Surviving Peer Review on Your Own Terms, by Alison Skyrme, Jane Schmidt, and Curtis Sassur

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A new librarian, an experienced librarian and an archivist got together to do a research project. What happened along the way was not quite what we expected. Maybe you’ve experienced something like it, or maybe you’ll face a similar situation in the future. We want to share our experience with the joy, excitement, trials, and disappointment in the world of academic publishing.

Why we did the research

For us, finding the topic was the easy part. We had decided that we would purposefully avoid supervising unpaid internships as a matter of professional integrity, and only take on students that our library could properly fund. During the course of this decision, it was clear that the topic had been neglected in library research and we wanted to take a close look at the institutionalization of unpaid internships within accredited library science graduate programs. There was (and remains) a climate of scrutiny on the misuse of unpaid interns in many sectors. Work-study programs are an accepted part of librarian education - we thought it was prudent to take a critical look at how well it’s working. We wanted to hear what the interns had to say. Are they really benefitting? Is their work valued? Is the experience worthwhile? So, with ethics board approval, a research plan, and a literature review in hand we were on our way.

Research: The good, the bad, and the anti-climactic

We thought a social sciences-based approach would best serve our needs, so we used survey tools and interviews to examine the value of the internships. Our background research went well: it showed a gap in the research, offered guidance in the form of similar studies from other fields, and highlighted issues to investigate. The dreaded ethics approval process was a useful exercise, even though it did feel a bit fastidious in the moment. Gaps in our survey tools, ethical considerations we’d missed, and practical issues were highlighted and remedied. With approval in hand, we eagerly sent our surveys and interview requests out into the world and waited for the data and volunteers to come flooding in.

Cue the crickets.

Sometimes, despite best efforts, all you get is a small sample size. In our case, very small. Tiny, really. Why? Some institutions may have been unwilling to participate, some individuals were perhaps afraid of giving negative feedback that may affect their future career, despite assurances of privacy. Others may have simply deleted the email. Still others may have had survey fatigue. There is no way to know why we got a a poor response rate, but we did. We re-sent requests, we widened our search, we ensured messages were being received, but we still only received a small amount of responses. What next? We sought the advice of our ethics review board to see if we should proceed. They told us that we could, but we would have to note that the sample size would have to be acknowledged in the final product. And so, we carried on - we’d gotten this far, right?

The interviews we did with former unpaid interns that did contact us were fascinating. They shared experiences we hadn’t considered and gave us a point of view we hadn’t anticipated. That’s what research is supposed to do, right? We became so immersed in the rich narratives before us, our concerns about the sample size were assuaged.

Putting it out there

When we had collected all the data we could, we found a journal that seemed in line with the kind of research we did. We followed the structure, formatting and submission instructions, and then we waited. And waited. By the time we received the good news that our publication had been accepted (with “extensive and comprehensive revisions”), the research was well over a year old, and we were starting to lose enthusiasm. But we rallied, and began to carefully review the required changes. Receiving negative feedback is never a hootenanny. We understand the process is designed to ensure high quality - and certainly there were changes that needed to be made - but upon reviewing the portions that were re-written as per the reviewers suggestions, we no longer felt the paper was meaningful enough to be published.

Making the hard choice

So, now what? When you have annual reviews pending and research is expected, it’s difficult to say “no” to a publication, even if the final product would feel inauthentic. While our paper was technically accepted, the required revisions would have nullified any conclusions we made, and we honestly wondered why they wanted to publish it. We concluded that we didn’t need to shoehorn our research into a box that didn’t fit. We also decided we didn’t want to let it go, and opted for Plan B - alternative dissemination.

Plan “B” doesn’t have to be Bad

This must be prefaced with an acknowledgement that we are lucky enough to work for an institution that takes a relatively broad view of publishing. Poster presentations, self-publishing, and blog posts are all reasonably considered. This isn’t the case for everyone, of course. But if librarians are meant to be at the forefront of a bold new world of scholarly dissemination, we need to walk the talk. This project may not have gone exactly as planned in the traditional sense, but even with its shortcomings, there is value to its existence. We are sharing it now, for the wisdom to be gleaned from its (limited) results and to talk about the experience we had from idea to peer review. We feel privileged to be able to take this approach and hope that it helps inspire others to explore a similar path if they find themselves in a similar situation.

Alternative dissemination is ok. [Editor’s Note: I’m obviously a fan of alternative dissemination.] We don’t need to publish in an academic journal to have our voices heard, to start a discussion, to make people think. Certainly the traditional peer-review model has its place, but it is not always the best way to reach your audience. We cannot expect scholarly communications to evolve if we aren’t willing to take the lead by example.

