|
CSHE/Mellon Peer Review Study Now
Available
The Center for the Study for Higher Education at the University
of California, Berkeley, has just published the report of its project
on peer review and its role in academic tenure and review and in
scholarly publishing. The project included both extensive background
papers and also a workshop (which I was fortunate to be able to
attend). Full details in the release from CSHE reproduced below.
I think this is a valuable look at a much under-explored area and
should be of interest to many CNI-announce readers.
Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI
-------------------------------
Since 2005, and with generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Center for Studies in Higher
Education (CSHE) has been conducting research to explore how
academic values - including those related to peer review,
publishing, sharing, and collaboration -influence scholarly
communication practices and engagement with new technological
affordances, open access publishing, and the public good.
This report includes (1) an overview of the state of peer review
in the Academy at large, (2) a set of recommendations for moving
forward, (3) a proposed research agenda to examine in depth the
effects of academic status-seeking on the entire academic enterprise,
(4) proceedings from the workshop on the four topics noted above, and
(5) four substantial and broadly conceived background papers on the
workshop topics, with associated literature reviews.
The document explores, in particular, the tightly intertwined
phenomena of peer review in publication and academic promotion, the
values and associated costs to the Academy of the current system,
experimental forms of peer review in various disciplinary areas, the
effects of scholarly practices on the publishing system, and the
possibilities and real costs of creating alternative loci for peer
review and publishing that link scholarly societies, libraries,
institutional repositories, and university presses. We also explore
the motivations and ingredients of successful open access resolutions
that are directed at peer-reviewed article-length material. In doing
so, this report suggests that creating a wider array of
institutionally acceptable and cost-effective alternatives to peer
reviewing and publishing scholarly work could maintain the quality of
academic peer review, support greater research productivity, reduce
the explosive growth of low-quality publications, increase the
purchasing power of cash-strapped libraries, better support the free
flow and preservation of ideas, and relieve the burden on overtaxed
faculty of conducting too much peer review.
This latest report on the state and future of peer review is a natural
extension of our findings in Assessing the Future
Landscape of Scholarly Communication: An Exploration of Faculty Values
and Needs in Seven Disciplines (2010), which stressed the
need for a more nuanced academic reward system that is less dependent
on citation metrics, the slavish adherence to marquee journals and
university presses, and the growing tendency of institutions to
outsource assessment of scholarship to such proxies as default
promotion criteria.
Links to the complete results of our ongoing work can be found at
The Future of Scholarly Communication Project website.
========================================
Diane Harley, Ph.D.,
Principal Investigator and Director, Higher Education in the Digital
Age Project,
|