One of the things we attempted to do in the course of our meeting this week was to draw up a cluster of principles that should guide the kinds of work published through MediaCommons, as well as a set of principles guiding the new mode of open peer-to-peer review that we hope the network will instantiate. The lists that follow are drawn from my notes, taken in the course of the meeting, and then elaborated upon in order to complete certain thoughts and draw out certain conclusions. I hope that the other folks who were at the meeting will chime in and correct any misapprehensions or misinterpretations that I may put forward here, and fill in any gaps in my memory. I likewise hope that many other users of this network-in-process will respond as well, and spread the word about this discussion, helping us to create the best possible system for the production of networked scholarly discourse.

Principles Guiding MediaCommons Projects:

1. MediaCommons projects ought to take advantage of or be enabled by the digital environment — that is, they should be multi-mediated, or networked, or community-built, or they should foreground the process of creation and revision. In any case, projects (and proposals for projects) should be clear about how they are using the networked publishing environment as a part of their practice or methodology.

2. MediaCommons particularly desires projects that demonstrate a concern for accessibility to multiple audiences, particularly in terms of writing style. This is not to say that all projects must be equally readable by all audiences, or that difficulty is not valued; rather, it is to say that as the network is open, we believe our work should be open, and valuable, to everyone within that network.

3. Any work published on MediaCommons should provide some transparency of process that persists beyond the finished document, a revision history that a reader can drill into, for instance, as in a wiki.

4. Projects should be published on MediaCommons under the Creative Commons license of the author’s choosing, and may be republished in other forms beyond MediaCommons, but the authors must commit to the project’s persistence within the network. This persistence does not preclude proliferation, though any further publications must acknowledge MediaCommons.

Principles Guiding the MediaCommons System of Peer-to-Peer Review

1. Peer review within MediaCommons is designed less to serve as a system of “gatekeeping” than to provide a new mode of collegial support to scholarly authors, helping them in the development and revision of their work, as well as assisting readers in finding and engaging with high-quality material in which they have an interest.

2. Such a shift from gatekeeping to collegial support of necessity requires a divorce between the interests of peer review — facilitating the production of quality scholarly discourse amongst peers — and the institutional credentialing functions that peer review has come to serve. In other words, the simple fact of a project’s having been published with MediaCommons cannot be taken as evidence for purposes of promotion and tenure review.

3. For that reason, MediaCommons must provide the means for scholars to improve their work via conversation and revision, while also providing a set of metrics that those scholars can present, along with their work, to promotion and tenure committees and other individuals involved in such review processes. Such metrics, however, can never be assumed to stand on their own; institutions must take it upon themselves to find ways to review a candidate’s work for quality, rather than relying upon publishing outlets to make such important personnel decisions for them.

4. Each project published within MediaCommons will have a profile attached to it, tracking such web-native metrics as inbound links, citations, page views, comments, and the like. The network’s editors will also generate, upon request, a statement contextualizing this data, providing both a close reading of the project, via the comments generated during its open review process, and a “distant reading” (see Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps, and Trees) exploring the project’s profile within the network.

5. Participation in the open peer-to-peer review process being developed within the network is of primary importance to the life of the community, and thus while not all “peers” (or commenters) must be authors within the site, all authors must be peers, actively involved in the review of projects within their sphere of interest.

6. To ensure such active and engaged participation, MediaCommons will develop a system by which an author’s “reputation” within the network is determined not simply through review of their own projects but also through evaluation, by the community, of their participation within the community. Authors and peers will thus be given some means of rating comments as well as projects.

7. Further, because the open review process demands honesty and accountability in order to work, peers should commit to using their real names, rather than screen names, within the network. Member identity will be verified via the submission and authentication of an institutional email address. Any comments made within the network under a name other than that given by the member and verified during the registration process will be flagged as pseudonymous; such comments may be subject to filtering or some manner of ratings penalty.

