For the graduate student on the job market, waiting for a journal to complete its peer review process, which could take years, with no guarantee of publication, becomes almost unsustainable, especially when one has to wait for one journal to finish its assessment before moving a submission on to the next.
Throughout my career in two ways, I have addressed what I believe are the unfair, even ludicrous, timetables and gatekeeping mechanisms that go along with refereed journal publishing.
My first strategy has been to consider my existing article-length works not as journal content but rather as the bases for my own edited volumes. My talk will advise scholars on the job market or tenure clock with unpublished dissertation research or other chapter-length pieces to not just consider submitting them to someone else’s publication but instead to create their own publications. My initial ideas about this stemmed from frustration with my inability to get work that I knew was worthy published in an academic journal in a timely manner.
Work that is good enough for a refereed journal article is good enough to be a chapter in an anthology. Rather than devoting one’s energies into conforming such pieces to the whims of peer reviewers and journal editors, why not instead devote one’s energies to finding similar articles that could set a new standard for knowledge production on a given subject?
I took my do-it-yourself philosophy even further when I created the peer-reviewed Journal of Civil and Human Rights as an alternative to existing journals that I did not think were actually viable outlets for scholars like me.