I realized over the weekend that I’ve been struggling for so long with the article I’m writing—or, to be honest, not writing—that it’s (a) now pretty heavily overdue, and (b) threatening to take on the albatross-like status that only things I feel hugely guilty about can take on, a situation that compounds daily, as my guilt prevents me from being able to fully confont the object of my guilt.  Etc.  So clearly steps must be taken.

I’m now in the second day of a very strict regime, in which I sit down at the computer immediately after performing the necessary morning ablutions and having a little breakfast and caffeine.  I am not allowed to fire up the email client.  I am not allowed to open a browser window.  There are no forms of interactivity available to my computer, for one half hour.  For one half hour, I open only the article draft and my notes, and that is all I look at.  For one half hour.  And I write, something, even if it’s totally placeholder prose that I know won’t make it into the final version, even if it’s just bullet point notes about what comes next.

What I have, after two days of this, is a lot of mangled bullet points and notes for things I’ve got to read and/or recover from old research.  It’s not pretty, but there’s a lot of it, and it’s starting to take on a kind of shape.  I’m beginning to get interested.

And today was a bit easier than yesterday, I think.

I seem to recall having mentioned something like this a while back, about the relationship between ease and frequency in writing, something about needing to practice daily.  It’s probably bad when the need to reread applies to your own ideas, too.

(cross-posted from if:book)

Over the last several months, as I’ve met with the folks from if:book and with the quite impressive group of academics we pulled together to discuss the possibility of starting an all-electronic scholarly press, I’ve spent an awful lot of time thinking and talking about peer review—how it currently functions, why we need it, and how it might be improved.  Peer review is extremely important—I want to acknowledge that right up front—but it threatens to become the axle around which all conversations about the future of publishing get wrapped, like Isadora Duncan’s scarf, strangling any possible innovations in scholarly communication before they can get launched.  In order to move forward with any kind of innovative publishing process, we must solve the peer review problem, but in order to do so, we first have to separate the structure of peer review from the purposes it serves—and we need to be a bit brutally honest with ourselves about those purposes, distinguishing between those purposes we’d ideally like peer review to serve and those functions it actually winds up fulfilling.

The issue of peer review has of course been brought back to the front of my consciousness by the experiment with open peer review currently being undertaken by the journal Nature, as well as by the debate about the future of peer review that the journal is currently hosting (both introduced last week on if:book).  The experiment is fairly simple:  the editors of Nature have created an online open review system that will run parallel to its traditional anonymous review process.

From 5 June 2006, authors may opt to have their submitted manuscripts posted publicly for comment.

Any scientist may then post comments, provided they identify themselves. Once the usual confidential peer review process is complete, the public ‘open peer review’ process will be closed. Editors will then read all comments on the manuscript and invite authors to respond. At the end of the process, as part of the trial, editors will assess the value of the public comments.

As several entries in the web debate that is running alongside this trial make clear, though, this is not exactly a groundbreaking model; the editors of several other scientific journals that already use open review systems to varying extents have posted brief comments about their processes.  Electronic Transactions in Artificial Intelligence, for instance, has a two-stage process, a three-month open review stage, followed by a speedy up-or-down refereeing stage (with some time for revisions, if desired, inbetween).  This process, the editors acknowledge, has produced some complications in the notion of “publication,” as the texts in the open review stage are already freely available online; in some sense, the journal itself has become a vehicle for re-publishing selected articles.

Peer review is, by this model, designed to serve two different purposes—first, fostering discussion and feedback amongst scholars, with the aim of strengthening the work that they produce; second, filtering that work for quality, such that only the best is selected for final “publication.” ETAI’s dual-stage process makes this bifurcation in the purpose of peer review clear, and manages to serve both functions well.  Moreover, by foregrounding the open stage of peer review—by considering an article “published” during the three months of its open review, but then only “refereed” once anonymous scientists have held their up-or-down vote, a vote that comes only after the article has been read, discussed, and revised—this kind of process seems to return the center of gravity in peer review to communication amongst peers.

