peer to peer 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 »

The open review experiment conducted by MediaCommons on behalf of Shakespeare Quarterly continues to make a splash. Previously covered by Jennifer Howard in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the experiment has now led to a front page story in the New York Times looking broadly at the ways that peer review is being opened up through projects such as ours and the Center for History and New Media’s Hacking the Academy.

We’re ecstatic to have gotten this attention. Now we hope to follow through. If you have an account here, you can already create a scholarly profile, publish your own blog, and build a research network. We’re taking proposals for projects that our network members want to develop under our auspices, and we’re also looking for submissions for MediaCommons Press.... read more »

Another response to the Shakespeare Quarterly open review experiment, this one from the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education, thinking through this test of open review as an example of the ways that faculty at small liberal arts colleges are taking the lead in developing new modes of scholarly communication.... read more »

Today’s Chronicle of Higher Education brings us a wonderful article from Jennifer Howard, exploring our recent experiment in open peer review, conducted on behalf of the eminent journal, Shakespeare Quarterly. This review process, which is at the heart of MediaCommons Press’s experiments in new modes of publishing for scholarship, has been so successful for SQ that, as the article notes, the journal’s editors plan to use it again for future special issues.... read more »

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:... read more »