Feb 27, 2012 - Professional orga- nizations, such as the Conference on Composition and Communication and the Modern Language Association, also include ...
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Berkeley: Center for Studies in Higher Education, U of California, Berkeley, 2011. Web. 27 Dec. 2011. Purdue University, Office of the Provost. “West Lafayette Campus Promotion and Tenure Policy.” 23 Sept. 2011. Web. 24 Dec. 2011.
Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion. “Report of the MLA Task Force on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion.” New York: MLA, 2007. Print. York College of Pennsylvania. “Faculty Manual.” Internal document. York: York College of Pennsylvania, 2009.
Irwin Weiser Irwin Weiser is the Justin S. Morrill Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and professor of English at Purdue University. Prior to his appointment as dean, he served as head of the Department of English. His research and teaching concentrate on contemporary composition theory, composition research methods, and writing assessment. His most recent publications include three collections of essays on writing program administration coedited with Shirley K Rose. Weiser has been a member of the Executive Committee of the Conference on College Composition and Communication and the Executive Board of the National Council of Writing Program Administrators. He has led workshops for new department heads and chairs for the Association of Departments of English and for new writing program administrators for the National Council of Writing Program Administrators. He is currently a member of the editorial board of CCC.
Methodologies of Peer and Editorial Review: Changing Practices Cynthia L. Selfe Ohio State University Gail E. Hawisher University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign In this article, we identify some of the major changes in peer review methodologies and procedures in recent years that have characterized the field of English studies more generally and rhetoric and composition/writing studies1 and computers and composition more specifically. Our goal is to suggest some of the modifications in the disciplining nature of peer review (Biagioli) that still warrant further exploration now that many journals and presses in rhetoric
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and composition have moved into digital environments. In defining peer review, following the lead of Kathleen Fitzpatrick in Planned Obsolescence, we refer to the assessment of scholarly work by referees within a given field, usually in addition to the editor of a journal or press. In an effort to extend the value of this article, we have asked editors representing three presses that focus on online publication (WAC Clearinghouse, Parlor Press, Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press) and four online journals (Kairos, CCC Online, Computers and Composition Online, Across the Disciplines) to contribute their insights, and we are grateful for their generosity in doing so.
In 1999, when Elsevier took over the publication of Computers and Composition, a journal we edited into 2011, the journal’s peer review practices were fairly typical of print journals in composition studies. As editors of the journal, we asked authors to mail us five paper or “hard” copies of their submission, and we read the pieces and sought two or three area specialists from the Computers and Composition editorial board to serve as reviewers and provide us with their commentary and recommendations for the submissions. Authors were asked to remove identifying information from submitted articles and were given at least two reviewers’ sets of comments after the review process and a letter from the editors explaining the decision (decline, revise and resubmit, accept with revisions, accept). The referees were also invited to make suggestions for revision if the manuscript seemed promising for publication in Computers and Composition. Our goal was to respond to submitting authors with the reviewers’ comments within three months of the initial submission. When authors The more anonymous the process was, so to speak, were informed of our final decision the more value departments of English and other with regard to the manuscript they academicunits often accorded the published articles. submitted, the reviewers remained anonymous. Referees were asked to send their comments directly to the journal editors and generally corresponded with us via email or more traditional postal services in the early years of the journal. Prepublication peer review along the lines we have sketched was often an important component for consideration during the tenure and promotion process at authors’ institutions as documented through our correspondence with authors and from the many requests generated by tenure and promotion committees. The more anonymous the process was, so to speak, the more value departments of English and other academic units often accorded the published
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articles. In other words, the more objective the reviews seemed in the eyes of the academy, the more certain were tenure and promotion committees that an accepted article represented scholarship that was independently vetted by the scholarly community and thus appropriate for publication. In terms of prepublication review, scholars often circulated their work in advance of publication and tested their formulations of arguments in public venues such as professional conferences before they submitted articles for review by the journal. In terms of postpublication review, tenure and promotion committees often consulted published responses to articles, gauged their reach and importance by counts of citation indices, or asked about the refereeing and acceptance practices of the journal. These processes are still in place today across the field but certainly seem to be changing as digital communication technologies become ubiquitous within the publishing community: referees often choose to sign their reviews and offer assistance to authors through the exchanges of emails and open discussion of the ways in which manuscripts might be improved. As we write today, at the end of 2011, we find ourselves editing still and still seeking peer reviews. Some aspects of this process have changed, but certainly not all. As the founding editors of Computers and Composition Digital Press (CCDP), an imprint of Utah State University Press, we have never received a paper copy of the book-weight electronic projects that we now publish, nor will any referees. Many of the submissions are born in digital environments and live fully online in part because the mediated content resists print manuscripts that consist only of alphabetic text. Although we still seek the opinions of expert reviewers from CCDP’s international editorial board and beyond, we initially do not tell authors who will review their projects. We note quickly, however, that a common practice is to ask reviewers to continue working with the authors/designers after the first review and through subsequent revisions of a project. If referees agree, we let authors know who reviewed their projects and pass along their reviews intact with an editorial letter that summarizes our take on the referees’ opinions, not so different from our practices with the almost thirty-year-old print journal Computers and Composition. Further, given that the identity of authors is almost impossible to remove entirely from electronic projects (e.g., authors’ images often appear in video materials, their voices are recognizable in audio materials, their identities are often revealed in encoded information attached to files), referees now are aware of the identities of project authors.
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Often, too, the process of revising and editing mediated projects takes longer and is more involved than for print manuscripts. Because we are a native digital press, the process of reviewing such projects takes special expertise—not only a knowledge of the subject matter but also an understanding of related design issues and standards, familiarity with technical considerations and options, and an awareness of accessibility requirements and approaches (Purdy and Walker). In our more recent experiences with CCDP, tenure and promotion committees continue to value preproduction peer review, although they have come to understand the limitations and the constraints of supposedly anonymous reviews in a digital age, and many are now dealing with manuscripts that have received extensive prepublication review by colleagues online. In our experience, and as Irwin Weiser here suggests, many department chairs and many of the colleagues serving on such committees continue to understand reviews as referencing colleagues’ best judgments about the scholarly worth of a project. Departmental practices continue to value peer review as a key factor in tenure and promotion decisions although many departments, including our own at Ohio State University and the University of Illinois, are somewhat less concerned about whether a piece of scholarship appears online or in print— especially now that university presses such as the University of Michigan publish digital work and that electronic book-weight projects and collections of electronic materials are beginning to be used by prestigious universities as the centerpiece of recent tenure and promotion decisions. Professional organizations, such as the Conference on Composition and Communication and the Modern Language Association, also include in their published materials guidelines for tenure and promotion cases that include digital scholarship. As the world of publishing transforms itself, prepublication review has changed form as has postpublication review; digital books now may change and morph with readers’ attached commentary or blogs even after the manuscripts are published. We discuss both phenomena later in this article.