I wonder, then, about the relatively conservative move that Nature has made with its open peer review trial.  First, the journal is at great pains to reassure authors and readers that traditional, anonymous peer review will still take place alongside open discussion.  Beyond this, however, there seems to be a relative lack of communication between those two forms of review: open review will take place at the same time as anonymous review, rather than as a preliminary phase, preventing authors from putting the public comments they receive to use in revision; and while the editors will “read” all such public comments, it appears that only the anonymous reviews will be considered in determining whether any given article is published.  Is this caution about open review an attempt to avoid throwing out the baby of quality control with the bathwater of anonymity?  In fact, the editors of Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics present evidence (based on their two-stage review process) that open review significantly increases the quality of articles a journal publishes:

Our statistics confirm that collaborative peer review facilitates and enhances quality assurance. The journal has a relatively low overall rejection rate of less than 20%, but only three years after its launch the ISI journal impact factor ranked Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics twelfth out of 169 journals in ‘Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences’ and ‘Environmental Sciences’.

These numbers support the idea that public peer review and interactive discussion deter authors from submitting low-quality manuscripts, and thus relieve editors and reviewers from spending too much time on deficient submissions.

By keeping anonymous review and open review separate, without allowing the open any precedence, Nature is allowing itself to avoid asking any risky questions about the purposes of its process, and is perhaps inadvertently maintaining the focus on peer review’s gatekeeping function.  The result of such a focus is that scholars are less able to learn from the review process, less able to put comments on their work to use, and less able to respond to those comments in kind.

If anonymous, closed peer review processes aren’t facilitating scholarly discourse, what purposes do they serve?  Gatekeeping, as I’ve suggested, is a primary one; as almost all of the folks I’ve talked with this spring have insisted, peer review is necessary to ensuring that the work published by scholarly outlets is of sufficiently high quality, and anonymity is necessary in order to allow reviewers the freedom to say that an article should not be published.  In fact, this question of anonymity is quite fraught for most of the academics with whom I’ve spoken; they have repeatedly responded with various degrees of alarm to suggestions that their review comments might in fact be more productive delivered publicly, as part of an ongoing conversation with the author, rather than as a backchannel, one-way communication mediated by an editor.  Such a position may be justifiable if, again, the primary purpose of peer review is quality control, and if the process is reliably scrupulous.  However, as other discussants in the Nature web debate point out, blind peer review is not a perfect process, subject as it is to all kinds of failures and abuses, ranging from flawed articles that nonetheless make it through the system to ideas that are appropriated by unethical reviewers, with all manner of cronyism and professional jealousy inbetween.

So, again, if closed peer review processes aren’t serving scholars in their need for feedback and discussion, and if they can’t be wholly relied upon for their quality-control functions, what’s left?  I’d argue that the primary purpose that anonymous peer review actually serves today, at least in the humanities (and that qualifier, and everything that follows from it, opens a whole other can of worms that needs further discussion—what are the different needs with respect to peer review in the different disciplines?), is that of institutional warranting, of conveying to college and university administrations that the work their employees are doing is appropriate and well-thought-of in its field, and thus that these employees are deserving of ongoing appointments, tenure, promotions, raises, and whathaveyou.

Are these the functions that we really want peer review to serve?  Vast amounts of scholars’ time is poured into the peer review process each year; wouldn’t it be better to put that time into open discussions that not only improve the individual texts under review but are also, potentially, productive of new work?  Isn’t it possible that scholars would all be better served by separating the question of credentialing from the publishing process, by allowing everything through the gate, by designing a post-publication peer review process that focuses on how a scholarly text should be received rather than whether it should be out there in the first place?  Would the various credentialing bodies that currently rely on peer review’s gatekeeping function be satisfied if we were to say to them, “no, anonymous reviewers did not determine whether my article was worthy of publication, but if you look at the comments that my article has received, you can see that ten of the top experts in my field had really positive, constructive things to say about it”?

