Comments on: One: Peer Review

By: Outline | English 507 (Spring 2012 / Sayers)

Outline | English 507 (Spring 2012 / Sayers) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 17:10:11 +0000

[...] Reading: (1) Fitzpatrick, “Peer Review” (from draft version of Planned Obsolescence), (2) Nowviskie, “Why, Oh Why, CC-BY,” and [...]

By: Richard E. Miller

Richard E. Miller — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 16:39:47 +0000

I don’t think the reference to Duncan works. Her death was quick and violent; by some accounts she was nearly decapitated. I don’t think peer review has the power to act in this way on innovations in online publishing. If you cut the reference, choking and the axle remain a problem.

By: Jack Dougherty, “Storytelling and Civil Rights: From Dissertation to Book to Web-book” « How Historians Research, Write & Publish

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 20:01:16 +0000

[...] media means that the only working system is publish-then-filter” (Here Comes Everybody 98). . . [Read this Fitzpatrick (2009) passage in context] [...]

By: Steve Brier

Steve Brier — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 18:25:37 +0000

As much as I respect Bob Stein, the definitive comment on Wikipedia and history remains my departed comrade Roy Rosenzweig's brilliant intervention on the subject: "Can History Be Open Source? Wikipedia and the Future of the Past," http://chnm.gmu.edu/essays-on-history-new-media/essays/?essayid=42

By: George Carr

George Carr — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 21:40:41 +0000

Agreeing with previous posters, I think this paragraph contains the kernel of a much more complex argument, about the structure of academic credibility and authority, and its democratic (and anti-democratic) genesis. Non-academic writers and thinkers apply a wide variety of measures of credibility to the results of academic activity, and only some of them involve academic values. (I’m thinking as examples here of intelligent-design folks who discredit academic work on genetics/evolution because it’s largely based on computer modeling, or public-health activists who discredit studies on alcohol/tobacco/marijuana use because they’re largely funded by the industry.) I know you’re focusing this work on an intra-academic audience, people who already live and work in the sandbox of academic publishing, but you might think about how to give your readers some guidance on the topic of academic credibility and authority. As a lawyer who often presents scientific evidence to a jury of people who barely finished high school, the issue of establishing academia’s credibility, especially in the softer humanities fields, is very interesting.

By: Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Kathleen Fitzpatrick — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 16:14:49 +0000

I’ll have to look for that piece, Nick; it seems exactly à propos. (There’s a bit later on in a footnote about peer review producing rather than preventing the Vioxx/Celebra heart attack scandals; this may be an even better example.)

By: Nick Mirzoeff

Nick Mirzoeff — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:29:16 +0000

I’m reading this in the wake of the UEA climate centre scandal: the Guardian ran a long piece showing that peer review–which has been held up as a gold standard in refereeing climate change–was being crassly manipulated in certain cases, in ways that are all too familiar. So rather than deal with ways to negotiate climate change, the fetish with peer review has caused significant damage. In a BBC poll 35% of people in the UK think that climate change is made up or exaggerated or not cause by human action. In the US it’s over 40%. This is the price of academic arrogance in the age of networked information and it’s going to be steep.

By: Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Kathleen Fitzpatrick — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 02:46:55 +0000

Absolutely — a good reminder, Mike. Thanks!

By: michaelroy

michaelroy — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 03:53:29 +0000

I wonder if it is worth clarifying what you mean by the phrase ‘our institutions’; I suspect that you don’t mean just the individual colleges and universities that employ us, but also professional associations (aka MLA) and more amorphous things like ‘the institution of higher ed’; to repeat myself, it is probably worth somehow or another clarifying this, since some of the conservatism that afflicts us is a by-product of how hard it is for any individual school to stray very far from what the rest of the pack is doing.

By: Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Kathleen Fitzpatrick — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 22:26:18 +0000

Hi, Katherine. The notes are also contained in copy-and-paste-able (and commentable) format at the end of the document. But thanks for the comment — I think you may be right. I need to ponder what the key point is here…

By: Katherine Rowe

Katherine Rowe — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 22:06:56 +0000

I’d like to second that comment and suggest moving what seems to me the key conclusion out of footnote 1.8 and into the body of the text. (I’m assuming, Kathleen, that you can make changes before this goes to hard covers?)

The key idea comes at the end of the sentence: “thus reminding scholars that our very professional existences…may be dependent on…the inclusion of a broader public…such that they understand the value of academic ways of knowing.”

(This platform won’t allow cutting and pasting text from a footnote, btw — annoying)

By: Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Kathleen Fitzpatrick — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 20:02:14 +0000

Absolutely, Maria — it’s a key part of what’s to come, and an enormous question that contemporary scholarship has to wrestle with as we think about what constitutes “authority” in the digital…

By: Maria Bustillos

Maria Bustillos — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 22:32:47 +0000

The other revolution produced by the web (aside from radical changes in content distribution) is the rise of the ‘outsider’–from citizen journalists on dKos, a number of whom (Greenwald, Ana Marie Cox) have vaulted into the highest ranks of the tradmed, to the mad obsessives of Wikipedia, who have brought valuable knowledge to the attention of an interested public way before we could have gotten to know of it otherwise (especially true in the case of living notables and new fields of study.)

The big questions here might really be, who now qualifies as a ‘peer’?? And what now qualifies as “authorization”?

I imagine you’ll be getting into this later, but I didn’t want to forget to comment on that; as a civilian who is interested in scholarly matters, this question is of particular interest.

By: David Parry

David Parry — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 18:12:18 +0000

I really like the repetition of the word irrelevance here, the sounding of it against the Cathy Davidson epigraph. For me this is one of the strongest arguments that can be made. Be online, engage public knowledge where it exists and is produced, or be irrelevant. The anti-intellectualism that many in the academy somewhat correctly observe to be a feature of American culture, is also a two way street, a anti-public discourse on the part of those within the academy. This seems to me the crux (or one of) your point, the network lets us expand and rethink what a peer is.