Historical Perspectives on Peer Review The history of peer review in academic journals and presses as a scholarly practice stretches back far beyond the history of rhetoric and composition/ writing studies or contemporary English studies. Its genealogy is generally traced to scientific journals and presses. Michael Mabe, for example, dates the earliest peer review system to Henry Oldenburg, who created the first scientific journal in 1665 when he became a member of the Royale Society of London.
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The goal of this system, Mabe contends, was to acknowledge and establish the precedence of scientific discoveries and ensure the proper credit of results to the individuals who first identified them. In contrast, Kathleen Fitzpatrick dates the history of formal peer review in scientific journals to either 1731 and the Royale Society of Edinburgh, or to 1752 and the Royale Society of London, which created a “Committee on Papers” for conducting reviews of items to publish in its nearly one-hundred-year-old journal, Philosophical Transactions. And Mario Biagioli traces the history of peer review to the Royale Society of London in 1662 or the Académie Royale des Sciences of Paris in 1699, both of which, he notes, as some of the first scientific academies, were allowed to conduct their own review rather than submit to state licensing and censorship systems. In describing this mechanism of the system, Biagioli quotes Birch’s History of the Royale Society of London from 1756 and reprinted in 1968: “No book be printed by order of the council, which hath not been perused and considered by two of the council, who shall report, that such book contains nothing but what is suitable to the design and work of the society” (Birch 347). The difference between the state’s concerns for risk management and those of the scientific academies, Biagioli explains, was that while state censors were occupied in their review with treason and heresy, respectively—whether the “claims put forward in a manuscript . . . offended the state or the church” (19)—the scientific societies cared about “the robustness and originality of the claims, not just their political orthodoxy, because the publication of weak, old, dogmatic, or fraudulent claims would have reflected negatively on the institution itself and may have endangered royal support” (19). In a gradual process, then, One important characteristicinfluencingthe systemfor as Fitzpatrick notes, scientific more formalized peer review proved to be the steady societies absorbed an altered growth of specialized journals and the increasingnum- version of the state’s disciplining ber of academicpresses that extended their output and responsibilities, making way for a expanded into international markets. transition from “state censorship to self-policing,” while at the same time “creating, in the Foucauldian sense, a disciplinary technology” (11) that laid the early groundwork for a related system of peer review in later academic disciplines. The more contemporary version of peer review that we recognize today, Fitzpatrick notes, came about in the middle of the nineteenth century when journals such as Science and the Journal of the American Medical Association began to use outside readers to assess manuscripts. It was at that point, Biagioli contends, when peer review achieved the “degree zero” (12) of
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disciplining effect, because academic reviewers became both the subject and object of the assessment. One important characteristic influencing the system for more formalized peer review proved to be the steady growth of specialized journals and the increasing number of academic presses that extended their output and expanded into international markets (Abbott). Within the context of this expansion, review became not only more formalized but also more time consuming. As Abbott notes, in the 1970s the average scholar in the humanities and social sciences was “submitting one paper a year and reviewing three others” (“Publication” 21). Book publishing, dating from the rise of academic presses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, followed a similar trend. By the 1960s, for Emergingfromthis period, duringwhich more example, “roughly one in six academics and more journals and presses competed for was reading at least one full book MS each what they considered the best manuscripts, was per year” (21). Further, Abbott notes that a hierarchy of prestige that has continued to because reviewing for both journals and exert pressure on scholars and departments. books was “concentrated at the top of the prestige hierarchy” (20–21),2 these statistics were much higher for leading scholars, a practice that continues today with senior scholars often reviewing fifteen to twenty articles per year, along with three or more book manuscripts.3 Emerging from this period, during which more and more journals and presses competed for what they considered the best manuscripts, was a hierarchy of prestige that has continued to exert pressure on scholars and departments. As the numbers of journals and presses increased, scholars and departments became accustomed to seeing work placed in what became known as top-tier journals and presses that competed with each other for manuscripts. Now, despite the fact that university academic presses are changing dramatically at a rapid rate (Task Force; Jones),4 and prestigious print journals are fighting decreasing page limits and increasing production costs, this hierarchy continues to exert power, as Harley and Acord argue: Senior scholars expect young scholars to meet the same levels of peer review and certification that they faced. Consequently, most young scholars do not risk publishing in outlets that lack prestige; they follow the lead of their mentors and place enormous value on outlets with established reputations. Along with the committees that make hiring and promotion decisions, these young scholars are therefore major actors in the Academy’s inability to break the cycle of publication overproduction. (3)
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Cultural practices for peer review and the recognition accorded various journals because of these practices—often resulting in dwindling numbers of entering scholars—encourages such scholars and editors to adhere to and support the same journal conventions through which their mentors and advisers earned their prestigious academic credentials. Today, as senior scholars ourselves, we still find it difficult, for example, to Even as changes to the methodology of peer review convince colleagues that statistics systems have been given increasingattention, the about the online circulation of an values of conventional peer review retain adherents. article—for instance, the fact that an article has been downloaded and read in 107 different countries around the globe—mean every bit as much when according importance to the article as does the more traditional measure of a journal’s acceptance rate.
The Benefits and Shortcomings of Conventional Peer Review Even as changes to the methodology of peer review systems have been given increasing attention, the values of conventional peer review retain adherents. Several scholars, Harley and Acord among them, present some thinking about peer review’s benefits that we briefly summarize here:
• Peer-reviewed publication protects scholars’ intellectual work. • Publishers of journals and the libraries that subscribe to the journals preserve intellectual work that has been so reviewed and published.
• The peer review process, notably the doubly anonymous review,5 can improve published work through requiring revisions and citation checks.
• Peer review helps separate worthy research and scholarship from that which is poorly conceived and conducted (Harley, Earl-Novell, et al.; Harley, Accord, et al.; Friedlander; Nichols et al.).