Nature‘s experiment is an honorable one, and a step in the right direction.  It is, however, a conservative step, one that foregrounds the institutional purposes of peer review rather than the ways that such review might be made to better serve the scholarly community.  We’ve been working this spring on what we imagine to be a more progressive possibility, the scholarly press reimagined not as a disseminator of discrete electronic texts, but instead as a network that brings scholars together, allowing them to publish everything from blogs to books in formats that allow for productive connections, discussions, and discoveries.  I’ll be writing more about this network soon; in the meantime, however, if we really want to energize scholarly discourse through this new mode of networked publishing, we’re going to have to design, from the ground up, a productive new peer review process, one that makes more fruitful interaction among authors and readers a primary goal.

So, I’m sitting in Houston, waiting on the inbound aircraft that will take my outbound flight merrily back to the west coast. We’re going to be about an hour late. I am absolutely, positively, not complaining.

Here’s why: I don’t have the whole story as yet—I only got a somewhat garbled version from my mother—but my sister seems to have had the worst travel day ever, in the history of travel.

That, of course, is an overstatement. That little Titanic thing was probably worse. But here’s what I currently understand about her story:

She was supposed to leave New Orleans for Newark at 10 am. Weather on the east coast, not to put to fine a point on it, blows, and has blown for some time now. So no east coast flights were going anywhere. But they kept saying, oh, it’s a little delayed, no worries. And apparently, they loaded and unloaded the plane a couple of times. Why? Dunno. Mom’s semi-hysteria wouldn’t say.

In any case, they definitely loaded the plane sometime in the 4 pm vicinity, and then decided sometime after that to unload it again, but told everyone that they could leave their stuff on the plane. While they were waiting, my sister ducked into the place next door to her gate to grab something to eat on the plane—and when she got back, the plane was gone.

No boarding announcements. No announcements of any kind. If you weren’t standing in the immediate gate area, you were still in New Orleans.

And, if you were my sister, everything except your wallet was now on its way to Newark.

And your airline isn’t operating any more flights to Newark today.

Here’s the good news: she must have thrown some kind of very effective fit, because the airline (1) managed to get some subset of her stuff off the plane (I have no idea; Mom’s semi-hysteria was chilling out a bit by this point, but still wasn’t terribly clear with the details); (2) refunded the entire purchase price of her ticket, which funds she was able to use to purchase another ticket on another airline, leaving very soon thereafter and arriving at JFK; and (3) promised to gather up the rest of her stuff off the plane and make sure that it appeared at JFK when she did.

Of course, the flight to JFK was promptly delayed for two hours.

Me, I’m just sitting here. Not complaining, not one little bit.

It’s been a fabulous visit, but I’m about up to here with both the heat and the humidity. Not to mention the crazy fattening food, the omnipresent alcohol, and the general sloth. I think I need a week at a spa to recover from my weekend in Louisiana.

Fortunately, we’re headed back to California tomorrow. More, and of more substance, soon. I promise.

Two and a half hours on the runway in Houston.  Fortunately, there was beer after that.

I’ve had a paper accepted for this October’s BlogTalk Reloaded, and so it appears I’m headed to Vienna in October.  This looks like a fascinating set of papers, from a broad range of folks doing work on and in social software.  It’s an exciting lineup, and a new city for me…

Under the category of things I’ve been meaning to note for a while:  David Weinberger at Many-to-Many brought my attention to PennTags, a project of the UPenn library that allows users not only to collect and tag bookmarks, del.icio.us style, but also to tag links to the library’s catalog data, thus leaving traces for themselves (and for others) of their research processes and pathways.  (More info about the project.)

While this project doesn’t yet affect the structure of the actual libary catalog (something that I’m not quite sure is clear in Weinberger’s post), it does present an exciting possibility for research libraries to explore:  how can they provide user-oriented social software resources that are integrated with the library’s more traditional static archiving functions?

