As I have written in a long memoir essay published about two months ago, when four academics, including me, founded the journal Studies in Nepali History and Society (SINHAS) in 1995, all four of us had very little experience of formal peer review. By this, I mean we had limited first-hand knowledge of both receiving peer review comments written by others about our own formal submissions to journals and doing peer reviews of articles submitted by others to various journals. By the summer of 1995, two of us in the founding team had published only three full-length journal articles. One of the three articles, my piece published in 1994 in Contributions to Nepalese Studies, had not passed through rigorous peer review. Significantly, three of the four founders, including me, had never done a formal peer review of an article manuscript written by someone else for any journal.

Nevertheless, when founding SINHAS, we decided that everything we publish will undergo peer review. We instituted a simple peer review process by deciding that every submission would be read by two or more reviewers, including at least one editor. The idea was to try to make sure that the article under review adds something substantial to our collective knowledge of Nepali history and society. To guide the process, we asked reviewers to tell us (a) if the paper under review successfully presents original or little-known material based on recent research or contributes to a new understanding of familiar material by treating it in an original manner and (b) if the paper has a clear and well-developed argument. We also asked the reviewers to rate the importance of the work under review, both for its theoretical/disciplinary contributions and for Nepal Studies.

As we editors were not experts on everything related to Nepal, we approached many colleagues with the requisite knowledge to provide reviewer reports on the submitted items. Most reviewers we approached in the initial years agreed to submit their reviews within six to 12 weeks. Whether they were just being generous to the editorial team of a new journal or Nepal Studies had managed to attract exceptionally collegial colleagues, I do not know. Such support was very encouraging.

We editors alternated responsibility for managing the review process, which included writing to the reviewers, curating their review comments and communicating their comments and our editorial decision to the author(s) concerned. Curating of review comments involved additional editorial labour on top of the evaluative labour put in by the reviewers. The whole process was initially informed by intuition rather than experience, but we worked hard to make the review process rigorous and encouraging. The peer review system we had operationalised was not flawless—no peer review system in the world is flawless—but we were sincere.

While managing/witnessing the review process of items submitted to SINHAS, I quickly learnt that peer review was not just an evaluation mechanism. It was also a conversation between an author(s), various reviewers and the journal editors to augment the quality of the analysis presented in the manuscript under consideration for publication. The sincerity involved in this conversation constituted the bedrock of the quality of what we published in SINHAS.

Peer review as bureaucracy

Although we instituted a peer review process for each submission to SINHAS, the term “peer review” was not included in the text describing the journal’s mission and operation. It did not occur to us then that this explicit mention was necessary. Some years ago, a colleague who works in a Nepali university and had published more than one article in the journal requested us to provide him a letter saying SINHAS was a “peer-reviewed journal”. He further said he needed it to submit it to his university as part of his application for promotion. After we received several such requests, in late 2019, we revised the blurb describing the journal as a “peer-reviewed semi-annual publication.” It was telling that the concerned universities did not ask our colleagues to submit officially certified copies of the peer-review comments, but rather, only requested letters verifying SINHAS’s status as a peer-reviewed journal.

That peer review is now a necessary guff between various stakeholders related to the submitted article manuscript is a given fact for us editors, but the journal is published in a country whose academic managers have reduced research evaluation to a set of bureaucratic checklists. Surgeon-writer Atul Gawande wrote his best-seller The Checklist Manifesto (2010) to argue that given the complexities of modern professions, even the best experts need checklists to “get things right.” Given our bureaucratised academia, we operationalise checklists to “get things done with the right papers” so that when folks from the Akhtiyar office come checking, there is no gadbadi.

The university administrators responsible for evaluating tenure and promotion applications of their colleagues need rubber stamps saying “peer reviewed” so that they can mark the appropriate box in the checklist. They do not commit to reflecting on what kinds of peer review processes are in place in various journals within the country and which best practices can be adopted more broadly.

In other words, peer review has been turned into a bureaucratic requirement, not a process needed to advance the quality of published research. Where is the evidence, you might ask? The evidence is everywhere. As a first stop, you might check the Nepal Journals Online portal, where you can find many social science journals that advertise themselves as “peer reviewed” but publish texts that are not the outcome of any good research. The peer review process they deploy is not helping to produce many insightful research articles about Nepal, and no one seems much bothered about his fact.

If they were, we would have had many public reflections on these sorts of questions: Who is a “peer” in the peer review process of social science and humanities journals? What qualities do the peers need to have to participate in the review process? How should editors curate the comments provided by peer reviewers if they want the manuscript evaluation process to be both exacting and encouraging? In a country where academics love to flaunt their “Pra” “Da” [= Professor Doctor] titles in front of their names, how are professorial hierarchies negotiated by the journal editors in the peer review process? Do academically junior editors fear retribution when they send “revise and resubmit” or “reject” editorial decisions—based on justified peer reviews—to their senior PraDas?

These and many other related questions that have not been asked even once publicly are real evidence of the bureaucratic taming of the research evaluation process in Nepal. Daring young academics need to break the shackles of this bureaucracy.