The Blogosphere as a Carnival of Ideas, from the Chronicle
It’s all about carnivals for me recently, for some reason. Anyway, it’s gratifying to finally see some positive treatment of blogging in academia.
Academic blogs offer the kind of intellectual excitement and engagement that attracted many scholars to the academic life in the first place, but which often get lost in the hustle to secure positions, grants, and disciplinary recognition. Properly considered, the blogosphere represents the closest equivalent to the Republic of Letters that we have today. … Over the next 10 years, blogs and bloglike forms of exchange are likely to transform how we think of ourselves as scholars. While blogging won’t replace academic publishing, it builds a space for serious conversation around and between the more considered articles and monographs that we write.
And because I’m a geek, I just had to include this:
…the difference between academic publishing and blogging is reminiscent of “one of those Star Trek or Twilight Zone episodes where it turns out there is another species sharing the same space with us, but so sped up or slowed down in time, relatively, that contact is almost impossible.” Which is not to say that blogs and more conventional forms of publishing can’t complement each other very nicely.
Seems to me that the academic blogsphere provides a venue for informal peer review before the official peer review process begins. Who reads academic blogs? Our colleagues, our students and former students, our friends. We have the opportunity to get feedback on our ideas from all of these people before we write them up for publication. If one of the purposes of the peer review process is to improve the quality of scholarly writing, then surely more peer review would be a good thing. My question is, will blog posts be considered prior publication by publishers?
3 Comments
Mark
Thanks for linking to this. A much more nuanced view than the one in the Tribble article a few months back.
Trish
I doubt that will be considered prior publication as long as you don’t include the analyzed data showing how you reached your major conclusions. We publish pieces that have been in conference proceedings/poster sessions/smaller bits, as long as they have not gone into great depth (i.e. 1-2 pages or more).
In addition, many publishers have loosened the strictures on “prior publication” with the open access movement and NIH’s move to include post-prints in PubMed Central. If a post-print in an open access archive is allowed by publishers, I would guess that anything less than reprinting your article on your blog wouldn’t cause a major problem.
Jason
I’ve said this sort of thing for a couple of years now…all the way back to the original publication of my Master’s Thesis on my blog. Between the rise of self-publication, university archives, metadata creation made easy via tags/folksonomies, blogs, wikis, and all the upcoming forms of information dissemination and feedback….”scholarly publication”, the old model of peer review is going to be radically updated in the next few years.
I’ve made a few radical guesses about the future, and I’m less certain about this one than I am about a few others I’ve made, but it’s mainly due to timeframe, and not whether or not it will happen. It will.