• Many peer-reviewed journals disseminate scholarly reviews of research, bibliographies, and other related material that help contribute to the formation of a field. Perhaps the most debated aspect of peer review is anonymity. For the purposes of this article, and working, in part, from definitions in a 2008 report sponsored by the Publishing Research Consortium, Peer Review in Scholarly Journals, we use, as mentioned above, the term doubly anonymous review to refer
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to a prepublication system in which authors’ identities are kept from reviewers and reviewers’ identities are concealed from authors. In a cross-disciplinary survey funded by the Publishing Research Consortium and completed by more than three thousand journal editors and authors who had published within the previous twenty-four months, the doubly anonymous approach was considered effective because it served to keep reviewers from being swayed by “previous notions of the author’s work (either positive or negative), eliminated bias against authors from authors in developing regions of the world trying to publish their work in high-impact-factor journals, and helped avoid bias against women scholars” (19). Similarly, the term reviewer anonymous is used to refer to prepublication approaches in which the identity of reviewers is kept from authors but authors’ names are known to reviewers. In the same Publishing Research Consortium survey, respondents thought this approach effective because it allowed referees to “check that the authors haven’t published the work previously,” consider “other work by the same author(s) in their assessment,” and “assess the degree of [authors’] previous expertise” (18). Those who oppose these more conventional forms of anonymous peer review, however, such as Stephen Ceci and Douglas Peters, cite “charges of editorial capriciousness, poor inter-referee reliability, and outright bias against unknown authors and those affiliated with low-prestige institutions” (1491). As Ceci and Peters contend, there has been a goodly amount of criticism directed at systems of peer review including “fairness and reliability” (1491). Anonymous systems, they further argue, are “costly public relations gimmick[s]” (1492). Authors use anonymity in such systems to convince reviewers that “they have a more impressive publication history” (1492) than they rightfully possess, and anonymous-review approaches deprive “reviewers of information they need about an author’s track record” (1492).
Additional Problems with Prepublication Peer Review Dissatisfaction with peer review systems is not limited to issues of anonymity, however. Harley and Acord, among others, cite several areas of concern, which we summarize below:
• The process of peer review slows the time to publication in many fields with manuscripts often being submitted to a variety of journals before finally being published.
• The process of peer review can hinder both recognition to the author and the academic community’s use of the scholarly work.
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• Peer review can be a conservative force across the disciplines with prominent gatekeepers often participating as reviewers.
• Finding qualified scholars to evaluate new work from multidisciplinary areas of study can pose considerable challenges (Lee).
• It is often difficult to locate enough reviewers for journal submissions even in established fields and areas of study.
• New initiatives are needed to establish standards and criteria for evaluating innovative scholarly products that are difficult for peer reviewing, for instance, websites and creation of other new types of scholarly resources. As Fytton Rowland points out, however, while scholars and editors acknowledge that peer review is vulnerable to abuses and challenges, the majority of editors and scholars across disciplines continue to consider these shortcomings unusual and believe some form of anonymous peer review to be “the ‘least worst’ option available for ensuring integrity in research work and maintaining the dependable quality of the canonical record of scholarship” (3).
Experiments with Open Peer Review and Postpublication Review Because many aspects of anonymous peer review systems have been criticized, open peer review projects have been posed with increasing frequency in recent years. Open peer review projects, as Harley and Acord note, “extend and supplement conventional peer-review Because many aspects of anonymous peer review systems procedures” using social media have been criticized, open peer review projects have been and networking approaches posed with increasingfrequency in recent years. that invite “participative readergenerated” responses (45). In such systems, peer review is “crowdsourced” on the Internet and performed by “readers, friends, colleagues, and sometimes editor-invited reviewers, rather than exclusively organized or selected by editors” (45). The resulting reviews are made available to the public, often before the final publication of the text. This notion of crowdsourcing or, in essence, community response in the form of open peer review lends itself to the rapid dissemination of scholarship on the Internet. Perhaps the most well-known example of open peer review in the humanities involves Shakespeare Quarterly, which experimented with a hybrid open
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reviewing system in 2010, hosted by MediaCommonsPress. As Katherine Rowe, the guest editor directing the trial, described the process: [A]n expert reviewer (the guest editor) joined the initial screening of submissions. Authors whose essays passed that screening were offered a choice of the traditional blind review process or open vetting online, followed by a period of revision. For those essays vetted through the open process, the final decision would be based on the revised versions. Whether or not an author chose the open review, the final decision to accept or reject an essay rested with the editor, as it normally does at SQ. (v)
Patricia Cohen noted in her description of the experiment, which ran from March 10 to May 5, 2010, “Forty-one participants (including the submitters, journal editor, and guest editor) posted more than 350 comments, making for a lively exchange. The journal’s open-review pages on MediaCommons were accessed over 9,500 times” (1). Although the trial, as Rowe observed, clearly placed higher “demands on reviewers to perform substantive but collegial critiques in a public arena” than did more conventional review processes and was judged more “labor intensive,” it also opened opportunities for “substantive exchanges between authors and reviewers, foregrounded key issues for Shakespeareans working in new media” and made it easy to “distinguish shared concerns from the idiosyncratic reactions of a single scholar” (vii). A second experiment with open peer review, Katherine Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolescence, was also hosted by MediaCommons while it underwent open review by a public audience. Fitzpatrick revised the text with the help of the public commentary added to the work and attached to each numbered paragraph and, in a second stage, submitted the manuscript to New York University Press, which then sent it out for anonymous review before accepting it for publication in print form. Planned Obsolescence represents not only an experiment in open access publishing but also a book-length project about the new technologies of composing and publishing that destabilize the concept of printed books and change the book logic that continues to shape electronicpublishing systems. This project tackles not only the concepts of author and reader but also the systems of peer review, publishing, libraries, preservation, and repositories with far-reaching intellectual and material effects for academic authors as well as public intellectuals. As Fitzpatrick notes in her interview with Lisa Klarr, [C]hanging the book’s environment—transforming it from a static form to a dynamic one, from a format that has clear borders to one in which those borders
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become a whole lot fuzzier, from a medium that has come to be associated with solitary, silent consumption to one that is increasingly collective and discussionoriented—will mean changing our assumptions about how reading and writing function. (Klarr)
One tension at the center of Fitzpatrick’s argument has to do with the huge amount of labor expended that always attends peer review and the general lack of professional recognition for this labor in systems of tenure review. Fitzpatrick’s experiment with Planned Obsolescence does not eliminate this labor, and indeed some critics note that open-access peer review efforts like this one may significantly increase the amount of unpaid labor because it involves large cadres of volunteers involved in reviewing, commenting, and blogging about projects (Klarr). In light of the labor-intensive changes, she recommends the following in Planned Obsolescence: establishing peer-to-peer, crowdsourced, gift-economy networks of reviewing; developing new open-review publishing platforms that permit older versions of scholarly work to appear alongside the current version; moving toward “interactive, multi-modal,6 historically thick texts” that encourage people to “comment on the work, to tag it, mash it, and remix it” (Klarr); and creating new forms of database-driven scholarship. Fitzpatrick also suggests changes in the existing systems that shape this labor. Among these changes are repositioning electronic publishing as a core service of universities that tend to understand their mission as publishing faculty research; developing publishing consortia that are similar to library collectionsharing cooperatives; getting university presses (and libraries) to rethink their business models (to focus on services rather than paper products), their stance toward copyright (in light of the circulation and remixing of texts in digital environments), and their intellectual mission through the university (to showcase and circulate faculty research and scholarship); encouraging departments to recognize peer reviewing as a scholarly contribution that should be recorded on faculty curriculum vitae and recognized at tenure and promotion time; and encouraging scholars to uncouple their historically inflected understandings of authorship with ownership and a system of circulation based on scarcity and control. These suggestions, as Mary Waltham and others note, however, do not fully address concerns about open peer review, which, as Harley and Acord argue, must contend with the material conditions of the academy and scholarly publishing as it now exists. One of the challenges that open peer review approaches must address is changing the contemporary economies of attention
