More on Scholarly Publishing: MediaCommons

As a result of following up some links on Alexandra Juhasz's great blog, Media Praxis: Integrating Media Theory, Practice and Politics, I decided to set up a new list of weblogs, on Film Studies For Free, which discuss digital scholarship in useful ways, I believe, for Film Studies researchers in an age in which we struggle not only with issues of research quality but also with evolving forms of research audit.

One of the blogs I've listed, MediaCommons: A Digital Scholarly Network, took me off to the following resource of interest: an article published as a work-in-progress on MediaCommons in March 2007: 'MediaCommons: Scholarly Publishing in the Age of the Internet'. It covers the emergence of digital scholarly publishing, MLA Taskforce Recommendations, the 'Born-Digital Monograph', Trackback, Versioning, Comments, Peer Review, and Peer-to-Peer Review.

MediaCommons, a project-in-development with support from the Institute for the Future of the Book (part of the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC) and the MacArthur Foundation, is attempting to establish a network in which

scholars, students, and other interested members of the public can help to shift the focus of scholarship back to the circulation of discourse. This network will be community-driven, responding flexibly to the needs and desires of its users. It will also be multi-nodal, providing access to a wide range of intellectual writing and media production, including forms such as blogs, wikis, and journals, as well as digitally networked scholarly monographs. Larger-scale publishing projects will be developed with an editorial board that will also function as stewards of the larger network. (Quotation from HERE)

Through the MediaCommons site I also found a link to the following fascinating posting about Open Access publishing, 'Open-access is the future: boycott locked-down academic journals', on the blog apophenia by Danah Boyd. The posting contains links to further discussions about Open Access, too. These include the highly useful piece 'Six things that researchers need to know about open access' by Peter Suber, with plenty of great links to further sites of interest.