The Scholarly Review Process at the University of Toronto Press

This report discusses the purpose of scholarly review and examines how the components of the process provide scholarly presses with a dependable system by which to select and develop manuscripts for publication. After examining scholarly review in a general sense, this report addresses the review process in detail as it occurs at the University of Toronto Press. The University of Toronto Press is the largest scholarly publisher in Canada and publishes in the social sciences and humanities disciplines. This report identifies safeguards that university presses integrate into the scholarly review process to ensure that the process consistently produces high-quality books. Two rounds of interviews were conducted to collect the data in this report. First, five University of Toronto Press editors were interviewed between July and August of 2002. The second set of interviews included four UTP authors as well as the Programme Manager of the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme (funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada) and occurred in January of 2003. Information from these conversations was then integrated with what I learned during my internship at the press, as well as with research from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences (CFHSS) Web site, the Journal of Scholarly Publishing, books about publishing with a scholarly press, the Manuscript Review Committee’s terms of reference, and a memorandum from a University of Toronto vice-president about the role of the university’s faculty publication board. This project report concludes by discussing issues that compromise the success of scholarly review and by proposing possible solutions to these problems.