8. Just as authors have the ability to select which Creative Commons license their work is published under, reserving to themselves those rights that are important to them, so authors should have the ability to decide what sort of evaluation their work should receive. The review options presented to authors should include the ability to name the particular communities to which the project is addressed, allowing the author to request review from the audiences best able to assess the quality of the work.

This is the first of a series of posts that I’ll be making over the next couple of days about the outcomes of this week’s first meeting of the group of scholars formerly known as the Editorial Board* of MediaCommons. This first post is necessarily brief — I’m waiting for a plane, about to jet off to another meeting — but I hope it’ll provide a fruitful point of entry for a complex and engaging conversation.

Over the last couple of months, I’ve been giving a talk here and there on MediaCommons, its genesis, and the set of issues within the academy that the project is hoping to address. Because many people have asked me about this talk, and because we want to test out some of the modes of scholarly engagement that MediaCommons is hoping to produce, we’ve produced a version of the talk in CommentPress, a set of WordPress hacks developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book. CommentPress allows the text to be discussed at a variety of levels, ranging from the paragraph to the page, and it allows for a similar variety of means for reading the resulting conversation, organizing comments by section, by paragraph, or by author.

I’m looking forward to seeing your responses to this opening salvo in what I hope will be a long and fruitful discourse about the direction of MediaCommons. Please read and comment, engaging both with the original text and with one another. We all very much look forward to watching this conversation develop.

—

*One further thing that came out of this week’s meeting: we’ve begun to realize that the function of the group we’ve been calling the “Editorial Board” is very different from that of traditional editorial boards, whether of journals or presses, and thus that the term may not be terrifically apropos. The folks serving in this capacity won’t be working in a “gatekeeping” capacity, deciding what does and doesn’t merit publication. Instead, they’ll operate in an older mode of editorship, helping to develop projects, guide them through the authoring, production, and publication process, and facilitating the discussion and review that they produce. (I should note, of course, that this is a lot more work than simply saying yes or no, but it also has the potential for being much more rewarding, for both editor and author alike.) We’re looking for a new term to describe this function, and the group that’s serving it. During the meeting, we found ourself using terms like “shepherding” and “stewardship” to describe the work of the board, each of which attempts to get at the key importance of facilitation and guidance in this role, but I’ll confess to being pretty uncomfortable with the noun versions of both of those terms. (Shepherds? Stewards? I want neither to invite jokes about herding cats nor to produce images of in-flight service.) I’m a bit drawn to “mediators,” for all of the obvious punning reasons. But I’d love to hear from you — what would you call this group?

Thinking on what Jason and others have been saying and how it relates to the technical features available to us through online practices of writing, researching and mediating the Academy, I think that what we are doing here is going to emerge is one particular set of Academic practices of e-writing and publishing. I suspect there might be considerable debate and internal disagreement concerning how this will look - but as we continuing *doing* - we will begin to see how it looks.

Perhaps then we are not “re” inventing any wheels but indeed formalizing some structures and practices. Forming our own hierarchies for PTR. That is, not resisting, but building and reproducing while reshaping existing Academic practices, placing ourselves as the rule makers.

I look forward to seeing more discussion.

In reentering from a stimulating & really provocative few days at the MediaCommons retreat, one of the lasting insights and exciting aspects of our plan is rethinking the peer review and academic community roles as parts of reputation systems. Coincidentally, I stumbled across this Wired article on “crowdhacking,” or manipulating reputation systems like Digg & eBay for fun & profit (more profit than fun). Although it’s doubtful that MediaCommons would spawn a cottage industry to promote or disparage academic reputation, all it would take is one member to game the system to destroy the whole endeavor. For me, this speaks to the need to work against anonymity and ensure that reputation in our community is generated through thoughtful commentary more than just button-pushing tagging.

More to come here and at my own blog.
-Jason

Hi all,

It was great meeting all of you. Missed meeting Tara again and would have liked to have seen the remaining (for now still) “editorial board” members.

The ocean, Wii and movie were wonderful interludes (and I finally understood the reference to FuddRuckers… duh - but I am slow sometimes).

