Editorial

313

With this issue of College & Research Librar-
ies, the current editorial staff, board, and 
cadre of referees begin their second, and 
final, three-year term of service. During 
our first term, 2008 to 2011, we brought 
you five or six articles and an equal num-
ber of book reviews every other month. 
We hope you as readers found them 
enlightening on a wide variety of aca-
demic library topics. We culled the many 
manuscripts we received for consider-
ation to select, through the peer review 
process, the best research and writing 
submitted. Our acceptance statistics with 
manuscripts are fairly consistent year 
to year: we receive about one hundred 
manuscripts for consideration and from 
these we select thirty for publication. 

My experience as editor of our journal 
for the last three years has only rein-
forced my commitment to the blind peer 
review process we follow in selecting 
manuscripts for publication. Our review 
process, similar to that of other peer re-
view scholarly journals, works like this: 
step one, manuscript (without author 
information) screened by an editorial 
assistant for worthiness of peer review; 
step two, manuscript (without author 
information) reviewed by two or more 
referees; and step three, editor makes final 
decision based on peer reviews and own 
evaluation. This process takes two to three 
months to complete. While no process like 
this is perfect, peer review, in my opinion, 
comes close in its unbiased and careful 
critique of writing and research results. 
Usually there is consensus among the 
referees and the editor in our first rounds 
of evaluation; when there is not, I seek 
more independent reviews until I see a 
clear pattern of evaluation emerge. 

Any credit for the value of our journal 
must, of course, go first to the authors 

Editorial Review

of our articles. It is their in-
sights, found through their 
research and expressed in 
their good writing, that make 
our journal worthwhile. We appreciate 
the time, effort, concentration, creativity, 
and persistence demanded of our authors. 
Most of our manuscripts go through one 
or more revisions before being finally 
accepted for publication. 

Our referees deserve a great deal of 
credit too. We have a cadre of ninety 
experienced academic librarian writers 
and researchers with their own excel-
lent publication records who volunteer 
their time to act as impartial evaluators 
of our manuscript submissions. Referees 
are the anonymous, unsung heroes of 
the scholarly communications process. 
I am continually impressed by the qual-
ity of their rigorous reviews and their 
thoughtful and constructive comments 
and judgments. As much as possible I try 
to share referee evaluations with authors, 
so they can revise accepted manuscripts 
to make them even better or to rewrite 
their papers to eliminate more serious 
weaknesses. Authors should understand 
that most scholarly journals like ours 
reject more manuscripts that they accept. 
Critical but constructive feedback from 
the peer review process should be used 
to improve future writing efforts, not 
discourage them.

The editorial team for our journal con-
sists of the editor, editorial administrator 
who keeps all our processes in order, 
the editorial assistants, the book review 
editor, and the editorial board. All our 
names appear on the journal’s masthead. 
Also, staff in the ACRL Office handles es-
sential activities of copy editing, journal 
production, and business operations for 
the journal. Our basic job is to support our 



314 College & Research Libraries July 2011

authors, book reviewers, and referees in 
their creative and evaluative work.

 Over the last three years our edito-
rial team and ACRL have made several 
significant improvements to College & 
Research Libraries. With ACRL support, 
we moved our journal’s manuscript sub-
mission and peer review processes from 
a manual operation to an online system 
called “Editorial Manager” from Aries 
Systems. This system has been adopted 
by many scholarly societies for their pub-
lications and has certainly streamlined 
and quickened the internal processes of 

our journal. In 2008, we introduced an 
online prepublication service that allows 
us to make manuscripts publicly avail-
able shortly after their acceptance, thus 
eliminating a nine month to one year 
blackout before their formal print and 
online publication. And finally, with just 
the last issue of the journal, we have made 
College & Research Libraries a fully open 
access journal. Our editorial team and 
many members of ACRL campaigned 
for this change to make our journal a 
model of best practice in scholarly com-
munications. 

Joseph Branin, Editor