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within the academy that limit scholars’ time for volunteer efforts of reviewing (Rowland 6), a situation that already makes it difficult to recruit competent reviewers;7 scholars also fear that open peer reviewing will expand the risk of their being “scooped” (Harley, Acord, et al. 283). Also coming into play are the tradition of understanding peer reviewing as service in scholars’ tenure and promotion dossiers and, thus, a lack of recognition of such activities as a type of scholarly contribution (Harley, Acord, et al.) and, perhaps most importantly, scholars’ trepidation about making their review comments public and thus risking “‘getting it wrong’. . . and having ‘wrong’ conclusions become part of the permanent record” (47). As the report Peer Review in Scholarly Journals (Publishing Research Consortium) notes: “Proponents of open peer review will Related to open peer review in some contexts, is have to overcome the fact that 49% postpublication peer review, where the impact and of reviewers say that publishing their reach of scholarly texts are assessed after they are signed report would make them less published, sometimes on an ongoingbasis. likely to review for a journal and that a similar proportion, 47%, would see disclosure of their name to the author as a disincentive” (45). That such concerns continue to circulate despite successful experiments in open peer review becomes evident when scholars such as Stevan Harnard note that while “peer commentary is a superb supplement to peer review,” it has yet to be proven as an wholly appropriate “substitute for it” (291). Related to open peer review in some contexts, is postpublication peer review, where the impact and reach of scholarly texts are assessed after they are published, sometimes on an ongoing basis. Certain forms of postpublication peer review have a long history in connection to humanities publication efforts. Letters to the editor and book reviews, for example, have served to indicate the impact, reach, and effectiveness of published works for centuries and, certainly, figure centrally in contemporary tenure and promotion cases alongside the reviews of external scholars looking at a colleague’s record of publication (Harley and Acord 10). In contemporary contexts, however, reviewers’ comments from blogs and bibliometric data have been added as sources of postpublication review, inspiring considerable controversy. Although blog commentary and reviews, for example, have been characterized as “unfiltered” and “decentralized” commentary by “self appointed critics” (Cross 49) who do not always have credentials of serious scholars, bibliometric measures of a scholar’s impact—generally based on algorithms that take citation and journal status into account—have been criticized as being too centralized in the
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hands of large aggregators like Thomson Reuters, which may fail to account for disciplinary nuances. Citation analysis, for instance, has been used for decades despite shortcomings of the Humanities Citation Index and its less-than-complete coverage of journals in a field such as rhetoric and composition/writing studies or emerging fields such as digital media composing. According to Jo Cross, when Eugene Garfield more than forty years ago introduced the notion of impact factor as a means of measuring the influence of a particular journal article by counting the numbers of citations other articles have made to it, this metric became all important. Currently, Thomson Reuters calculates and publishes these figures in Journal Citation Reports (JCR), which continues the tradition of uneven coverage across disciplinary fields, especially in emerging and nonmainstream arenas and in the humanities. For example, fewer than 5 percent of arts and humanities journals are covered by the JCR. In comparison, more than 46 percent of journals in behavioral sciences are covered (Cross). Similarly, the current list of publications in Thomson’s arts and humanities list contains College English, College Composition and Communication, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Rhetoric Review, and Rhetorica, but not ATD: Across the Disciplines, Computers and Composition, Computers and Composition Online, Kairos, CCC Online, Technical Communication Quarterly, or the Journal of Business and Technical Communication (Source Publication List), obviously considering some of these journals as publishers In addition, the level of impact of an article or of scholarship outside the humanities. an author’s work, especially in the humanities, As scholars and editors in rhetoric and may take time to be reflected in standard metrics composition/writing studies, however, unlike articles in the sciences, which have immedi- we would argue that all of these jourate currency. As a result, the impact of humanities’ nals figure centrally within the field. articles can be missed by bibliometrictools. Further, we are concerned that at least four of the omitted journals are online publications, a situation that could affect the impact factor assigned to articles published by scholars working in the digital media arenas of rhetoric and composition. As Harley and Acord observe, this uneven coverage of different fields in calculating impact factors questions the influence of private sector organizations in deciding upon the importance of particular journals in particular areas of study: the coverage of much citation data is partial at best, generally including only top-
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ranked journals or specific disciplines. . . . The Impact Factor or score for a particular article or journal is contingent on the size and type of the database—provided by companies like Elsevier and Thomson Reuters—that is being searched. (52)
In addition, the level of impact of an article or an author’s work, especially in the humanities, may take time to be reflected in standard metrics unlike articles in the sciences, which have immediate currency. As a result, the impact of humanities’ articles can be missed by bibliometric tools. As Robert Townsend argues, the value of articles in history and other humanities’ fields often increases and should include citations past the ten-year window used by Thomson Reuters. Open peer review and postpublication review have been combined with some success in the sciences. Perhaps one of the best known of these experiments is the PLoS ONE website. PLoS ONE, published by the nonprofit Public Library of Science, is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access, online publication that “welcomes reports on primary research from any scientific discipline” (“PLoS ONE”) and provides both peer review by expert, practicing researchers and a robust set of postpublication tools to indicate quality and impact: citation information from “third-party citation measuring services” (Harley and Acord 46), such as Thomson Reuters Web of Science, online usage data, “social bookmarking services” (46) that automatically bookmark articles for researchers, an open comment (in reference to an entire article) and notes (in reference to specific parts of an article), features, blog coverage statistics compiled by aggregators, a star system that allows users to rate articles, although a “scan of articles suggests that reader comments are, in fact, rare” (46). Comparable systems in the humanities include the aforementioned MediaCommonsPress, which provides for the open peer review of monographs, and John Willinsky’s Open Monograph Press (OMP). Affiliated with the Public Knowledge Project and based in part on the innovative Athabasca University Press in Canada, the OMP provides a home for both open access journals and monographs. The OMP, Harley and Acord note, offers “an iterative peer-review model” to monograph authors, including the solicitation of “pre-publication peer reviews . . . posted online, from a scholarly community” (46), and a set of reading tools that allows for public or private commenting. Authors have a chance to refine their work based on early feedback and to monitor responses to their monographs in attached blogs or readers’ comments. OMP software also allows editors to “set the degree of blindness and openness to the review process” (Willinsky 10). The OMP system, Willinsky notes, is informed by the small-press movement and attempts to address the rising costs of publishing by
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reducing the expense of clerical work, from looking up addresses to preparing standard emails, while extending opportunities for editor, author, and others to contribute to the quality and reach of the work in question.
