THATCamp (Day 2b)

The initial schedule is now up. I’m going to attend a morning session on open peer review, an early afternoon session on comic books and playing with scholarship and will be a discussion starter on the session on disruptive pedagogy. I’m hoping, in the session that I’m helping facilitate to, among other things, that there might be some interest in a collection of essays (book/website) on pedagogies of disruption.

Open Peer Review session
Discussion starters: Sarah Werner, Folger Shakespeare Library; Jack Dougherty, Trinity College (editor of Writing History in the Digital Age)
Things that made their way into the conversation:  Risks associated with open peer review (public rejection); how OPR is different from the standard peer review process; how some authors get more encouraged than others and what that means in an open solicitation model like the one used in Writing History in the Digital Age; what happens when editors in a process like the one used WHDA encourage some authors more than others (as opposed to the crowd doing so); how slow standard peer review is and how uniterative as compared to open peer review; how long should open peer review remain “open”; how open peer review is exhausting for authors, especially because the time window for revisions by authors is often short; are authors giving up the rights to a paper once they put it up in open peer review (and then what happens if it is rejected); who do the comments belong to (important to stipulate that commenters abdicate their copyright); process of OPR–inviting authors/commenters, etc. (community management); has OPR improved the quality of journals/book; are some works more “commentable” than others and does that lead authors to offer these sorts of contributions, which are not necessarily “better” in the sense of scholarly value; value of this sort of approach for students–seeing how the sausage is made; OPR has the advantage of providing one way for reviewers to gain credit for their work, where traditional peer review is a private matter for which we receive no credit (might one begin to build a reputation as a commenter?); what does OPR not do well (speed is the enemy of good prose/careful arguments, what happens if you open the review process and almost no one takes part).

One of my interests in attending this session was to see, if my idea for something “book like” on pedagogies of disruption flies, what sort of publishing model/peer review model, to use.  Advice from Jack — think ahead and be very specific about your editorial policies. One of my other interests here is for what we’re going to do with original content solicited for Global Perspectives on Digital History (as opposed to republished content).