Sounds like a great research opportunity….

Alison Skyrme is the Special Collections Librarian at the Ryerson University Library and Archives, and an instructor in the Film + Photographic Preservation and Collections Management graduate program at Ryerson. Alison holds a Master of Information from the University of Toronto, 2015, and specializes in the management of photographic collections. She is currently the Image Arts liaison librarian. She tweets at @A_Skyrme.

Jane Schmidt has worked in collections management at Ryerson University in Toronto since she graduated from University of Alberta in 2004. She has previously presented and published on issues related to monograph acquisitions including weeding, demand driven acquisitions and budget management. She is presently the Engineering liaison librarian. Her current research interests include Little Free Libraries, public libraries, political economy and dinosaurs, thanks to her 5 year old son Elliott. She tweets at @janeschmidt and blogs at The Incidental Academic Librarian.

Curtis Sassur currently serves as the Archivist and Coordinator of Archives & Special Collections at Ryerson University. Curtis holds a Masters of Information Studies (MISt) from the University of Toronto, and a BA in philosophy from the University of Guelph. Curtis' current research interests include the Canadian cultural donation/tax credit system and the increasing encroachment of private sector paradigms and practices into the library sector. He tweets at @RU_Archivist.

Librarians, Tenure, and Research, by Kirstin Dougan

The question of whether academic librarians should be part of a tenure system on par with teaching faculty is not a new one, and this post will not debate the pros and cons of the issue. However, I offer the thoughts of a librarian who went from an academic position in which librarians did not have faculty status or tenure (but instead had something called continuing appointment), to one in which librarians have faculty status and are held to standards as rigorous as those for other faculty.

For some background, the AAUP/ACRL recently put out a revised statement on college and university librarians and tenure. All in all I agree with this statement. However, I do so with some lingering ambivalence. You see, this is my third professional position (three different institutions), and the only one at which librarians have tenure. Over five years ago I came to this aspect of the job reluctantly, but willing to tackle the challenge of research and tenure in order to have the job I want, at an institution I admire, and to be back in a part of the country I adore. Now, more than five years later, my tenure papers will start their long process forward. I am excited about the research I am doing and questions I am examining, and I can truly say that the research part of my job keeps it interesting and thought-provoking.

The biggest challenges I faced were the need to develop a research agenda and learn how to implement it in a relatively short amount of time. If you look, you’ll find that there are many articles in the library science literature that address this topic, but here are a few guiding principles. How does one decide what to research? First, think about questions that intrigue you. What issues do you face in your job on a regular basis that would benefit from exploration and data collection? My research questions all come directly from my daily work as a public services librarian in a large academic music library. Whatever you choose, make it something that interests you and that you want to spend some serious time with.  Ideally, it will be something that you can analyze in pieces and get more than one project/publication out of. Next, think about how you can gather data on your question. You must match the methodology to the question at hand or your work won’t produce meaningful results. There are several good resources on research question development and research methodology, and the one that really got me thinking was Practical Research Methods for Library and Information Professionals by Susan Beck and Kate Manuel. Also, it’s likely that your campus will require institutional review board training/applications for research projects involving people (surveys, focus groups, observational, etc.) so plan ahead for this.  Many campuses offer faculty and staff funding opportunities as well as survey and statistical support for their research, at a minimum.

Make research and writing a priority. Many productivity advocates say to write every day to keep the ideas and words flowing. Set weekly writing “dates” with a colleague, either a librarian or another faculty member. Share your goals with each other at the beginning of the session and check in when you’re done. Get advice from colleagues about projects and ask them to read your work throughout the process. Not all library tenure systems are the same. Some, like ours, include elements of librarianship, research, and service to the school and/or the profession, and have expectations equal to that of teaching faculty. Keep those expectations in mind and prioritize your efforts. If publication is a primary requirement for your tenure case, don’t do conference presentations unless the proceedings will be published or you can turn that work into a peer-reviewed article.

Of course, research and publication isn’t limited to those librarians who need it for tenure. I’d encourage anyone to consider taking on a research project that is important to them. The opportunity and support to do research has informed and transformed my librarianship, and I would like to think that the publications I have produced have increased the profession’s knowledge base.


Kristin Dougan is the Music and Performing Arts Librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She tweets both @kmdougan and @mpalillinois. This is her second post for this blog. The first was “How to Prepare to be a Subject Specialist Librarian.”

[Editor's note: Kristin recently gave a presentation on this topic. A Google doc of the slides is available.]