Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Peer‐to‐peer Review and the Future of Scholarly Authority

The nature of authority is shifting in online scholarly communication. This examination of the history and future of peer review argues that effective online communication requires the development of an open, community‐oriented, post‐publication system of peer‐to‐peer review, transforming peer review from a process focused on gatekeeping to one concerned with filtering the wealth of scholarly material made available via the Internet.

Reading (and Writing) Online, Rather Than on the Decline

Changing perceptions of and assumptions about the book in contemporary culture, and particularly those perceptions as situated within an increasingly complex media and communication landscape, have been at the heart of my research for nearly 15 years. One would think that the situation might have stabilized over that time — after all, if the book were genuinely on its way out, having been shunted aside by movies, or television, or video games or the internet, one would expect that trajectory over the course of that length of time to be clear. One would expect the tale to be unambiguously one of decline. Yet while, in the last decade and a half, ongoing technological developments have produced an ever-increasing number of new challengers to the book’s role as the primary vector through which literate culture communicates, the forms that the book takes and the ways that readers encounter the book have proliferated. While the relationship to the book as an object is certainly changing in the West, those changes may indicate a more thorough imbrication of books and reading with popular culture, rather than their marginalization.1

Revising Peer Review

Kathleen Fitzpatrick argues that as online platforms for scholarly publishing foster increasingly fluid means of communication amongst researchers, the principles on which such publishing is founded—including, most crucially, peer review—must become more flexible.

What is Publishing? (1)

What do we mean by publishing in today’s world? What should be the goals of scholarly publishing? What are the ideals to which scholarly publishing should aspire? What roles might scholarly publishers have in the future? What scenarios exist where publishers continue to play a vital role but information moves more freely? What impact might these reforms have on the health of publishers? Scholarly societies? Science research? Why?

Report from the "What is Publishing?" (1) Workgroup

The mechanisms used for scholarly publishing have remained largely unchanged over time, even as we’ve moved from a print-based world to a digital world. The scholarly communication ecosystem, however, is now undergoing a period of rapid transformation, including the introduction of new actors, new services, and increased pressure to improve the means of scholarly communication in order to meet the growing expectations of an information-rich world. Where to begin? The first question is to ask how scholarly publishing can provide the greatest benefit to global society in a sustainable way. Our two-day conversation about this question led us to the conclusion that the “black box,” monolithic model of scholarly publishing no longer serves most researchers. The most sustainable approach that best responds to the needs of authors and researchers today, and that may also pose the least amount of risk in completely disrupting the system, is disaggregated services—unbundling the products and services that publishers currently provide and letting market forces drive the development of, and demand for, a new and improved a la carte world of knowledge artifacts and knowledge management tools. OSI2016 Workshop Question What do we mean by publishing in today’s world? What should be the goals of scholarly publishing? What are the ideals to which scholarly publishing should aspire? What roles might scholarly publishers have in the future? What scenarios exist where publishers continue to play a vital role but information moves more freely? What impact might these reforms have on the health of publishers? Scholarly societies? Science research? Why?

The Future History of the Book: Time, Attention, Convention

What is the state of the book today? This is not an inquiry after the book’s health. Questions of the book’s ostensible decline have hounded it for decades, if not centuries, and have variously led to the conclusion that the book is dying, or that it is in the prime of its life, depending. I have argued at length elsewhere that anxieties about the book’s obsolescence are frequently driven by the conservative impulse to shore up the hierarchies between the book and newer media forms (and, not at all incidentally, the hierarchies between those who participate in what we might think of as book culture and those who happily engage with newer media), and I hope in this chapter not to dwell for too long on that phenomenon.1 Rather, I am asking after the book’s physical state, in a different sense: is it solid or liquid—or perhaps more pertinently, does it exist in some altogether ambiguous state? The book has always been, like light, both particle and wave—both material substance and transmitted information. I begin by asking about the book’s physical state in order to open a series of questions—and this essay, I should admit up front, is more question than answer—about what might become of the book, and of our relationship to it, as its material substance changes.