Peer Review, Judgment, and Reading

Abstract

originally invited me to contribute to this cluster of essays on the evaluation of digital scholarship for tenure and promotion, I was a faculty member. I'd just undergone a successful review for promotion to full professor on the basis of an all-digital dossier, and Laura and Susan hoped that I'd write about some of the benefits that I enjoyed and challenges that I faced in the process.In the meantime, I have moved into a new role, director of scholarly communication for the MLA, whose charge is to assist the organization and its members in thinking through the ways that new digital publishing paradigms and platforms are changing scholars' work today. I've written extensively about these changes in my forthcoming book, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, in which I focus specifically on the degree to which scholars, reviewers, and administrators will all need to shift their perspectives and expectations as digital texts and objects become increasingly central to scholarly communication.These transformations will not come easily. In my own promotion review, despite the fact that I was a scholar whose work took new digital modes of communication as its explicit focus, questions were raised about the relative status of online and print publications. Among these questions, not surprisingly, was the status of my digital work with respect to peer review. New York University Press had submitted my book manuscriptThe author is director of scholarly communication at the MLA.

Does Tenure Matter? Factors Influencing Faculty Contributions to Institutional Repositories

“…The MLA (2002; issued recommendations to departments of language and literature to discuss the dramatic changes in scholarly communication and to develop guidelines for assessing electronic publications and web archives, such as IRs. In addition, ideas for different methods of evaluating scholarly research are occurring in the humanities including post-publication review in history (Townsend, 2010) and open review in languages and literature (Fitzpatrick, 2011). These methods involve disseminating a creative work for critical feedback from experts in the field through blogs or other social media rather than through traditional processes.…”

Open Science in the Humanities, or: Open Humanities?

“…Fitzpatrick argues in a similar manner, demanding more progress in the practice and discourse on open peer review [47,48]. However, her approach is profoundly shaped by notions of the digital and digital humanities.…”

“…Kuhn and Hagenhoff analyse requirements of digital monograph publishing and conclude with a decisively progressive, open potential for an outdated publishing model [45]. Fitzpatrick contributes comprehensive discussions of inadequate scholarly communication practices for which openness is offered as the best way forward [46][47][48]. Cohen discusses digital processes as a possible solution to one of the fundamental problems scholarly communication in the humanities exhibit: the social contract that is actualised by traditional, institutional publishing [49].…”

A multi-disciplinary perspective on emergent and future innovations in peer review

“…However, as history shows, such a process is non-traditional but nonetheless currently held in high regard. Practices such as self-publishing and predatory or deceptive publishing cast a shadow of doubt on the validity of research posted openly online that follow these models, including those with traditional scholarly imprints ( Fitzpatrick, 2011a; Tennant et al , 2016). The inertia hindering widespread adoption of new models of peer review can be ascribed to what is often termed “cultural inertia”, and affects many aspects of scholarly research.…”

“…In 2006, the Modern Languages Association released a statement on the peer review and evaluation of new forms of scholarship, insisting that they “be assessed with the same rigor used to judge scholarly quality in print media” ( Stanton et al , 2007). Fitzpatrick (2011a) considered the idea of an objective evaluation of non-text products in the humanities, as well as the challenges faced during evaluation of a digital product that may have much more to review than a traditional text product, including community engagement and sustainability practices. To work with these non-text products, humanities scholars have used multiple methods of peer review and embraced OPR in order to adapt to the increased creation of non-text, multimedia scholarly products, and to integrate these products into the scholarly record and review process ( Anderson & McPherson, 2011).…”