I am writing my mediacommons related blogs at cyberdiva.org/blog/mc

This week’s In Media Res line-up:

Monday, March 26, 2007 – Amanda Lotz (University of Michigan) presents: “Dreamers”: Cable, The Great American Success Story”

Tuesday, March 27, 2007 – Brian Ott (Colorado State University) presents: “The Many Lessons of ‘Spiders of Drugs’.”

Wednesday, March 28, 2007 – Faye Ginsburg (New York University) presents: “Found in Translation”

Thursday, March 29, 2007 – Derek Kompare (Southern Methodist University) presents: “Lost in Seriality”

Friday, March 30, 2007 – Hollis Griffin (Northwestern University) presents: “Steel Magnolia: Nancy Grace and The Epistemology of Place”

Please check out these wonderful contributions and offer your thoughts via a comment.

I’ll be attending the pasted-below session tomorrow morning; I thought it would be good to get the panelists’ perspectives on the future of scholarly monographs. I doubt they’re going to be talking much about the kind of work we’re doing (I expect some discussion of subventions and such), but I’m interested in hearing what they have to say. When we — the editorial board — get together for our planning meeting, I’ll give a full report of the panel. I’ll try to type up the highlights and post them as well.

The Future of the Scholarly Book in Composition, Rhetorical, and Literacy Studies

Session: L.11 on Mar 24, 2007 from 9:30 AM to 10:45 AM Cluster: 107) Institutional and Professional
Type: Roundtable Interest Emphasis: not applicable
Level Emphasis: all Focus: not applicable

We propose to examine the future of the scholarly book in the overlapping realms of composition, rhetorical, and literacy studies. This examination is overdue: for some time, institutional demands that scholarly excellence be validated by book publication have been at odds with market forces that are shrinking academic publishers’ frontlists. Associations representing other disciplines have initiated conversations with multiple stakeholders regarding the scholarly book’s future. Our field must do the same. Its particular perspective on how books build disciplinary knowledge should be reflected in wider debates about next steps in academic publishing.

The session will unfold in three phases. First, each speaker will offer a brief position statement rooted in experience with writing, publishing, or evaluating scholarly books:

Speaker #1 is a scholar with a role in campus administration. He will evaluate the efforts of academic societies that are grappling with the “publishing crisis” in part by addressing the decline of cultural value accorded humanistic and scientific knowledge. He will compare these efforts with those of higher education administrative bodies, which tend to comprehend the financial but not the intellectual challenges facing contemporary academic book culture. Speaker #1 will conclude by arguing for scholarship that is more rigorously interdisciplinary as one approach to broadening books’ intellectual and commercial appeal.

Speaker #2 is an academic whose own scholarly book is forthcoming from a university press. He will consider the role of the scholarly book in fostering a unique engagement–one that may not be available through other media or forms–with the ideas, forms, scenes, methods,
and meanings of literacy and rhetoric. Focusing on three germinal works from the field, Speaker #2 will note the “unique engagements” that have resulted from these books, and how these engagements have pushed the boundaries of knowledge in the field. Each of these engagements, he contends, was in part the result of working in a genre, the book, that allowed for inquiries that would not have been possible otherwise.

Speaker #3 will address the current state of academic publishing from the perspective of a senior editor with a privately held scholarly press that has been publishing in the humanities and social sciences for 30 years. She will address various organizational responses to the decline in scholarly book sales, ranging from publishing only hardcover editions and increasing list prices to refocusing acquisition efforts and eliminating scholarly monographs from publishing lists. She will also propose approaches to future scholarly publications that may be sustainable in the current academic marketplace.

Speaker #4, editor-in-chief of a university press that has a long-standing commitment to publishing titles in composition and rhetoric, will briefly address recent changes (and those forthcoming) that affect the publication of academic books, especially monographs, by university presses, and what steps non-profit, scholarly publishers are taking to respond to the changes. He will explore which types of academic books he believes his press must continue to publish in print format and which ones may be better suited to electronic publication, what solutions have been proposed to the problems in academic book publishing (especially in relation to tenure), as well as what, in general, a university press editor-in-chief sees for the future of the academic book.

