Digital Peer Review
by Kathleen Fitzpatrick — Pomona College
February 06, 2009 – 14:31
In the last few days, I’ve been running across a bunch of activity around the question of peer review in digital publishing, thinking that’s extremely important to MediaCommons as we begin the project of building our peer-to-peer review network. I’ve also been writing about such questions a lot, in particular in my book project, which I plan to begin posting excerpts from in the coming days. For the moment, however, a few links:
On “Academic Evolution,” a very strong argument by Gideon Burton indicating that our insistence that peer review is the thing that keeps academic publishing from turning into vanity publishing may be entirely wrong.
Urbis, a creative review engine for aspiring writers, using networked structures to help them develop and improve their work.
And, perhaps most significantly, if only because of its potential reach, Google Code’s GPeerReview project, which enables a network of colleagues to review and sign one another’s work, and to use statistical analysis to determine the connectedness of that work.
Are there other projects and experiments of which we should be taking note as we plot our peer-to-peer review future?
- Tags
peer to peer review
Comments
Peer Review
by Paul Jay — Loyola University Chicago
February 06, 2009 – 16:06
I’ve been tracking this issue ever since it came up a couple of years ago in a graduate course of mine that focused on the emergence of networked public culture. I’ve tried to keep my students up on the shift to digital publishing in the humanities in general and in my field, English, in particular. I’ve been insisting this is what is happening—journals going fully online, people using free software to create their own journals (like Postcolonial Texts, for example), in sum, the beginning of a tectonic shift in academic publishing that indeed raises all kinds of questions about the tradition of peer review.
There’s an interesting, understandable gap between my own interests and my students’, however. I’m a tenured full professor. I got tenure through the peer review system. I can afford to pull back right now from traditional publishing venues and move my own work online in various forms, but they can’t. For them to get published, get jobs, and a foothold in the profession they’ve got to take the traditional route, which puts pressure on those of us who are senior members of the profession to make a major commitment to transforming how work in the humanities gets vetted and "published." It’s a paradox that the people in the profession most vocal and passionate about digital scholarship are the ones most at risk in the transition period. So it seems to me we need to think about the unevenness of the terrain here and how to negotiate it, as well as insist that senior members of the profession help lead the way when it comes to reinstitutionalizing the dissemination of scholarship in the digital age.
Paul Jay
Loyola University Chicago