One important consideration in academic peer review work is that every field has to nurture its researchers. Not all works will be from seasoned researchers who are familiar with the expectations of publications. There have to be allowances for the steep learning curve about what is expected in professional publishing, and there have to be efforts to support constructive learning around this work. 

Novice authors often aim for prestigious journals and publishers with high rejection rates. They will naively position themselves by naming models after themselves. They will infuse their professional biographies with a lot of self-promotion (often to their own detriment); they may over-claim capabilities. They may over-assume the monetary benefits of their work (or assume direct monetization to begin with). They may become deeply protectionist of their work even though it is untested and not directly applicable to real-world processes or products. They think there is a “value” to attention and will primp and pose as if attention means that they’ve arrived. Not so much. 

Dependencies:  The pressures of research and publishing are non-trivial. There are many “dependencies,” too, in the successful making of a researcher: a lifetime of critical education, important mentoring, emotional resilience, access to information and resources, and collegial relationships. One benefit of approaching publishing naively is that the emotional “high” of publishing may be motivating for future work.

Thinking about Cold Calling Researchers...and Asking for a Professional Favor...:  One effective way for peer reviewers to pull back from the harshest critiques is for them to think a little like an editor.  An editor should have a sense of the actual work that goes into the research and the write-up.  In terms of an incentive structure, an editor has a vested interest in ensuring that a work is published; otherwise, a lot of invested effort will have been lost on his / her part.  

A chapter may take anywhere from several months of work hours to even several years.  (Think about doctoral dissertations, which often require several years to achieve.)  If the metadata in a Word file has not been scrubbed, a reviewer may look at that information and see just how many revisions have gone into a work.  Oftentimes, dozens of revisions have been invested in a work before it is submitted.  For a typical academic book chapter, it is not unusual for a comprehensive folder to contain 400 - 500 files, including annotated works for a thorough literature review, drafts of images, note sets, data sets, and other related information.  A tidy finalized draft is not arrived at simply. 

If reviewers conceptualize just how hard it would be to cold-call a researcher and to ask him / her to contribute that amount of work to a research and writing project *without pay,* that can help reviewers get in the right mindset to try to support a researcher and author (or research team).  Researchers must have a lot of stamina and persistence to achieve the work. They have to be open to discovery in their work.  Research papers that only capture what the researcher thought at the beginning are usually staid and unworthy of publication (since they generally just recycle what is already known).  A researcher must have the willingness to be surprised by findings; he or she has to have the skill to ask relevant questions during the research process and then chase down leads with sufficient rigor. He or she also has to have sufficiently high standards and dissatisfaction with anything less--which will enhance the quality of the overall work.  The research into human creativity and innovation shows a "window" during which researchers are most productive in their careers. For example, many can go through a professional lifetime with only a few publications and many without any. 

For all the required dedication, researchers' ties to various publications, though, tend to be fragile, especially if that relationship is not professionally nurtured.  Even if a work does not ultimately make, there still has to be that respect for the effort.