Current Experiments in Rhetoric and Composition/Writing Studies Rhetoric and composition/writing studies, too, has experimented with new peer review methodologies and related open-publishing delivery systems designed to reduce the costs and challenges of Rhetoricand composition/writingstudies, too, has publishing academic scholarship. For experimented with new peer review methodolo- the purposes of tracing such efforts in gies and related open-publishingdelivery systems this particular article, we contacted designed to reduce the costs and challenges of the editors of signal publications publishingacademicscholarship. located squarely within rhetoric and composition/writing studies that have pioneered digital publishing (and open-publishing environments) and experimented with various methodologies of peer review: four journals (Kairos, edited by Douglas Eyman and Cheryl Ball; CCC Online, edited by Bump Halbritter; Computers and Composition Online, edited by Kristine Blair; ATD: Across the Disciplines, edited by Michael Pemberton) and three presses (Computers and Composition Digital Press (CCDP)/Utah State University Press (USUP), edited by Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe; the WAC Clearinghouse, edited by Michael Palmquist; and Parlor Press, edited by David Blakesley). Given the difficulties of masking author identities in the digital environments these journals and presses occupy, many have moved away from anonymous peer review systems designed to mask the identities of reviewers and authors. The reviews of editor Michael Pemberton’s ATD: Across the Disciplines, for example, are usually signed. As Michael Palmquist remarks, for the WAC Clearinghouse, in which ATD and several book series and journals are now housed, the signing of reviews has become a common practice. Palmquist notes that although the clearinghouse first began with anonymous review, the editors gradually moved to more open review as digital documents made concealing identities difficult and as anonymous review increasingly was philosophically in conflict with editors’ thinking: We found that it can be extraordinarily difficult to conceal author identities (and, in many cases, reviewer identities) when exchanging electronic documents. The properties associated with many electronic documents will track the identities of authors and editors of documents and, unless care is taken to remove this information, it is relatively easy to view it.
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Palmquist adds: In a sense, we adapted our relatively traditional peer review process [of the late 1990s and early 2000s] to the realities of digital publishing by moving from blind reviews to signed reviews. Philosophically, however, we find that this approach is consistent with our values as a publishing cooperative [as is] the shift from the more traditional, blind review process to the more open signed review process that ATD and some of our book series editors use.
Writing about ATD’s developing review practices, Michael Pemberton also touches upon his changing attitudes as editor: The move from double blind to single blind (and sometimes completely transparent) reviews springs, ultimately, from my desire to make the review process more collaborative and less mysterious. Our professional discourse has long valorized social constructionist approaches to knowledge making, and my background in writing center theory has also convinced me of the value of personal interaction and authentic, face-to-face conversations. I think there’s value in knowing who your reviewers are, and that knowledge can sometimes help authors decide whether and/or how to revise their manuscripts.
A combination, then, of understanding review as a collaborative process supported by dramatic changes in digital communication has influenced many editors in the field to make reviews more open. The changes derive in Acombination, then, of understandingreview as a a theoretical sense, as Pemberton collaborative process supported by dramaticchanges notes, but also in a practical sense in digital communication has influenced many from the electronic environments editors in the field to make reviews more open. in which the journals are published. Kristine Blair observes, “elements of multimodality that involve video and audio basically prohibit (in positive ways) . . . blind peer review in that these artifacts invariably identify context, authors, programs.” In addition, given an editorial commitment to developing a broad base of authors and contributors in the field of digital composition, at least two of the journals—Kairos and Computers and Composition Online—have made sure that their editorial reviewing systems, after an initial decision to accept a project, involve as much mentoring and development as assessment. Kairos, for example, in Doug Eyman’s words, assigns editors to work with authors, as needed, to guide/facilitate revisions based on the Editorial Board’s comments and evaluation. While advancement to this editorial stage is
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not a guarantee of publication, it does reflect a significant investment in the submission. Our intention is to publish the webtext if the author or authors complete the revisions requested in consultation with the editors.
Computers and Composition Online also provides editorial mentoring and development assistance to authors creating multimodal texts. Kristine Blair comments: Over the years, we were discovering that there were many prospective web authors who need assistance in their digital design processes so that we began to employ a mentoring process in which these authors were paired with graduate student section editors/designers. . . . We have assisted with design and, given designers co-publication efforts, we have even begun to see more submissions where authors have listed designers as co-authors.
This close editorial and technological work with authors has characterized the first issue under Bump Halbritter of CCC Online (Winter 2012) as well. The digital audio/video texts submitted for publication have required significant editorial “intervention” designed to “devise and implement strategies for making these texts searchable, quotable, and scannable as well as readable/viewable/ audible” (Halbritter). In this time of increased digital publication, whether we call those who work with texts in these many different capacities editors, designers, or authors becomes something of a moot point and is certainly open for discussion in the field and among those who publish digital products. The presses we surveyed have also made similar moves toward experimenting with partially open peer review, as well as editorial mentoring and development in digital environments. The WAC Clearinghouse, Computers and Composition Digital Press (CCDP)/Utah State University Press (USUP), and Parlor Press, for instance, use at least two levels of review, encouraging authors to send proposals and sample chapters so that editors and reviewers can comment on projects in their formative stages, before authors invest extensive time on technical challenges, decisions about software platforms, and the extent of mediated content. As editor of Parlor Press, David Blakesley explains that the press, established in 2002, has always depended on digital media to support every aspect of his publishing collective. He states: We were basically born digital and adapted a variety of technologies from the beginning to facilitate peer review through all of the stages. Submissions have always been distributed electronically among editors and reviewers. Reviewers
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are encouraged to comment on PDFs or Word documents. We use a number of file sharing tools, such as DropBox (these days) to facilitate the process at various stages. We are considering using Submishmash to manage review and distribution because the sheer number of submissions has made it more and more difficult to provide the more personal attention to the review process.
