This Book is Open for Peer Review

This book started as a collection of resources to be shared on our university’s Pressbooks network; I didn’t think it needed peer review when I first started writing it. But as I wrote the preface, I realized that I’d made a radical departure from the pedagogy I’d been using in my literature courses. This book is advocating for a shift in the way we teach the humanities. Once I realized this, I started hunting for an academic publisher—a press that would help me put these ideas into scholarly circulation. But this desire to engage with others in the field conflicted with my practical goals for the book. I wanted readers to be able to remix resources in the book to suit their goals in the classroom and found that publication options were limited for a book with a CC-BY license. I understand why there are very few publishers willing to take on a project like this, but I didn’t want to put energy into something that instructors wouldn’t be able to remix for their classrooms. I’ve encountered many incredible textbooks that I would still be using today if it was possible to revise them for my courses. Remixing isn’t easy with a traditionally published textbook.

I wrote to my OER colleagues for advice. Ed Beck shared an example of how he facilitated a peer review process for Civilización Hispanoamericana and Apurva Ashok reminded me of the Open Textbooks Review Criteria (suggested by the DOERS tenure and promotion matrix). I decided to work with my library to design a peer-review process that would help me learn what literature scholars across different institutions thought of the resources in this book and the critique of humanities pedagogy they imply. Amber Montano became my editor and I’m revising this description of our open peer review process after receiving the first batch of reviewer reports (some anonymized by Amber) in June 2025. These reports were incredibly helpful (and you can click below to read them). It is worth noting that I started writing this book in May 2024 and I’m publishing a peer-reviewed edition in July 2025. I’m pretty happy with that timeline.

I admire Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s use of open peer review and considered circulating a manuscript before publishing the book as she did with Planned Obsolescence, Generous Thinking, and Leading Generously. I was also impressed by the open peer review processes used for the creation of many open educational resources. The standard when I completed the Rebus Open Publishing Projects Certificate was to circulate a Google Doc manuscript with comments enabled (a variation on the commentpress plugin that Fitzpatrick used for her projects). Editors using this process circulated a call for reviewers through announcements on listservs, social media, and forums, meaning there were often many more reviewers than the two in a traditional peer-review process. In each of these cases, reviewers could see what other reviewers were saying, which made it possible for the manuscript to serve as a springboard for conversation between reviewers. Because I anticipated this book prompting wildly divergent responses (from the enthusiastic to the horrified) and because I wanted to capture those individual impressions, we decided to collect individual reader reports and publish the ones we were given permission to share. I took inspiration from [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film & Moving Image Studies, which makes reviewer feedback public alongside published work.

In all open peer review processes I’d encountered, the manuscript was revised before the work was officially published and that manuscript (with reviewer feedback attached at the line level) remained accessible even when the revised version was published. But that wasn’t possible for me since I am updating the book with each new edition. I published the March 2025 edition on our pressbooks network before the first round of peer review and then made revisions before releasing the July 2025 edition (what you’re reading now). I am making the version history of this book public in a repository on GitHub. There, a reader can download the Pressbooks XML of each edition, deciding which version they want to use for their own remix.

The process of peer review for this book allows reviewers to remain anonymous or not, to be acknowledged publicly or not, and to make their review public or not. You can see the public reviews below with some responses from me as notes. The anonymous reviews have also proven incredibly helpful; these will remain an important part of my process as this book grows. The ideas in this book are new and they are still in creation. Readers with opinions about this book (even readers who decide not to adopt it for their courses) are welcome to review it and I will address their responses when I revise the book next summer.

I’ve made many revisions to the book this summer, but I want to comment on a few here to illustrate how the process has worked.

One reviewer’s feedback about the design of Algorithms and the Arts has prompted me to share more about the history of the course and my plan for the next time I teach it. I did this for each of the courses I include in the book; these notes appear just below course descriptions.

Most reviewer questions have prompted me to expand “Strategies for Teaching Literature with Student-Selected Texts.” Following Fitzpatrick’s lead, I have mentioned when reviewer feedback has prompted me to add new material to the chapter.

Reviewers who explored the first prototype of WonderCat (a relational database that supports the pedagogy in this book) reported understandable confusion. We devoted our attention to structuring and visualizing data, leaving little time to refine the user experience. We are working this summer to make it easier to navigate, but this remains a work in progress. If you want to join our WonderCat mailing list, please fill out the form below. We will be in touch as we roll out new features and will be very grateful for any feedback you want to share about your experiences with the tool.