[UPDATE, 6.27.06:  I meant to note this a couple of days ago; I was wrong, wrong, wrong.  It turns out that PennTags does affect the library catalog; when an entry gets tagged, a box appears at the bottom of the entry’s page noting how it’s been tagged, and by whom, with links to the tag pages.  See for yourself. Pretty darned nifty.]

new office
Originally uploaded by KF.

We’ve suffered a series of losses in my department this semester, and are about to find ourselves in a very different department, come fall.  I’ll put it this way:  as of Spring 2006, there were four women in the department who were senior to me.  Three of them are leaving the college—our much-adored Shakespearean is retiring, our Dickinsonian is headed off to chair a big R1 department, and our all-purpose Americanist, who has been serving as associate dean for the last three years, has been named dean of a quite great small liberal arts college on the other coast.  Suddenly, in our department of fifteen, there are only (depending on how you look at it) four or five folks more senior than I, and only one woman who’s been here longer than me.

There’s something vertiginous about this shift in the department’s center of gravity; I never, ever expected to be this senior this soon.  I keep telling myself, however, that this is a moment ripe with possibility, in which our department might remake itself into something dramatically new, something that can energize all of us intellectually.

And then there’s the offices.  Offices in our department have always been assigned following a slightly morphed version of seniority, one based less on rank than on length of time served within the department.  By that standard, I’m the fourth most senior person actually resident in the department (the one female colleague who is senior to me is a college administrator, and so is housed elsewhere), and so, as offices were being reassigned, I expected to find myself in slightly larger digs.

What I did not expect, not at all, was to find myself in the office of the eminent Shakespearean, a gorgeous, massive office on the upper southwest corner of the building.

As it turns out, I was right not to expect it; the colleague who is immediately senior to me should have been given this office (and did request it), but a communications snafu resulted in me moving in here before the mistake was discovered.  After a little negotiating, we’ve decided that, for this year at least, he’ll move into the office of the Dickinsonian, on the downstairs northwest corner, and next year we’ll check in with one another to see if he wants to switch places.

So I’m trying to strike a balance between reveling in my glorious new abode and maintaining a position of non-attachment, so as not to be disappointed if I don’t stay here.  This post constitutes a bit of reveling.  As does the phenomenal amount of work I’ve gotten done in the last week.  Now back to non-attachment, and to work.

books!
Originally uploaded by KF.

They arrived yesterday, proving that this project, begun in 1996, is finally, one-hundred percent, completely and totally done.

Celebration commenced roughly immediately.  Recovering continues today.

(And at the risk of over-advertising, remember that you can get your very own copy here.)

It’s been a week of major housekeeping since I returned from New York: first, I needed to unpack all the stuff that I moved back from Louisiana, which arrived while I was away; after that, the condo needed some serious organizing and cleaning. Just as I finished that, I began packing up and moving my office across the hall into what are some seriously palatial new digs (pictures TK, once I’ve gotten to take them). This was followed by several days of sorting and reorganizing files (may as well get some kind of real improvement out of the move, rather than just more space for the same old mess). And now I’m embarked on what may turn out to be the most time-consuming and ridiculous task yet—or what may turn out to be miraculous in the upgrade it works on my brain: I’m entering a bunch of my old paper research notes onto the computer, and I’m importing all of my old computer research notes into DEVONthink, hoping to create a powerfully searchable database of all my notes. I’m also building, for the first time, a citation database. Somehow or another I managed to get through college, grad school, and the first eight years of my professorness without ever using EndNote or anything like it, so I’m now attempting to capture everything in Bookends. (Rumors suggest the future integration of DEVONthink and Bookends, which would make me awfully happy.)

In any case, if you don’t hear from me for a while, it’s because I’m up to my elbows in reorganization. More, better, and clearer-headed, soon.