At all times, though, he has also recognized the importance of establishing the press as a scholarly publisher “with experts in the field involved at every level of the review and publication process and chiefly responsible for all publication decisions, even through marketing and promotion. No one without expertise in the particular field of study has any say on what the Press accepts We hasten to note, however, that without excepfor publication” (Blakesley). We hasten tion, each of the editors we queried—whether to note, however, that without exception, involved with the publication of articles, books, each of the editors we queried—whether edited collections, revised editions, and more— involved with the publication of articles, mentioned their concern with scholarly integrity. books, edited collections, revised editions, and more—mentioned their concern with scholarly integrity. As new venues in the relatively young field of rhetoric and composition/writing studies emerged, editors sought, as Pemberton observes, to enhance “a sense of respectability, professionalism, and . . . prestige by embracing the features of peer review that were modeled by the most respected journals in the field.” For most of the field’s journals and presses, then, the evolution of a collaborative model was, and remains, gradual. It is also interesting to note, however, that as early as the late 1990s, Joseph Harris, then editor of College Composition and Communication, began inviting readers to sign their reviews if they so chose. Thus arguably the field’s flagship journal began to experiment with a prepublication reviewing practice that others in the field might emulate. Publication outlets within the field have also begun to experiment with postpublication review. CCDP, for example, is supported by the Scholar Electric, a press blog edited by Ryan Trauman and Timothy Lockridge, which publishes reviews of published projects and solicits the commentary of digital scholars on experiments in publishing. Links to other independent blogs are also featured on the individual portal pages of the CCDP website when projects are reviewed by external bloggers. Both the WAC Clearinghouse and the CCDP/USUP, moreover, are openaccess publishers that, like Willinsky’s OMP, provide projects for no cost. In this sense, these presses have anticipated Katherine Fitzpatrick’s call in
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Planned Obsolescence for academic authors willing to invest in a gift economy that refigures the concepts of profit and ownership in connection with texts and the responsibilities of academic authors to circulate their work to the public. In addition, the published projects of the CCDP/USUP have taken on the challenges of multimodal composition that Fitzpatrick presents. With the publication of Susan Delagrange’s Technologies of Wonder and Patrick Berry, Gail Hawisher, and Cynthia Selfe’s Transnational Literate Lives in Digital Times, in 2011 and in 2012 respectively, the CCDP is publishing projects that have the same intellectual weight as books, the same specific gravity, reach, and scope, but that do not simply rely on alphabetic text as the primary carrier of meaning. These projects have not been originally conceived to be published in print but rather electronically, and they cannot be fully represented in print contexts alone. We call these texts born digital to signal authors’ refusal to treat mediated elements—audio, images, text, and video—simply as illustrative content. Rather, the authors of such projects insist on involving audio, video, and textual elements in reciprocal conversations with one another and with readers, listeners, and viewers—establishing semiotic exchanges that become more than the sum of their individual parts. Such texts are born and live only in digital realms. These efforts, we believe, are changing the culture of rhetoric and composition/writing studies more broadly. Delagrange’s book, for example, is certainly one of the first born digital texts—texts that cannot exist outside a digital and multimedia environment—in rhetoric and composition studies/writing studies that has figured as the centerpiece of a tenure and promotion case.
Commentary on Peer Review Practices In this article, we have attempted to explore in some detail publication review processes that have evolved in academe and to demonstrate some of the practices that continue to emerge and change within our own field of rhetoric and composition/writing studies. Obviously, our review is cursory but nevertheless leads us to the following observations and commentary: Comment 1. In rhetoric and composition/writing studies, anonymous peer review is likely to have always been compromised. A system of anonymity in which reviewers do not know the authors of manuscripts and the authors do not know the reviewers has had a spotty history in the field, despite many editors and publishers endorsing a notion of objectivity when it comes to judging manuscripts
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through anonymous review. Presses and journals are moving away from strictly anonymous review processes to hybrid systems of review that allow for more openness in communication and information exchange. This practice has become increasingly transparent particularly as digital media makes its way into all facets of academic lives and has become especially a practical concern in digital journals and presses in which mediated content—photos, videos, audio, additional images, websites—are integral to projects. Comment 2. Prepublication and postpublication reviews have always existed as important processes for judging the quality and worth of scholarship and continue to do so today. If prepublication reviews have sanctioned the publishing of scholarship, postpublication reviews have often been the benchmarks through which colleagues have ultimately been judged as scholars. In rhetoric and composition/writing studies, at least as far back as Joseph Harris’s editorship leading up to the twenty-first century, College Composition and Communication, for example, has encouraged referees to sign their initial reviews if they so choose. As mentioned as well, Computers and Composition Digital Press asks reviewers of manuscripts that are accepted to continue to work as developmental editors, and Kairos has long had in place this practice as well. Overall there has been a tendency for the relationships between authors, editors, and reviewers to become increasingly open as the form and frequency—and frankly the amount—of review changes and as digital communication and the World Wide Web extend exponentially online writing spaces (Bolter). Comment 3. Peer review and open publication practices in rhetoric and composition/writing studies have, in some respects, anticipated the rethinking of copyright and ownership, the expanded circulation of texts to public audiences, and the establishment of an intellectual gift economy called for by Katherine Fitzpatrick in Planned Obsolescence. As Fitzpatrick explains, we might usefully ponder the mode of exchange that best suits academic culture, and what rights authors must retain within that mode of exchange. We should carefully consider . . . the potential value in “giving it away” . . . . If the purpose of scholarship is to be read, understanding its distribution as partially driven by a gift economy only makes sense. (26)
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In rhetoric and composition/writing studies, for example, journals, such as Kairos, ATD, and Computers and Composition Online, along with publications of the WAC Clearinghouse and CCDP, are already experimenting with intellectual gift economies. We should also make clear, however, that problems exist within this model as well. With CCDP, for example, we often find ourselves wanting to pay colleagues for the many services they provide, but we simply lack the necessary funding to do so. That so many scholars from around the world are able to read these open-access publications tends to make up for this shortcoming so long as the Internet itself remains available to wide-ranging numbers of people. Comment 4. Peer review of scholarship continues to be a major factor in many departments as far as tenure and promotion decisions are concerned. Digital journals and presses in rhetoric and composition have dealt with this reality by retaining a value on editorial and peer review, while altering the nature of both processes to accommodate increased openness at least in the practices of publication if not tenure and promotion review. We do note here, however, the longstanding guidelines that the Modern Language Association offers departments and those who would judge academic scholarship: While the use of computers in the modern languages is not a new phenomenon, the popular success of information networks like the World Wide Web, coupled with the proliferation of advanced multimedia tools, has resulted in an outpouring of critical publications, applied scholarship, and curricular innovation. Humanists are not only adopting new technologies but are also actively collaborating with technical experts in fields such as image processing, document encoding, and information science. Academic work in digital media should be evaluated in the light of these rapidly changing institutional and professional contexts, and departments should recognize that some traditional notions of scholarship, teaching, and service are being redefined. (Committee on Information Technology)
These guidelines, along with those from other professional organizations, especially the Conference on College Composition and Communication, relate directly to the field’s changing practices of peer review and are likely to become more relevant as academic research moves into the future. This article, then, begins to take on questions that arise in an environment of changing requirements for peer review and publication. In particular,
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we describe some of the historical processes leading up to current practices that irrevocably shape anew what we are about as scholars and researchers who participate in peer review systems. As should be quite obvious, this exploration of changing peer review practices and their consequences is just a beginning and has been helped immeasurably not only by colleagues who edit established journals but also by those who pioneer the creation of new venues through which the field might share its research and those who participate willingly within such experimental systems. We are convinced that only through such exploration and experimentation will we, as a large and complex profession, develop better, more productive, and more humane ways of dealing with the peer review of scholarship.
