About six months ago, I published a lengthy post, both on Planned Obsolescence and on if:book, about the future of peer review in electronic scholarly publishing. At least some portion of that post was occasioned by Nature's experiment with an open peer-review system. That experiment was closed earlier this month, and the editors have now analyzed the data resulting from it, and have declared the experiment to have failed, and have announced that “for now at least, we will not implement open peer review.”

The statistics that they cite are indeed indicative of some serious issues in the open system they implemented: only 5% of authors who submitted work during the trial agreed to have their papers opened to public comment; only 54% of those papers (or a 38 of a total of 71) received substantive comments. But I have to wonder whether the experiment wasn't rigged from the beginning, destined for a predictable failure because of the trial's constraints.

First, no real impetus was created for authors to open their papers to public review; as I noted back in June, the open portion of the peer review process was wholly optional, and had no bearing whatsoever on the editors' decision to publish any given paper. And second, no incentive was created for commenters to participate in the process; why go to all the effort of reading and commenting on a paper if your comments serve no identifiable purpose?

What I want to ask at this point is what MediaCommons can learn from the ostensible failures of Nature's experiment. How can we develop a successful open peer-review process with adequate author and reviewer buy-in?

A brief reminder: MediaCommons is seeking proposals for for innovative projects that engagingly explore some aspect of media history, theory, or culture through an adventurous use of the broad palette of technologies provided by the digital network. We've received four extremely exciting proposals so far, but we'd like to see many more. We also want your input and feedback on those proposals: how might they be enhanced? Facilitating and publishing new forms of digital scholarship such as these will be one of the most important aspects of the MediaCommons to come; please get involved by proposing new projects and by commenting on the projects already proposed.

Many apologies for the relative quiet around here; the end of the semester is proceeding apace, and we're all a bit caught up in its tide. In lieu of stimulating new thoughts of my own, I'd like to direct you over to the blog of our friends at the Institute for the Future of the Book, where a couple of recent posts, one by Ben Vershbow and one by Sebastian Mary are exploring the sense of the contemporary writer, both the digital author that seems to be coming into being and the print author that worries about being left behind…

First, a shout out to the good folks at Flow, who continue to provide a venue for timely, accessible and insightful scholarship about contemporary television and media culture and who have been kind enough to publish a piece by Kathleen and myself about MediaCommons in their latest issue. Additionally, this issue has some great columns by Mary Beltran, Michele Byars, Harper Cossar, Dan Leopard and Lynn Joyrich. Definitely worth checking out.

Second, building on some of the important conversations that have already begun taking shape through this blog about the types of scholarly endeavors and community projects that might be undertaken, I’d like to propose using MediaCommons as a site for deliberation on pedagogical approaches to teaching about media.

Many websites already allow scholars to upload and share syllabi and these are certainly useful community resources, but my suggestion would be to collectively build syllabi and discuss the myriad approaches to organizing classes. These syllabi could range from generic “Intro to Media Studies” courses to special topics classes.

Our goal would not be to create the “perfect” syllabus – a rather limiting and unimaginative endeavor — but rather, to engage in conversations about how to best reach and challenge students to become more critically engaged with the media they consume through our approaches to the classes we teach.

By possibly using wiki software, we could collectively assemble resources, add, subtract, and rearrange materials in efforts to come up with innovative approaches to teaching. The wiki would also allow for all changes to be tracked, providing a kind of roadmap to how decisions are being collectively shaped.

Additionally, by employing a participatory and adaptable commenting function that would allow members to interject ideas anywhere on the document, all changes to these syllabi would be subject to public deliberation. Comments could appear alongside the syllabus and be connected to specific aspects of it rather than appearing only at the bottom of the page and addressing the document as a whole as most current comment fields tend to be set up. For an example please see McKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory.

Would this be a useful tool for scholars? How would something like this get started? Are there other ways of conceptualizing a collective syllabus initiative? What other types of pedagogical projects could we use MediaCommons for? Let us know what you think.