Stevan Harnad is probably the most influential figure advocating electronic forms of scholarly writing and peer review. His vision and outspoken views on the peer review process has enabled the scholarly community to begin considering differences between the electronic and print media for scholarly publishing, including affordances of speed and interaction. Harnad coined the expression Scholarly Skywriting (1990) to depict a continuous, interactive process in which an original work is published along side rebuttals and commentary. The original is revised, eliciting new commentary and fresh rebuttals in a contiuing dialectic cycle. Harnad is the founding editor of Psycholoquy, a journal which was founded with the intent of practicing the "scholarly skywriting" model.
In the Winter of '94, Nicholas Burbules and Bertram Bruce quietly posted, for open online review, a copy an article they had submitted for publication in the Educational Researcher. The article, "This is Not a Paper" was about the changing perceptions of electronic publication and scholarly writing. By the time it appeared in print nearly a year later, (November, 1995), the online article had already found its place within the emerging conversation over the legitimacy of online publication and the merits of a "vanity press". Network readership extended to a much broader audience than that which was intended for the print Journal. The article describes the dynamic, continuous self-correcting benefits derived from a system of on-going, open peer review.Bernard Hibbitts opened debate within the legal comunity by suggesting the possible demise of the traditional law review as we know it. Hibbitts advances the possibility that legal scholars can directly publish their work online, bypassing the artificial filter of student review, a legacy of the age of print. It is a process which serves short-term institutional aims at the expense of the larger legal community.
See corollary sites that link to this page.
Martin Ryder