Peer reviewed journals in the humanities are experimenting with Web tools to re-engineer the process of deciding what is and isn’t scholarship. The traditional peer review process developed in a particular technological and social environment as a way to screen new research for quality and draw the borderline between amateurs and specialized experts. Of course it is prone to “[c]lubby exclusiveness, sloppy editing and fraud…”, and it is slow. But up to now it has been the essential gatekeeper and is crucial in how universities make tenure decisions.
Open review has been experimented with for some time already in economics and science.
Money quotes:
“What we’re experiencing now is the most important transformation in our reading and writing tools since the invention of movable type,” said Katherine Rowe, a Renaissance specialist and media historian at Bryn Mawr College. “The way scholarly exchange is moving is radical, and we need to think about what it means for our fields.”…
“Serious scholars are asking whether the institutions of the academy — as they have existed for decades, even centuries — aren’t becoming obsolete”…
“The traditional process is not so much a gold standard but an effective accommodation to the needs of the field. It represents a settlement for a particular moment, not a perfect ideal.”
This would represent a huge change. It’s another example of how Internet technology disrupts every entrenched, privileged group in society.
Even “liberals” in academia are terrified of this one. I have had several heated discussions about this in the past few years. A system that accommodated a particular time, social order, and technological culture has come to be accepted as nature, especially by the people that it privileges. Rethinking it seems like a good idea to me.
What do you think? If you are opposed to Open Review, can you explain why Peer Review is better, given the availability of much more powerful tools for collaboration and discussion?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/arts/24peer.html
The photo is from an exhibit of early Italian printed books at the John Hay Library at Brown University, Providence, RI.
When it comes to open review, how is it open? What does open mean and how/who is facilitating the review?
It’s exciting how the internet opens up many ways to communicate and collaborate and discuss. I have had the opportunity to go through higher education without internet and with it. I recently received my M.Ed in Learning, Media and Technology from UMASS and I’d say it’s all quite a mixed bag.
It’s a challenge to have productive discussions whether we’re speaking face to face or following a thread or meeting up with people virtually. So, even if we have the tools to change how we’ve done something in the past, we still might not know how to use those tools effectively.
You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. As groups accept and learn to work with (and around) the new open model, more will be pressured to come aboard. Maybe they just need a good social media expert to help them develop new systems and better protocols for screening.
I think the point is not that we won’t need moderation and quality control, but that the existing models are built for obsolete technology and optimized for social structures that we don’t necessarily want to encourage.
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There will definitely be new roles to play in the emerging information infrastructure. It’s important that they are not simply brain dead adaptations of obsolete Functions, many of which serve any good purpose any longer.
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