A Proposal for Open Peer Review

Abstract

[1] Throughout its history, Music Theory Online has leveraged new digital technologies to increase access to high-level scholarship and facilitate discussions of published materials inside the journal itself. (See, for example, the commentaries in Volumes 0.2, 1.1, 13.3, and 16.4.) New technologies and publishing practices have developed in the past few years that can carry these practices even further, in great service to the academic community. One such publishing practice is open peer review, exemplified by publications like the Journal of Digital Humanities, Digital Humanities Now, Digital Humanities This, American History Now, and the book Web Writing: Why and How for Liberal Arts Teaching and Learning (Dougherty et al. 2014). While multiple practices exist that can be considered manifestations of open peer review, open peer review in its fullest sense takes the scholarly discussion that traditionally follows publication-such as the discussion threads contained in the early issues of MTO-and moves it pre-publication, rendering them part of the review process. Open peer review ensures high visibility for the best work, extensive vetting by the scholarly community pre-publication, and a timely publication process, all the while maintaining high standards for peer-reviewed publication.[2] Music theorists would benefit from having an open peer-review journal, and MTO is best situated to be that journal. MTO is also well situated to experiment with open peer review without committing its entire future to such a model. In this article, I will explain open peer review in more detail by following an example article through the process of review and publication, commenting on the potential benefits of this process along the way. I conclude with a proposal for how MTO might experiment with the open peer-review model in order to gauge its potential for our field more precisely.Following the Process[3] One of the first articles to appear in the Journal of Digital Humanities is Trevor Owens's "Defining Data for Humanists: Text, Artifact, Information or Evidence?" This article began as a chapter for the book, Writing History in the Digital Age, itself an open peer-review project (Nawrotski and Dougherty, 2013). Writing History in the Digital Age was undertaken by co-editors Jack Dougherty (Trinity College, Connecticut) and Kristen Nawrotzki (Padagogische Hochschule Heidelberg), in collaboration with the University of Michigan Press. This project is available from UMP as a print book, a downloadable ebook, and an open-access web book as part of their series of digitalculturebooks that explore novel publication models like open peer review and simultaneous print and open-access publication. For that project, Owens co-authored a chapter with Frederick W. Gibbs called "The Hermeneutics of Data and Historical Writing." The first version of this chapter was posted to the project website in the fall of 2011. On this website, readers can comment on the chapter as a whole, or on specific paragraphs in the chapter. The chapter received 35 total comments-12 on the chapter as a whole, and 23 on specific passages. Some of these comments we would recognize as typical peer-review summaries (accept/reject/revise with comments on how best to revise); others were directed at improving specific elements in the chapter.[4] Owens and Gibbs replied to some comments directly, and ultimately composed a revision of this chapter, which appeared on the project website in the spring of 2012. At this stage in the publication process, the chapter moved from review mode to copyediting mode. The chapter on the website includes a link to a document in Google Drive where any reader can comment (though comments ended up limited to the two authors and two editors), but only the document owners can change the text in response to those comments. The final version of this document was submitted to the publisher for inclusion in the print and electronic book editions (Gibbs and Owens 2013). …