open review

As was reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus yesterday, MediaCommons and New York University Press have together been given a $50,000 grant by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in support of a year-long study of peer-to-peer (P2P) review.... read more »

MediaCommons is very proud to be collaborating for a second year with Shakespeare Quarterly on the open review of essays under consideration for publication in their special issue on Shakespeare and Performance. As special issue editor Sarah Werner reports,

The essays cover a range of interesting subjects: a film about a Northern Ireland prison adaptation of Macbeth; Othello in 1903 Japan; Merchant of Venice in post-war West Germany; prophecy as a trope for performance; political theatre as staged by the RSC’s most recent stagings of the Histories; and a review of Ninagawa Yukio’s recent Doctor Faustus.... read more »

The open review experiment that MediaCommons recently conducted in collaboration with Shakespeare Quarterly continues to draw attention. This past week, SQ special issue editor Katherine Rowe and I appeared on Brian Lehrer Live on CUNY TV to discuss the changes that such open processes could potentially produce in the academic setting. (The show isn’t up on the CUNY TV site yet, but it can be downloaded via iTunes.)

Larry Cebula also recently published a very thoughtful post about the SQ open review, entitled “Peer Review 2.0?”. What’s perhaps most interesting about this post is the way that it becomes itself a form of peer review, asking serious questions about our process, its sustainability, and its potential shortcomings. This is precisely the kind of exchange that we’re hoping will help demonstrate the strengths of peer-to-peer review, which produces not just a review of individual scholarly texts but an ongoing self-critical mode of reviewing the reviewers, and reviewing the review process, as well.... read more »

It’s perhaps a tiny bit ironic to be launching this particular new MediaCommons Press project on the Ides of March, but nonetheless: we here at MediaCommons are thrilled to unveil the open review experiment being conducted here on behalf of Shakespeare Quarterly, in conjunction with the journal’s forthcoming special issue, “Shakespeare and New Media.” Special issue guest editor Katherine Rowe has brought together four fantastic articles plus three review essays, each considering the impact of... read more »