Notes 1. Despite College Composition and Communication (CCC), for example, having been an essential part of the discipline of rhetoric and composition/writing studies since 1950, the name that we choose to call ourselves varies. Common terms such as composition studies, composition and rhetoric, rhetoric and writing, and even academic writing, as frequently used overseas, all abound. Although today the educational statistical profile of the federal Classification of Instructional Programs (CIPS) recognizes us as Rhetoric and Composition/Writing Studies (Phelps and Ackerman), in this article we use a variety of our naming practices in an attempt to include the many representations of the field. We hope to suggest what a “dappled discipline” (Lauer) we really are and how these differences and our penchant for both discursive arguments and social science research tends to shape our peer review processes. As early as 1984, Janice Lauer noted that the scholarship of “composition studies,” as she referred to it at the time, “has a highly multidisciplinary cast” (20) and hence titled her article in Rhetoric Review “Composition Studies: Dappled Discipline.” 2. Scholars have documented the fact that the status of journals during the latter half of the twentieth century depends on a model of scarcity in which the more prestigious journals reject a higher percentage of manuscripts and are considered more scrupulous about reviewing. 3. The increasing burden of reviewing, as Abbott points out, has resulted in a number of problems, among them the difficulty of securing reviewers willing to read and comment on manuscripts “in large part because refusing is so easy on email” (21). He continues, “at the American Journal of Sociology we are now routinely asking seven to ten people to get two to three reviews of an article. Five years ago, by snail mail, four to five requests would produce two to three reviews. So much for the utility of running your journal electronically” (21).
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4. To a large extent, of course, economic realities are responsible for the decline in university presses, as so many authors have pointed out. Universities suffer from reduced state funding and pass along cuts to libraries and academic presses (Task Force). Diminished library budgets support declining purchases of university press monographs. John Willinsky, for example, documents the link between diminishing monograph sales to libraries as a major contributing factor in changing the economic system of scholarly publishing: “In terms of individual title sales, Eileen Gardiner and Ronald G. Musto, directors of the ACLS E-Humanities Project, report that between 1980 and 2000, the average library sales for a monograph plummeted from around 2,000 copies in 1980, to 1,000 in the late 1980s, to 500 in the 1990s, and then to a little more than 200 in the early years of this century. Affirming these numbers, John Thompson declares that this two decade decline in sales, ‘more than any other single factor . . . has transformed the economic conditions of scholarly publishing’ decidedly for the worse, in terms of this genre’s future (94). 5. We have avoided the terms blind review, single blind, and double blind in referring to author or reviewer anonymity because they suggest a sensory-deficit model rejected by disabilities scholars, for good reason, as insulting and problematic. We use the terms only when quoting other editors and scholars. 6. As Kathleen Fitzpatrick makes the case for multimodality: . . . if we continue to focus our attention exclusively on the production of digital texts that can be translated, in whatever “impoverished” way, into print, the range of our potential innovation will remain quite narrow. . . . [W]e might more productively start thinking of them as being far more multimodal. What is it that I mean when I say “multimodal”? Something more than simply multimedia; it’s not just a new relationship between text and image, or image and audio, or other forms of representation. Those other forms are already embedded in many of the texts that we produce. . . . Now, when my computer translates my words into the very same digital substance that sound, image, and other modes of representation exist in, we encounter the potential for a radical change, one that doesn’t just break down the boundaries between text and video, for instance, allowing me to embed illustrative clips within the analysis I produce of them . . . , but that instead changes the fundamental nature of the analysis itself . . . asking us to consider what a text is, and what it can be, in the digital age. If we have the ability to respond to video with video, if we can move seamlessly from audio files to images to text as means of representing music, it may behoove us to think about exactly what it is we’re producing when we write, how it is that these different modes of communication come together in complex document forms. (27)
7. As Fytton Rowland notes: In recent years, it has sometimes been reported that there may be growing reluctance on the part of many academics to undertake refereeing work. Several reasons have been suggested for this. One is that the number of papers submit-
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ted to peer-reviewed journals, conferences and grant-giving bodies continues to increase. This in turn is due both to the growth in the number of people engaged in research work, and to the growing insistence by universities and governments that academics must show evidence of peer-reviewed publications. At the same time, pressure of work on academics has increased, not only in respect of the need to seek more research grants and to write more papers, but also because of increased student numbers as the proportion of young adults engaged in higher education increases. The willingness of scholars to undertake work that is neither paid nor publicly recognized is said to be falling. At the same time, as mentioned earlier, a minority of the academic community feels that electronic-only scholarly publication—seen to be a likely development in the near future—will remove the need to ration publication space by peer review, since, unlike print products, electronic publications have a virtually zero ‘run-on cost’. Although it is true that computer storage for voluminous data has continually fallen in price over many years, the readers’ time remains a scarce resource, and most academics feel that peer review performs a valuable filtering function, saving them time, as readers, by providing an indication of the gradations of quality among publications. (6)
Works Cited Bolter, J. David. Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print. 2nd ed. London: Taylor & Francis, 2009. Print.
Abbott, Andrew. “Publication and the Future of Knowledge.” Plenary Lecture to the Association of American University Presses. Montreal, June 2008. Web. 23 Oct. 2011.
