library of primitive art

Academic web publishing: my hobbyhorse

With apologies for the delay in posting, here is an interesting post, 'Nature's Open Peer Review Experiment Closed', from RSS4Lib on the failure of a web-based peer-review  mechanism to take hold among Nature magazine's academic readership. It seems that while scholars were willing to post their articles online, their peers were reluctant to use the web forum to post comments. And while a majority of those authors who participated expressed satisfaction with the system, the experiment nevertheless failed to generate enough participation.

RSS4Lib's Ken Varnum wonders in his post,

I'm likewise curious to see if an experiment like this aimed more directly at rising scholars -- those in the midst of, or having recently completed, their doctorates -- might have different results. Or is the tradition of anonymous peer review is so deeply embedded in academia that it trumps these newfangled "web 2.0" tools?

I can see where new academics initially might be reluctant to rock the boat when it comes to promoting alternatives to traditional publishing. And it might be some time before these new academics have sufficient tenure and clout to make changes in the established tenure norms. Would this be a chicken-and-egg question or who flinches first?

Has MLA seen the light?

To follow up on my Quo vadis? post regarding the growth of new media scholarly publication, Jim Retting offers promising ruminations at his Twilight Librarian. Jim sifts through the Modern Language Association's recently released Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion to locate the following recommendation:

4. Departments and institutions should recognize the legitimacy of scholarship produced in new media, whether by individuals or in collaboration, and create procedures for evaluating these forms of scholarship.

Jim recognizes clearly what escapes someone like myself, safely beyond the exigencies of academic tenure and promotion: No faculty member will consider exploiting the new media for publishing without the promise that it will be tangibly acknowledged.

It's too early to pop the cork on the champagne. But Jim makes an excellent point:

It will open new opportunities for collaboration with humanities faculty who turn to librarians and educational technologists for assistance and guidance. Librarians and educational technologists can even form partnerships to help senior faculty learn about the role new media can play in humanities scholarship so that these faculty will be able to make truly informed judgments about their younger colleagues' work.

 

Tracking open-access alternatives to traditional print publishing

A recent post on the blog Material World brought home to me just how quickly open-access publication has arrived, even in our often remote corner of the academic world. The post as it was conceived, illustrated and with scholarly apparatus (including an author's note), is likely to satisfy a research need just as much as any succinct journal article. It would seem that the appearance of the scholarly blog post heralds a certain 'coming of age' of the weblog.