ANU Press

Peer review procedure

Hosted by the Division of Information at The Australian National University, ANU Press was established in 2003 to explore and enable new modes of scholarly publishing.

Taking advantage of new information and communication technologies to make available the intellectual output of the academic community of ANU, the primary focus of ANU Press is the production of electronic scholarly works. All works are also available for purchase through a Print on Demand (PoD) service.

ANU Press produces fully peer-reviewed research publications and is recognised by DIISRTE as a commercial publisher, enabling ANU Press authors to gain full recognition under the Higher Education Research Data Collection scheme.

The decision to establish ANU Press was based on:

  • a recognition of the need to create an effective mechanism for disseminating high quality ANU scholarship that lacks a ready commercial market
  • a determination to eliminate barriers inherent in existing models of scholarly communication
  • an acceptance that the operational overheads of the conventional academic press are no longer affordable
  • a realisation that emergent electronic press technologies offer a feasible alternative to the conventional academic press in terms of cost and available infrastructure.

Through active engagement and modification of current generation technologies, ANU Press:

  • provides standardised publishing processes via a generic set of publishing workflows
  • provides content indexing in the form of subject headings and metadata, as well as hyperlinked term indexing through scripted generation
  • converts original format files to XML, in order to facilitate the production of electronic editions of previously published scholarly titles
  • publishes works in both electronic and print formats

Procedure

Manuscript submissions to ANU Press office are referred to the relevant Editorial Committee for consideration. The Editorial Committee determines whether the proposal is of interest and, if so, requests a manuscript evaluation via independent peer review (a double-blind process, with at least two referees and at least one of these referees being external to the ANU). The process from peer-review to final copy-editing is the responsibility of the Editorial Committee. Once the copy-edited manuscript has been accepted for publication, ANU Press commences the production cycle.