Scholarly Publishing in the Age of the Internet

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?