Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

9.9.10 | Publish or perish is the dictate of academia. Getting published in an academic journal is what makes or breaks a career, yet researchers regularly must wait eight, even 10 months to hear a reply from the editors—often a rejection. The hang-up is the tried and true method of review: volunteer peer reviewers.

Some have been wondering, can the web offer better way? Can journals apply a form of crowd-sourcing to peer review?

The New York Times’ Patricia Cohen writes: “Today a small vanguard of digitally adept scholars is rethinking how knowledge is understood and judged by inviting online readers to comment on books in progress compiling journals from blog posts and sometimes successfully petitioning their universities to grant promotions and tenure on the basis of non-peer-reviewed projects.”

The journal Shakespeare Quarterly recently experimented with a more open online review process. The journal posted essays online that had not yet been accepted along with comments by a core group of experts, and it invited the public to comment. The results were promising.

“In the end 41 people made more than 350 comments, many of which elicited responses from the authors,” writes Cohen. “The revised essays were then reviewed by the quarterly’s editors, who made the final decision to include them in the printed journal, due out Sept. 17.”

The Times reports that other, more science-based fields have also had recent successes with an open, web-based review model, including sharing unpublished working papers and using online tools to evaluate mathematical proofs.

Scholars are cautious and say each type of review has benefits and drawbacks.

The web-based review approach is troubling to some who argue that only those who are truly expert in a field are qualified to evaluate a work’s originality and intellectual merit.

But others say digital media offers a significant opportunity to correct failings of the past system by generating discussion, improving works in progress, and sharing new research in a timelier manner.

“Serious scholars are asking whether the institutions of the academy — as they have existed for decades, even centuries — aren’t becoming obsolete,” Dan Cohen, director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, told the Times.

You can read the full story here.

Plus: Cathy Davidson, HASTAC co-founder, continues the discussion on her blog with “Should Blogs Count for Tenure and Promotion?”

Davidson will facilitate a workshop at Duke University later this week on Peer-to-Peer Pedagogy. The workshop will explore how digital technologies can encourage new collaborative teaching and learning models, such as crowd-sourced grading, peer learning, and the development of online-to-offline knowledge communities. Look for more on coverage on Spotlight in the coming weeks.