Along with the revived Rice University Press, which announced last week it would reboot as a digital press after a 10-year hiatus, the Institute for the Future of the Book (IF Book) last week launched MediaCommons a digital initiative in media studies that will seek to pioneer new forms of digital scholarly communication in the humanities. According to IF Book fellow Ben Vershbow, MediaCommons will go beyond editions of digital text to include a “wide-ranging scholarly network” in which media studies professionals can “write, publish, review, and discuss, in forms ranging from the blog to the monograph, from the purely textual to the multi-mediated, with all manner of degrees in between.” There are some similarities to electronic press initiatives, such as Rice UP, Vershbow notes, but also some key differences. “MediaCommons will really be a place more than a press,” Vershbow told the LJ Academic Newswire. The new edition of Rice UP, he observes, is moving to an all-digital model in order to make scholarly materials simultaneously more accessible and less expensive by taking advantage of the benefits of digital publishing. “But the way these materials are submitted, reviewed, and vetted is still quite conventional,” he explained. “MediaCommons, on the other hand, is much more about foregrounding that interaction.”
Vershbow says MediaCommons represents a “shift from thinking about an ‘electronic press’ to thinking about a ‘scholarly network,'” in an effort to reinvigorate intellectual discourse. MediaCommons seeks to address complaints common to scholarly communication: time-lags before publication, further delays in reviews or responses, a hidden peer-review system, and, of course, “increasing economic difficulties threatening many university presses and libraries.” Eventually, MediaCommons will seek to produce “concrete scholarly products,” Vershbow said. But more importantly, the project seeks to reform the process of scholarship. “This is why we are calling it a scholarly network and not a press,” he says. “In MediaCommons, a scholarly work does not have to wait for an invisible review process to conclude in order for its public life to begin. Rather it begins as soon as it submitted.”
The point, Vershbow says, is to make “visible the conversations between scholars and to forge new conversations with the public, and, moreover, to make the products of both conversations universally accessible, and fully plugged into the mutli-mediated, networked modes of contemporary intellectual life.” Why Media Studies for this initiative? Vershbow says there is a natural affinity between the field and the process of publication. “On the intellectual side, scholars in media studies explore the very tools that a network such as the one we’re proposing will use,” he explained. “We’re convinced that media studies scholars will need to lead the way in convincing tenure and promotion committees that new modes of publishing like this network are not simply valid but important. We hope that media studies will provide a key point of entry for a broader reshaping of publishing in the humanities.”
Library Journal Academic Newswire, July 27, 2006
