Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen

Peer review procedure

When a manuscript is submitted to Museum Tusculanum Press, it is read and evaluated in terms of scholarly quality, style/genre, and the estimated amount of editing required in order for the manuscript to be turned into a book.

If the manuscript is accepted for publication upon the initial, internal evaluation, it is sent for external peer review. MTP has a large network of referees to whom manuscripts can be sent. Hence MTP’s edtior-in-chief decides on which referees (usually two) to send the manuscript to.

In the case of a manuscript being found suitable for inclusion in a series, both the internal evaluation and the decision on which referees to select will be made in collaboration with the series editor(s).

If the responses from the (two) referees are positive then the manuscript will be accepted for publication. If for instance one response is positive and the other negative, the manuscript will either be rejected because of the critique, or be sent to a third referee. On the basis of the third referee’s response, it will be decided whether or not the manuscript will be accepted for publication.

It is important to stress that the peer reviewing of large monographs (600+ pages) in the Humanities and Social Sciences often results in elaborate reports that the editor-in-chief needs to analyse in detail before taking a final decision on whether the manuscript can be accepted for publication.

It should be emphasised that these elaborate responses, which sometimes are made as blind or even double-blind peer review and sometimes not (depending on the author, the referee, the subject area, and or the type of manuscript), very often constitute the first step on the ladder to further scholarly manuscript consultancy by the referee(s).

As thanks for performing the peer review, reviewers are offered to select an agreed amount of books from MTP’s catalogue.