open academia (video transcript)

Bly, Adam, Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Katherine Rowe. (2010, September 22). Tea Party Online,Craigslist and Free Speech, and Open Academia.

BrianLehrer.TV.

Video February 20, 2011,posted to CUNYTV website.

keywords: open access, collaboration, crowdsourcing, peer review, obduracy, expert knowledge

will the net kill the age-old system of peer review in academic publishing? knowledge: liberatedand threatened by web publishing. sounds like common sense. publish-or-perish is the toughestpart of being a professor; research and write and be OKd by experts in the field; peer review; elite journal is a must for top-job and tenure; it's been the system for decades; the web is a disruptiveforce: publishing without a press, open peer review, show your work, in progress, publicly; whatdoes this mean for the advancement of learning itself and for the politics of academia?

1. Adam Bly, ScienceBlogs.com; Seed Media Group

“It’s controversial in as much as it’s a reform to age-old structures that work and by and large havebeen successful in advancing scholarly knowledge. Any change is going to met with somehesitation by those who have a vested interest. In science you have a handful of very largepublishing companies that have a vested interested in restricting access to information andkeeping peer review a very expensive and closed process. At the same time there’s a movementthat was at its onset very grassroots and radical and today has become much more accepted bythe bulk of the scientific community. Today the vast majority of physicists are publishing their workon archive, life scientists are using preprint and e-print services as well. The last five years hasseen a radical shift from open access being radical to being largely accepted by the scientificcommunity.”Lehrer: how is it different between the humanities, social sciences, and physical sciences?“There’s even a contrast between the [physical] sciences” (mentions the difference in theimmediacy of public benefit — i.e. medicine vs. physics)[second round]Lehrer: does this have implications for tenure?“Absolutely. The consequence of peer review is that you may or may not get published in atraditionally higher impact journal for example. Historically those impact factors then dictatewhether or not you’re eligible for tenure or whether you’ll get that NIH grant.” there is a hugeeconomic component to the consequence of this.Bly says “concurrent with this movement toward open access, toward digital scholarship, there’sreform in the metrics that we’re using to assess performance for scholars.” Publication is stillimportant, but the paper is no longer the fundamental unit (lists data as an example)contributing to the social web is now considered as important as being published in a high impactfactor journal. contributing beyond the publication of the paper is important.

http://christopherdelatorre.com/2012/01/26/brian-lehrer-open-academia/ 1

2. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Pomona College – promoted to full professor atPamona College, in part by revising a manuscript openly on the web.

planned obsolescence (book) focused on changes digital technology produces within the academicdiscourse. out for open review as the press was also putting it through peer review“the open process was able to get many more voices into discussing the manuscript at a muchearlier stage than one would ordinarily have.” 295 comments from 44 commenters “many of themdisagreed with one another about particular points of assessment. allowing the reviewers to speakto one another about the text produced a much richer and much more nuanced version of whatwas going on.”(Lehrer: so you used open source scholarship/peer-review to supplement conventional process,not to replace it)“Yes. Had it been up to me, I might have replaced it.” The press saw this as an experiment andnow is enthused at how well it went.[second round]Lehrer: is this dangerous because you’re watering down the expertise of the review? there’sanother question to be asked: was there something lost all along by only having expert review?“Absolutely. There are a couple of crucial reasons to open up peer review right now. The first oneis that the current system is fundamentally broken. There is far more labor to be done in the workof peer review than scholars have time for.” Attributes Vioxx disaster to peer-review mishap (bias)— there was a moment when the reviewers had a vested interest in the outcome of that article,and changed the ways the article presented its information. “There are ethical problems withcontemporary peer review. articles that get rejected simply because they disagree with areviewer’s own staked-out position, but there’s also the problem with labor. This is invisible labor for which academics can’t get any kind of credit right now. You can say you’ve been a peer reviewer but nobody can prove it, and you can’t ever be seen as contributing to the discourse.”Lehrer: why don’t they list it?in the vast majority of fields, listing the reviewers in an article isn’t customary. It’s seen as beingwhat Fitzpatrick calls a “blind process” – you’re not supposed to know who’s reviewing your article.in many fields the reviewers are not supposed to know whose article they’re reviewing.. that is afiction. most fields are small enough that it’s very clear whose article is being reviewed, and in factwho the reviewers are.

3. Katherine Rowe, Shakespeare Quarterly – experimented with a newkind of peer review that includes what is called “literary crowdsourcing”— teamed up with Media Commons, organization that’s testing newmodes (verify)

asked to edit special issue of the shakespeare quarterly one of the oldest journals in the field inAmerica. on the topic of shakespeare and new media, and with that topic the editorial board feltthat we had an obligation to test how well new media suited our core values – of access toknowledge, of excellence, and accountability. testing it this way helps us to assess what exactly it