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Confidentiality and Peer Review: The Paradox of Secrecy in Academe
- The Review of Higher Education
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 25, Number 2, Winter 2002
- pp. 163-183
- 10.1353/rhe.2002.0002
- Article
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Using narrative analysis, this essay critiques confidentiality in the peer review process, which is linked discursively with academic freedom, privacy, and honesty. Such a link disciplines individuals to believe that confidentiality is a personal interest and obscures the institutional and corporate interests at stake. Thus, confidentiality may insulate the academy from accountability and resistance. To exercise a critical agency that questions the interests that constrain them, faculty members may need to know and question how peer review decisions are made.