For those of you who weren’t at the brownbag yesterday, Gary talked about the upcoming JCDL, & had us all brainstorm a bit about it. Gary mentioned that the theme of the conference, Opening Information Horizons, was an attempt to implicitly play on the theme of open-source, open-access, open-science, etc. I suggested that one way to embrace that theme would be to implement open reviewing. That idea pretty much went over like a lead balloon. Gary’s complaint, & it’s a valid one, is that it would be a lot of extra work for the program commitee. I just sent Gary an email giving him some more information about this idea, so at least if the program committee rejects the idea they’ll be well-informed about it.
There are 2 models of open reviewing: open reviewing before the accept/reject decision, & open commenting after publication.
There seem to be fewer operational models of open reviewing out there. Ariadne has been doing this since 1996 (Open Peer Review & Argumentation: Loosening the Paper Chains on Journals), & BMJ is just in the process of implementing this (Opening up BMJ peer review).
Psycoloquy, the online journal that Stevan Harnad started, has implemented a peer commentary system, where once an article is published any registered user can comment on it.
Personally, I think the latter would be the better model for JCDL: during & after the conference, any conference attendee can comment on a paper. Also it seems to me that this would jibe with the recent trend in setting up conference wikis: there was a wiki set up for the 2005 ALA conference, & Brad is talking about setting up a wiki for ASIST 2005. Though in this case you wouldn’t want users to edit each other’s writing, just respond to it; so basically this is just a blog. And there’s a model for that too: the LITA blog, which was set up in time for the 2005 ALA Annual. Does anyone know of any conference that has implemented a Psycoloquy-style peer commentary system?