Speaker #5 is a scholar, a college-level administrator familiar with promotion and tenure processes, and an editor with a commercial publisher that has respected lists in composition and education. He will argue that books allow a kind of disciplinary conversation that is otherwise impossible to attain. They offer scholars the opportunity to engage in sustained dialogue with an idea, an argument: to be able to articulate an idea across “long time” furthers discovery, debate, and holds the greatest potential for disciplines to recover and rewrite themselves. The fundamental question, however, is how do we best promote this kind of writing–and the active reading of books that makes the writing of them feasible and viable.

In the roundtable’s second phase, our chair–herself an author of several scholarly titles–will provoke crosstalk among us that explores, among other subjects, prospects for a consensus vision that accounts for the minority discourses that are essential to the fair and equitable representation of identities in our field’s scholarly communication.

Finally, the chair will invite audience members to join the proceedings. We hope their questions will lead us to link our positions to current thinking in our field regarding research, intellectual property, and professional advancement. Doing so will allow us to conclude with situated recommendations for continued inquiry and deliberation.

Participant Affiliation Speech Title (if known)
Gesa Kirsch
(Chair) Bentley College
Charles Schuster
(Respondent) University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Peter Mortensen
(Speaker 1) University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The Future of the Scholarly Book: An Overview
John Duffy
(Speaker 2) University of Notre Dame The Future of the Scholarly Book: An Author’s Perspective
Linda Bathgate
(Speaker 3) Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. The Future of the Scholarly Book: A View from a Privately Held Scholarly Press
Karl Kageff
(Speaker Additional) Southern Illinois University Press The Future of the Scholarly Book: A View from a University Press

One more thing: I’m attaching to this post a couple of articles that I’d love everyone to take a look at before the meeting next week, an article by Herbert Van de Sompel et al, published in D-Lib Magazine, entitled “Rethinking Scholarly Communication: Building the System that Scholars Deserve,” and another by Ulrich Pöschl, published in Learned Publishing, entitled “Interactive journal concept for improved scientific publishing and quality assurance.” Both are fundamentally interested in issues of open access and open review, and might be useful to us as we think about the peer-to-peer review model that MediaCommons might develop.

So as I wrote in my comment on Avi’s summary of the SCMS ed board meeting, I have two battling impulses for our meeting next week, one of which is to linger in the “what” questions — What do we want MediaCommons to become? What kinds of projects should we take on? What kinds of community can we imagine? — and the other of which is to press on through, perhaps a bit precipitously, to the “how” questions. These “how” questions are the things that I most want to get to, in no small part so that we have a concrete direction for getting started. They include the questions that Avi closed his post with –

How do we establish credentialing/legitimacy without replicating existing peer review gate keeping models?
How do we move from peer review to open peer-to-peer review?
How do we review multi-mediated scholarship?
How do we attract both community and contributors to MediaCommons?

– and extend to even more day-to-day questions: How will the editorial board function in the development of the network? How will the network’s backend be structured? How will we keep up with changing technological demands? How will we negotiate the balance between volunteer labor and work that must be compensated?

And so forth. What I’d like to ask for, at this point, is your sense of the questions that we haven’t asked yet, both the whats that we shouldn’t overlook in our rush to details, and the hows that I hope we’ll begin developing concrete answers to next week…

The following is a summary of the key conversational points that came out of last week’s MediaCommons Editorial Board meeting in Chicago. The meeting was brief (only an hour or so) and only half the board was in attendance (Tim Anderson, Richard Edwards, Radhika Gajjala, Tara McPherson, Chuck Tryon, and myself), but it provides a good starting point for conversations that will happen next week in New Jersey.

