Edwina asked about refereeing, Tash about popular press, and Lilian about links to classics.
Edwina asked about how the “article referee process operates” for journal articles. There is a great deal of variation. There are incentives for scholars to publish only in refereed journals. Ulrich’s Guide to Periodicals http://www.ulrichsweb.com/ulrichsweb/
identifies refereed journals as such. Most journal information will declare it refereed if it is.
How does it work? An author sends a manuscript to a journal editor, these days by email to a web site maintained by the publisher. The editor takes a look to see that (1) it is suitable to the journal (if it is a political science journal the check is just to see if the discussion is about political science) and (2) to see if it meets certain minimum criteria for quality, which may be reading through a few pages. These two are simply eligibility tests.
Then the editor turns to the database of reviewers for the journal and finds two or three who have themselves worked on the same or similar subject as the manuscript. If the database is not enough the editor may read the footnotes it he manuscript and sent eh manuscript for review to some cited in the footnotes. The editor then contacts these three to review the manuscript. In most cases this is double-blind review. The name of the author of the manuscript is removed and the names of the reviewers are not revealed. The reviewers read the manuscript and write a report to the editor recommending publication (with or without revision) or rejection. The fastest experience I have had with this turnaround is 45 days and the longest about nine months. Invariably there is some discontinuity between two readers or among three readers and sometimes editors intervene then to break the deadlock, but some do not. If the response is to revise and resubmit the whole process can start over. It is often difficult to please the reviewers in a revise and resubmit if they have been, as is usually the case, inconsistent.
Tash asked early about popular press. Well as the publication list shows there was a time when I can could get into the opinion pages of Fairfax publications, but no more. I have given up trying. Now I discharge that urge by writing reviewers on Internet Movie Data Base (two – the German Game and Love Song for Bobby Long), revises on Amazon (many), and additions to entries for the Wikipedia (a bit on Thucydides).
There are a lot of web resources on classic texts, Lillian.