Ceci, Stephen J., and Douglas Peters. “How Blind Is Blind Review?” American Psychologist 39.12 (1984): 1491–94. Print.
Berry, Patrick W., Gail E. Hawisher, and Cynthia L. Selfe. Transnational Literate Lives in Digital Times. Logan: Computers and Composition Digital P/Utah State UP, 2012. Web. 14 Dec. 2011.
Cohen, Patricia. “Scholars Test Web Alternative to Peer Review.” New York Times 23 Aug. 2010. Web. 16 Oct. 2011.
Biagioli, Mario. “From Book Censorship to Academic Peer Review.” Emergences 12.1 (2002): 11–45. Print. Birch, Thomas. The History of the Royale Society of London for Improving of Natural Knowledge. 1756. Vol. 1. New York: Johnson Reprint, 1968. Print. Blair, Kristine. Peer review. 16 Sept. 2011. Email. Blakesley, David. Peer review. 31 Oct. 2011. Email.
Committee on Information Technology. “Guidelines for Evaluating Work with Digital Media in the Modern Languages.” Modern Language Association. MLA, 2002. Web. Cross, Jo. “Impact Factors—The Basics.” The E-Resources Management Handbook. London: Taylor & Francis, 2009. Web. 27 Feb. 2012. Delagrange, Susan. Technologies of Wonder: Rhetorical Practice in a Digital World. Logan: Computers and Composition Digital Press/Utah State UP, 2011. Web.
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Harnad, Stevan. “Learned Inquiry and the Net: The Role of Peer Review, Peer Commentary and Copyright.” Learned Publishing 11.4 (1998): 283–92. Print.
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Jones, Barbara Haney. The Restructuring of Scholarly Publishing in the United States, 1980–2001: A Resource-Based Analysis of University Presses. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen P, 2009. Print.
Friedlander, Amy. “The Triple Helix: Cyberinfrastructure, Scholarly Communication, and Trust.” Journal of Electronic Publishing 11.1 (2008). Web. 27 Feb. 2012.
Lee, Christopher. “Boundary-Crossing Research Meets Border Patrol.” Perspective: Peer Review of Interdisciplinary Scientific Papers. Peer Review Debate. Nature 2006. Web. 27 Feb. 2012.
Gardiner, Eileen, and Ronald G. Musto. “The Electronic Book.” The Oxford Companion to the Book. Ed. Michael Suarez and H. R. Woudhuysen. Oxford [UK]: Oxford UP, 2010. The Wall Street Journal. Web.
Klarr, Lisa. “Planned Obsolescence: An Interview with Kathleen Fitzpatrick.” 1 Mar. 2011. HASTAC: Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory. Web. Feb. 2012.
Halbritter, Bump. Peer review. 15 Sept. 2011. Email.
Lauer, Janice. “Composition Studies: Dappled Discipline.” Rhetoric Review 3.1 (1984): 20–28. Print.
Harley, Diane, and Sophia Krzys Acord. Peer Review in Academic Promotion and Publishing: Its Meaning, Locus, and Future. Project Report and Associated Recommendations. Proceedings from a Meeting and Background Papers. Berkeley: Center for Studies in Higher Education, U of California, Berkeley, 2011. Web. 27 Feb. 2012.
Mabe, Michael. “(Electronic) Journal Publishing.” The E-Resources Management Handbook 1 (Jan. 2009): 56–66. Web. 27 Feb. 2012.
Harley, Diane, Sophia Krzys Acord, Sarah Earl-Novell, Shannon Lawrence, and C. Judson King. Assessing the Future Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values and Needs in Seven Disciplines. Berkeley: Center for Studies in Higher Education, U of California, Berkeley: 2010. Web. 27 Feb. 2012. Harley, Diane, Sarah Earl-Novell, Jennifer Arter, Shannon Lawrence, and C. Judson King. “The Influence of Academic Values on Scholarly Publication and Communication Practices.” Journal of Electronic Publishing 10.2 (2007). Web. 27 Feb. 2012.
Nichols, David, Peter Williams, Ian Rowlands, and Hamid R. Jamali. “Researchers’ e-Journal Use and Information Seeking Behavior.” Journal of Information Science 36.4 (2010): 494–516. Print. Palmquist, Michael. Peer review. 29 Aug. 2011. Email. Pemberton, Michael. Peer review. 7 Nov. 2011. Email. Phelps, Louise Wetherbee, and John Ackerman. “Making the Case for Disciplinarity in Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies: The Visibility Project.” College Composition and Communication 62:1 (2010): 180–215. Print.
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Purdy, James P., and Joyce R. Walker. “Valuing Digital Scholarship: Exploring the Changing Realities of Intellectual Work.” Profession 2010. 177–95. New York: MLA. Print. Rowe, Katherine. “From the Editor: Gentle Numbers.” Shakespeare Quarterly 61.3 (2010): iv–ix. Web. 27 Feb. 2012. Rowland, Fytton. “Peer Review.” E-Resources Management Handbook 1 (Jan. 2009): 1–10. Web. Feb. 2012. Source Publication List for Web of Science. Arts and Humanities Index, 2011. Thomson Reuters. Web. 27 Feb. 2012.
Townsend, Robert B. “Assessing the Future of Peer Review.” AHA Today. Blog post. American Historical Association. 7 June 2010. Web. 27 Feb. 2012. Waltham, Mary. “The Future of Scholarly Journal Publishing among Social Sciences and Humanities Associations: Report on a Study Funded by a Planning Grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.” 2009. Web. 27 Feb. 2012. Willinsky, John. “Toward the Design of an Open Monograph Press.” Journal of Electronic Publishing 12.1 (2009). Web. 27 Feb. 2012.
Gail E. Hawisher Gail E. Hawisher is University Distinguished Teacher/Scholar and professor emeritus of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana–Champaign, where she founded the Center for Writing Studies and the University of Illinois Writing Project. She has been honored to receive the Lynn Martin Award for Distinguished Women Faculty and the University of Illinois Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Her work engages literate activity and new information technologies as reflected in her most recent coauthored Transnational Literate Lives in Digital Times—a study of how people across the world take up literacy and digital media.
Cynthia L. Selfe Cynthia L. Selfe is Humanities Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at Ohio State University. She is Co-founder and Executive Editor of Computers
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and Composition Digital Press/Utah State University Press (with Gail Hawisher) and the Co-Founder and Co-Director of the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (with H. Lewis Ulman). Selfe has served as the Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication and the Chair of the College Section of the National Council of Teachers of English. She is the author of numerous articles and books about the relationships among people, literacy, and digital environments.
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Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