Much of the conversation revolved around the dual needs for credibility and publicity. On the publicity front, all agreed that the “build it and they will come” philosophy was a dead end. Chuck Tryon noted that he had begun to see coverage of IMR on other blogs like greenscene.com, but this has not necessarily translated into a larger participatory community for MediaCommons. Richard Edward suggested that we should be maximizing our opportunities through developing our presence on friendship networks like MySpace and FaceBook and making IMR available for podcasts on iTunes or optimized for cell phones. In other words, we should be getting our content out rather than being dependant on people coming to the website. Tim Anderson followed that we also need to make the site useful to people, emphasizing MediaCommons’ ability to become a clearing house of competing interests with multiple layers of social networking connected through a community-driven tagging initiative. Anderson also saw the site’s archiving potential as a valuable resource for scholars. Tara McPherson thought that the focus on media studies was smart for building a core constituency, as was the current emphasis on short pieces (in fact, McPherson thought even shorter pieces might be better in drawing in an immediate crowd), but she noted that credibility would require more substantial multi-mediated projects. She also thought that the academy would more immediately value articles with clips over multi-mediated essays, though the long term goal should be establishing credibility for new forms of scholarship.

Radhika Gajjala noted that cultivating communities on Youtube and establishing credibility from within the academy were potentially at odds and McPherson noted that we needed to move in two directions at once by cultivating the edge but also connecting to the center. Gajjala suggested emphasizing MediaCommons’ efforts to build a type of scholarship of engagement that connected to University service and outreach missions and asked how MediaCommons might be engaged with local as well as non-academic communities? Edwards worried that while online classes were becoming important revenue generating models for Universities, they were also accompanied by a loss of prestige and that we needed to appeal to more than just Provosts for credibility, but to the scholarly community writ large. McPherson suggested that we needed to form an advisory board of established scholars that would lend legitimacy to our project. Henry Jenkins, Steve Jones, David Theo Goldberg and Kathy Davidson’s names were suggested. McPherson also added that rather than individuals constantly struggling to convince the academy that digital scholarship was both valuable and tenurable, that MediaCommons should seek to work with SCMS and/or HASTAC on developing policy statements about legitimate digital scholarly publishing practices. While this initiative could start with MediaCommons – possibly through a Wiki – its eventual recognition and adoption by an organization like SCMS would be key to gaining legitimacy.

In terms of content, much of the conversation focused on doing more with the site than we currently are. Edwards wished that IMR would move beyond simply offering commentary on clips and thought that commenting would be more effective if layered like an onion rather than its current vertical threading configuration, which left them too isolated. Anderson re-emphasized the importance of tagging for building non-linear networks. Edwards thought we needed to focus on attracting scholars already comfortable working on line rather than bringing in newbies, but wondered how we might convince these scholars to work through MediaCommons rather than their own sites. I added that I though IMR should allow for layered audio commentaries and allow for scholars to add comments directly into the video rather than appearing on the side. I also added that providing mash-up tools that would allow for scholarly collages and juxtapositions would be an important creative layer that would change the way commenting currently functioned.

As for peer-to-peer review and a public writing process, no clear consensus emerged. McPherson asked if we wanted to make bad writing public and suggested that scholars can react negatively to public criticism of their work – something that blind peer review protects against. Tryon wondered if peer review would be more akin to a respondent at a conference and Edwards added that we needed to establish a middle ground between the “thought of the moment” model encouraged by blogs and the current closed off peer review model.

In general, the meeting raised more questions than it answered, which is an opportunity to publicly work through some of these issues. We would love to hear follow-up thoughts — including anything I might have missed or misrepresented in this post — from those editorial board members that attended the meeting. We would also like to hear from those of you who could not attend. Finally, input from the MediaCommons community is much appreciated. Here are some questions that we plan to work through at next week’s meeting, but want to start talking about on line beforehand:

What sorts of work/projects should MediaCommons be engaging in/soliciting?
How do we establish credentialing/legitimacy without replicating existing peer review gate keeping models?
How do we move from peer review to open-peer-to-peer review?
How do we review multi-mediated scholarship?
How do we attract both community and contributors to MediaCommons?