Academic Electronic Journals: Past, Present, and Future - Advances in Computers - page 169

Refereeing journal articles is a service to the community with limited rewards.
Finding high quality reviewers is often difficult. Yet articles in advanced electronic-
ity e-journals require additional efforts from reviewers. They contain more material
(e.g., videos of lab experiments, raw data). Reviewers must be technically knowl-
edgeable to evaluate some of this material and the media used. In addition, some
articles may not be printable on a conventional printer 54 or are not written sequen-
tially (i.e., they use hypertext). 55 The reviewers would have to follow a variety of
links and read the article on-line rather than in print, making it more difficult to
review. Increasing the workload of reviewers without some apparent return would
create resistance and reduce the number of available reviewers. The review process
may become the new bottleneck of scholarly publishing.
Current T&P guidelines are not equipped to handle advanced electronicity
e-journals. For example, MISQ Discovery expects submissions to be theoretically
rigorous and to use the features afforded by the technology. These types of journals
will require changes in the typical T&P committee's view of electronic scholarship.
If T&P committees do not recognize and reward the added effort required, most
authors would be reluctant to contribute to these journals (see Section 6.2.4 ) and
reviewers would be reluctant to referee these articles.
Gatekeepers are likely to face similar challenges (loss of control and de-valued
status) as they would with paper replacement e-journals. Therefore, the added media
should have little effect on gatekeepers.
6.5.3 Skywriting and Community Reviews
Harnad [19] suggested the concepts of “ scholarly skywriting ” and an open, inter-
active refereeing process as ways to restore the communication function of academic
journals. In scholarly skywriting, a paper is, in effect, never formally finished but
continually reviewed by all its readers. Authors are able to change a manuscript at
any time based on readers' comments. Thus, the work becomes a living entity rather
than a static product. In Harnad's scenario, this ongoing refereeing process becomes
an integral part of the formation of the article. 56
The basic idea behind the concept is to shift the control (of accepting or rejecting
articles) from the gatekeepers back to the community. Articles are posted as they are
54 For example see Hars [21] .
55 For example see Myers [36] at: http://www.misq.org/discovery/MISQD_isworld/index.html .
56 The difficulty of implementing such a system is great. It requires people to be willing to make and send
comments, authors willing to make changes, electronic repositories keeping both comments and revisions,
and people using the work to review the repository periodically. Living scholarship in general did not
gather much support in the years since it was first discussed. An example is the few contributions that came
to MISQ Discovery which sought to encourage periodic revision. The Wikipedia ( www.wikipedia.com )
is an example of successful skywriting, although it is not an element of scholarly publication.