Guidelines for Readers of SAA Manuscripts

SAA will assign one to three readers to review most manuscripts being published by SAA. The readers will be assigned by the Publications Editor with recommendations from the Chair of the Publications Board and the author. One reader will be a member of the Board and the author will suggest one reader. Usually one or two of the readers will have expertise in the particular subject matter of the manuscript and one will represent a more general audience.

The Publications Editor will be responsible for communicating with the readers, providing copies of the manuscript, setting deadlines, collecting the reviews, and forwarding suggestions to the author. In some cases, a reader may communicate directly with the author (with copies sent first to the Publications Editor), and, in other cases, a reader may choose to remain anonymous. This does not preclude the author working with as many additional reviewers as the author feels is necessary. However, the formal reviews of the readers assigned by the Publications Editor will be used by the Publications Editor (in consultation with the chair of the Publications Board and members of the Board) to determine both major and minor changes that will be presented to the author. Some changes may be considered mandatory and may require the manuscript to be rewritten before publication will proceed.

Responsibilities of the readers:

1. Readers will focus their comments primarily upon concerns regarding content. Sometimes the line between copyediting and content editing overlaps. Thus the readers should call attention to sentences or paragraphs that are unclear or note whether sentence structure, terminology, or grammatical errors detract from the author’s meaning. These may be issues that a copyeditor unfamiliar with the subject matter likely will not detect.
2. The readers should primarily examine the interpretation of the author. If the book is a manual, does it reflect best practices and provide appropriate options for the varied circumstances of archivists in diverse settings? Especially if the book is more theoretical, does it reflect debates in the profession and the literature on the topic? Simply put, is the book a fair and solid treatment of the subject at hand? It is especially important to catch any technical inaccuracies. An SAA manual may be the one book a repository buys on a topic and guide a generation of archivists.
3. The readers should examine the sources consulted by the author. Are there major omissions from the bibliography or citations? Readers should spot check footnotes whenever sources are readily at hand, and, if discrepancies are found the Publications Editor may recommend a comprehensive review. Readers should examine the manuscript overall to determine if the appropriate citations are provided and whether any plagiarism issues exist.
4. SAA provides copyediting services during the production stage; readers do not need to copy edit manuscripts. In particular, readers do not need to provide detailed comments on capitalization, punctuation, spelling, and footnote style. Of course, readers should feel free to mark obvious errors of this nature and minor things like typos as they work through the manuscript.

The Publications Editor will determine deadlines for reviews and generally will be six to eight weeks following the receipt of the manuscript.

—Approved by Publications Board, August 29, 2001.