Referees are the core of a journal like T&C, and so a recent front-page New York Times article on online peer review caught the eye. The focus of the piece is Shakespeare Quarterly‘s experiment with an “open-review process” for a special issue on Shakespeare and new media. If it ends up reading like a pretty familiar argument between Progress and Inertia, well, that shouldn’t come as a great surprise.

The Center for History and New Media’s Dan Cohen gets the article’s last word:

To Mr. Cohen, the most pressing intellectual issue in the next decade is this tension between the insular, specialized world of expert scholarship and the open and free-wheeling exchange of information on the Web. “And academia,” he said, “is caught in the middle.”

No one can really argue with that conclusion, and Cohen would be perfectly well aware that that tension seemed like a pressing issue in the last decade, too. A look at Nature‘s peer review debate, or in the direction of MIT Press’s experience, might have contributed a little insight.

David Crotty at the Scholarly Kitchen takes up one thread of the critique of traditional peer review, the burden it supposedly imposes. He ends up touching obliquely on a question that deserves more direct attention, namely, what happens when the novelty wears off—when the submissions aren’t aimed at a special issue on new media, but a nameless midyear number that’s being put together when everyone’s attention could easily be elsewhere. In the end it’s a remarkably selfless role a peer-reviewer plays in the prevailing scheme of things, at least a good one, and you have to wonder how well that would survive experimentation.

Posted August 27th, 2010 by Joe Schultz
Filed under: Humanities | Peer review | Web