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A Study of Contexts and Practices

Who Else Is Exploring These Issues?

1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 3 In addition to the web forum held alongside Nature’s 2006 open review experiment,[16] much has recently been written about open review practices and related issues. Diane Harley and the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley have published an extensive report on the uses of peer review in the academic publishing and promotion processes; while this report does not focus on open review, it includes an assessment of the workload that traditional peer review practices place on scholars, suggesting that new alternatives could uphold quality control and support better scholarly communication while lightening the burden of peer review under which scholars labor.[17] Other publications have focused more explicitly on open review: Kathleen Fitzpatrick has written about the history and future of peer review, arguing for the development of new open review practices, in Planned Obsolescence.[18] Fitzpatrick has also co-written an article with Katherine Rowe exploring the process and results of the Shakespeare Quarterly open review experiment,[19] which has been covered by the Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times, and University Affairs/Affaires universitaires.[20] More recently, the journal postmedieval published an open web forum to discuss its own experiment with open review,[21] and Jack Dougherty, Kristen Nawrotzki, Charlotte Rochez, and Timothy Burke published a thoughtful conclusion to their online review process for Writing History in the Digital Age.[22] Discussions such as these are not universally laudatory; their frank evaluations of open review processes identify both strengths and challenges in ways intended to provoke careful deliberation by other editorial and collaborative groups considering conducting their own experiments with open review.

2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 2 Additionally, a number of efforts related to open peer review are underway, including projects such as the Open Annotation Collaboration (OAC), an effort to create technical standards and tools to enable the creation of web annotations that can be be shared in multiple contexts,  and the Open Researcher and Contributor ID project (ORCID), which is working to develop a standard for the unique identification of scholarly authors; both projects intersect with work being done by those seeking alternative means of accounting for the impact of scholarly research, such as the altmetrics group.[23] Projects such as Hypothesis seek to bring these kinds of information together, linking open web annotation with reputation management, in ways that might be useful to open review.[24] PressForward will provide tools through which groups of scholars can capture the best work being published across the open web, through a combination of crowd-sourcing and editorial management.[25] Social reading platforms like BookGlutton and SocialBook connect texts and readers in flexible, community-oriented discussions.[26] And sites such as Academia.edu are working to create communities of scholars sharing their work with one another.[27] In addition, our work with open review bears much in common with that of other groups seeking to introduce other forms of openness into scholarly research such as the open access and open data movements. The recommendations that we develop below presuppose that open review projects will learn from and collaborate with projects such as these in the coming years.

  • [16] Nature’s peer review debate <http://www.nature.com/nature/peerreview/debate/index.html>.
  • [17] Diane Harley, et al., “Peer Review in Academic Promotion and Publishing.”
  • [18] Fitzpatrick, Planned Obsolescence, pp. 15-49.
  • [19] Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Katherine Rowe, “Keywords for Open Review,” Logos 21.3-4 (2010): pp 133-41.
  • [20] Jennifer Howard, “Leading Humanities Journal Debuts ‘Open’ Peer Review, and Likes It,” Chronicle of Higher Education (26 July 2010) <http://chronicle.com/article/Leading-Humanities-Journal/123696/>; Patricia Cohen, “Scholars Test Web Alternative to Peer Review,” New York Times (24 August 2010) <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/24/arts/24peer.html>; Rosanna Tamburri, “Opening up peer review,” University Affairs/Affaires universitaires (5 March 2012) <http://www.universityaffairs.ca/opening-up-peer-review.aspx>
  • [21] postmedieval Forum, “Forum II: The State(s) of Review” (March 2012) <http://postmedieval-forum.com/forums/forum-ii-states-of-review/>
  • [22] “Conclusions: What We Learned from Writing History in the Digital Age (Spring 2012),” Writing History in the Digital Age. <http://writinghistory.trincoll.edu/conclusions-2012-spring/>
  • [23] Open Annotation Collaboration <http://www.openannotation.org/>; Open Researcher and Contributor ID <http://about.orcid.org/>; altmetrics <http://altmetrics.org/manifesto/>.
  • [24] Hypothesis <http://hypothes.is/>.
  • [25] PressForward <http://pressforward.org/>.
  • [26] BookGlutton <http://www.bookglutton.com/>; SocialBook <http://livemargin.com>.
  • [27] Academia.edu <http://academia.edu>.
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    Source: https://mcpress.media-commons.org/open-review/contextualizing-questions/who-else-is-exploring-these-issues/