between authors, reviewers and editors. Times Higher Education approached a number of leading university presses and academic publishers, but most – Cambridge, Chicago, Oxford, MIT, Princeton and Routledge/Taylor and Francis – failed to reply or opted not to be quoted.

written for the Association of University Presses by Minnesota University Press says that authors should “expect to receive an acknowledgement of the receipt of your proposal within a few days and a decision on it about two to three months after you submit it”. Portwood-Stacer declined to name “certain publishers” she could think of that “have a reputation for being less responsive”, but she was happy to flag up the University of North Carolina Press as an example of one with “a good reputation for being author-friendly and transparent”. And John Sherer, their Spangler family director, agreed to respond to questions from Times Higher Education.

In general, he suspects that authors working with university presses have “a more positive experience” than those dealing with commercial journal publishers given the former’s greater embeddedness in the scholarly community. In terms of schedules, he thinks it “reasonable to expect a confirmation of receipt within two to three business days. From there, four to eight weeks are common timelines for further engagement with submitted materials” although there was no doubt that “during staff transitions, busy conference season, or just the onslaught of work, we don’t always meet this goal”.

Despite those pressures, Sherer has no time for editors who delegate decision-making to peer reviewers and refuse to engage in discussion with authors. “Book editors often spend a great deal of time strategising complicated review processes and work as closely with authors as feasible throughout the review and revision process,” he said. And he noted that the Association of University Presses’ reflect “widespread understanding that peer review reports are far from the ‘final’ decision”.

Sherer echoed Alexander’s point that “it is harder and harder to find peer reviewers willing to do this hidden labour in timely ways”. Despite the mistakes that inevitably occur with “humans running a complex process”, however, he and his colleagues try to learn from them and “not let them become the dominant experience our authors face”.

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It is not unusual, of course, to come across academics who have had extremely positive experiences with several different publishers. But what advice does Portwood-Stacer have for those who don’t?

She makes two core points, one psychological and the other practical. When authors feel they are being treated badly, they should try to “understand where these issues are coming from. They are often structural issues about the way the press is set up and the labour demands on the editor.”

Moreover, it is not the fault of publishers if universities offer few incentives and little training for scholars to take on work as peer reviewers. And while it will always be annoying to wait weeks or months for a response to a message that could only have taken a few minutes to write, “authors have no way of knowing how many similar messages the editor is inundated with”. Particularly at the most prestigious publishers, “it could be hundreds”.

So it is always worth remembering that “the way you are treated by editors is not personal or a reflection on you or the quality of your work…They are not doing it on purpose to frustrate you!”

In more practical terms, Portwood-Stacer always advises her authors “not to put all their eggs in one basket, particularly if they are on a timeline.

“Have conversations with multiple publishers so you can see which are most responsive,” she advises. “In book publishing, unlike journal publishing, you can submit a proposal to multiple presses. Many authors don’t know that.”

And while not every press is willing to consider book proposals that are also under consideration elsewhere, she works with “many authors who have got several publishers to agree to simultaneous review”.

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While such authors may still feel themselves to be at publishers’ mercy, the odds of receiving such mercy are at least higher when the request for it is made to several.