Daniel Paul O'Donnell

A multi-disciplinary perspective on emergent and future innovations in peer review

Peer review of research articles is a core part of our scholarly communication system. In spite of its importance, the status and purpose of peer review is often contested. What is its role in our modern digital research and communications infrastructure? Does it perform to the high standards with which it is generally regarded? Studies of peer review have shown that it is prone to bias and abuse in numerous dimensions, frequently unreliable, and can fail to detect even fraudulent research. With the advent of Web technologies, we are now witnessing a phase of innovation and experimentation in our approaches to peer review. These developments prompted us to examine emerging models of peer review from a range of disciplines and venues, and to ask how they might address some of the issues with our current systems of peer review. We examine the functionality of a range of social Web platforms, and compare these with the traits underlying a viable peer review system: quality control, quantified performance metrics as engagement incentives, and certification and reputation. Ideally, any new systems will demonstrate that they out-perform current models while avoiding as many of the biases of existing systems as possible. We conclude that there is considerable scope for new peer review initiatives to be developed, each with their own potential issues and advantages. We also propose a novel hybrid platform model that, at least partially, resolves many of the technical and social issues associated with peer review, and can potentially disrupt the entire scholarly communication system. Success for any such development relies on reaching a critical threshold of research community engagement with both the process and the platform, and therefore cannot be achieved without a significant change of incentives in research environments.

Back to the future: what digital editors can learn from print editorial practice

This article revisits the question of the intellectual adequacy of the print critical edition. Contemporary theory and current digital practice have encouraged editors and users of editions to dismiss various aspects of the print critical edition- particularly the reading text and the critical apparatus―as artifacts of an obsolete technology. Using database theory, the author shows how many of these basic elements in fact represent the most intellectually efficient possible way of organizing information about texts and the readings of their underlying witnesses. By recognizing the inherent sophistication of the classical model, digital editors can improve of print practice by exploiting features of the new medium that make it easier to present such data in interactive ways.

Junius's knowledge of the Old English poem Durham

Until recently, the late Old English poem Durham was known to have been copied in two manuscripts of the twelfth century: Cambridge, University Library, Ff. 1. 27 (C) and London, British Library, Cotton Vitellius D. xx (V). C has been transcribed frequently and serves as the basis for Elliott Van Kirk Dobbies standard edition of the poem in the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records. V was almost completely destroyed in the Cottonian fire of 1731. Its version is known to us solely from George Hickess 1705 edition (H). In a recent article, however, Donald K. Fry announced the discovery of a third medieval text of the poem. Like V, the original manuscript of this ‘third’ version is now lost and can be reconstructed only from an early modern transcription - in this case a copy by Francis Junius no win the Stanford University Library (Stanford University Libraries, Department of Special Collections, Misc. 010 [J1]). Unlike V, however, Juniuss copy is our only record of this manuscripts existence. No other transcripts are known from medieval or early modern manuscript catalogues.

A multi-disciplinary perspective on emergent and future innovations in peer review [version 2; referees: 2 approved]

Peer review of research articles is a core part of our scholarly communication system. In spite of its importance, the status and purpose of peer review is often contested. What is its role in our modern digital research and communications infrastructure? Does it perform to the high standards with which it is generally regarded? Studies of peer review have shown that it is prone to bias and abuse in numerous dimensions, frequently unreliable, and can fail to detect even fraudulent research. With the advent of web technologies, we are now witnessing a phase of innovation and experimentation in our approaches to peer review. These developments prompted us to examine emerging models of peer review from a range of disciplines and venues, and to ask how they might address some of the issues with our current systems of peer review. We examine the functionality of a range of social Web platforms, and compare these with the traits underlying a viable peer review system: quality control, quantified performance metrics as engagement incentives, and certification and reputation. Ideally, any new systems will demonstrate that they out-perform and reduce the biases of existing models as much as possible. We conclude that there is considerable scope for new peer review initiatives to be developed, each with their own potential issues and advantages. We also propose a novel hybrid platform model that could, at least partially, resolve many of the socio-technical issues associated with peer review, and potentially disrupt the entire scholarly communication system. Success for any such development relies on reaching a critical threshold of research community engagement with both the process and the platform, and therefore cannot be achieved without a significant change of incentives in research environments.

Defining the Scholarly Commons - Reimagining Research Communication. Report of Force11 SCWG Workshop, Madrid, Spain, February 25-27, 2016

Sherpa Romeo blue journal. Open access article. Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0) applies.

The dream and the cross: Bringing 3D content in a digital edition

The Dream of the Rood is one of the earliest Christian poems in the corpus of Old English literature, and an example of the genre of dream poetry. While its complete text can be found in the 10th Century ”Vercelli Book”, the poem is considerably older, and its oldest occurrence is carved (in runes) on the 7-8th Century Ruthwell Stone Cross. In this paper, we present the prototype of a web-based digital edition of the Dream of the Rood, as it appears on the Ruthwell Cross. The multimedia framework presents the highly detailed 3D model acquired with 3D Scanning technology, together with the transcription and translation of the runes that can be found on its surface. The textual and spatial information are linked through a system of bi-directional links called spots, that give the possibility to the user to have a free navigation over the multimedia content, keeping the 3D and textual data synchronized. The proposed work provides discussion and solution on two main issues related to digital editions: the integration of three dimensional content in the context of the presentation on the web platform of heterogeneous multimedia data, and the creation of an XML encoding that could account for the necessities of 3D data disposition, but keeping the encoding rules in the context of the standards of the community.

Numerical and Geometric Patterning in Cœdmon's Hymn

For most of the past two hundred years, scholarly interest in Cædmon’s Hymn has concentrated on the oral, folkloric, and traditional Germanic aspects of Cædmon’s story and oeuvre.1 The past forty years, however, also have seen the development of a body of work that attempts to explicate the Hymn’s formal structure in light of classical and medieval theories of numeric and geometric patterning. This approach has its origins in the case of Cædmon’s Hymn in the work of Bernard F. Huppé and Morton Bloomfield. Its most significant proponents in recent years have included Ute Schwab and David Howlett. It is difficult to know what to make of this approach as it applies to the Hymn. On the one hand, claims made by its proponents often are very subtle and, to modern eyes at least, occasionally strain credulity: very few interpretations depend on falsifiable observations or premises, and different scholars can end up using identical evidence to demonstrate opposing arguments or seemingly opposing evidence to arrive at identical conclusions. On the other, however, numerical and geometric patterns are undeniably part of medieval exegetical and compositional practice and, as Ernst Robert Curtius reminds us, suffer from many of the same problems associated with modern study of the phenomenon. This is true even when the authors in question explain the reasoning behind their compositions. Thus, for example, Walafrid Strabo shows a strong predilection for “round” numbers (numbers divisible by 5 or 10) in his Latin poetry (Curtius 506)—a fact he comments on at least twice (in numbers 38 and 5; see Dümmler 2: 390 and 355). An exception to this practice, however, is an 84-line poem addressed to Lothair (number 76, Dümmler 2: 413–14). As Walafrid explains (lines 83–84), this length was determined by the age attained by the prophet Anna at the time of the birth of Christ (Luke 2.37), a biblical event otherwise unrelated to the contents of the poem. Had Walafrid not noted this fact, modern readers would most likely have considered the length of the poem to be a matter of chance. As Curtius notes: