This whole publishing racket...

Well, my application (and my fate) is now officially in the hands of the chairs of the two search committees. But that's not what I wanted to talk about today. Over the past 48-72 hours I have been reading from a lot of other blogs about the trials and tribulations of writing in the academy, particularly by those (like myself) who are still trying to break into it (see Cognitive Dissonance, Who's Deadline is it Anyway, Learning Rocks, Lessig Blog, The Program, and Who's Deadline is it Anyway again).

My good friend Nate Lowell has proposed what I think is a neat idea (see What's in a Name?"). Basically the idea is to create an academic journal that is much like a blog. The articles are posted to the journal and an editorial board review each article in a short time frame nder much the same peer review system that we are accustomed to in the academy. Once the article has been reviewed, if it is accepted it is published to the blog with the comments on the reviewers and then it is open for anyone to discuss through comments or trackback, just like any other blog.

Nate started something a few months back called Terra Incognita to give people a visual of what this might look like and how it may operate, although I think that his thoughts on what he is proposing now are more refined. Basically this would be rather new, David Wiley tried something similar to this a while back (see David Wiley: Pitch, Pitch Journal, and Submitting to Pitch), but for whatever reason I note that the Pitch website is no longer available. In his own post, Nate refers to Innovate, which is similar, but not everything that I have described above.

So, is this next wave of academic publishing in the academy? If it is, then the next step would be to convince Promotion and Tenure Committees of the value of this form of publishing. Given the difficulty that many of them have with simply online journals, this may be the bigger challenge.

Tags: aect, higher education, education