Teaching with Technology @ Tufts

• Online Peer Review

In the article Book 2.0: Scholars turn monographs into digital conversations http://chronicle.com/free/v52/i47/47a02001.htm McKenzie Wark, a professor of media and cultural studies at New School University, latest book GAM3R 7H30RY (pronounced "Gamer Theory") http://www.futureofthebook.org/gamertheory/ is being peer-reviewed both through a traditional scholarly press and through the Internet. Wark was approached by Ben Vershbow, a researcher at the Institute for the Future of the Book (http://www.futureofthebook.org/), a center supported by the University of Southern California. The Institute has begun an online scholarly press called MediaCommons, that will focus on the discipline of media studies.

"MediaCommons will try a variety of new ideas to shake up scholarly publishing. One of them is essentially a mini-Wikipedia about aspects of the discipline. Or, as the announcement states, "electronic reference works, in which a community collectively produces, in a mode analogous to current wiki projects, authoritative resources for research in the field."

Nature, the international weekly journal of science, http://www.nature.com/nature/index.html
for instance, started a program this summer in which authors can opt to have articles they submit made available immediately as electronic pre-prints that anyone can comment on. Those papers are still reviewed the old-fashioned way, but the comments by online users are also taken into consideration.

Other online book experiments include Pulse http://www.pulsethebook.com/index.php which "... does survey the 'new biology'-human systems and machines that work like living things—which is now transforming pretty much every field of human activity. " The book's "form is innovative" and available in print, as a networked book on the blog, by RSS feed or by email.

Another example is Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, which Yale published in May is also available in a free online format together with wiki pages that allow readers to criticize and annotate his text - http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php/Main_Page

PLoS One http://www.plosone.org/ , an international, peer-reviewed, open-access, online publication is being developed by the Public Library of Science, and "welcomes reports on primary research from any scientific discipline." PLoS is "a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource."

Providing open access to digital articles is not new. Since 1991, arXiv http://arxiv.org/ , an online archive run by Cornell University, has been electronically archiving and distributing research papers on physics, mathematics, computer science, nonlinear sciences, and quantitative biology. However the idea seems to be gathering momentum as some in academia are questioning the lengthy peer review process: ,On the Future of Academic Publishing, Peer Review, and Tenure Requirements
http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/on_the_future_of_academic_publishing_peer_review_and_tenure_requirements_or

• Free Textbooks

The Global Text Project" http://globaltext.org/index.html hopes to offer 1,000 textbooks that cover the range of topics typically encountered in the first two years of a university's undergraduate programs free to the developing world.