From: "Swisher, Bob" <bswisher@ou.edu>
To: "'it-fyi@listserv.ou.edu'" <it-fyi@lists.ou.edu>
Subject: it-fyi: On-Line Format for Scholarly Papers (Chron of Higher Ed)
Date: Tue, 1 Jun 1999 15:12:33 -0500
An On-Line Format for Scholarly Papers Lets Critics Aim Their Barbs
Precisely
By KELLY McCOLLUM
An interactive system for publishing scholarly papers, created by a
professor and a graduate student at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, offers instant gratification for critics and precise
feedback for authors.
The system, called the Interactive Paper Project
(http://lrsdb2.ed.uiuc.edu:591/ipp/), is an electronic format that lets
readers insert comments within scholarly papers as they read. Forms at the
end of every paragraph encourage readers to comment on specific ideas or
points, rather than to give a broad critique at the end of the paper,
although they can do that as well. The project was created by James Levin, a
professor of educational psychology, and James Buell, a graduate student.
Mr. Levin likens the format to a printed draft that a scholar might
photocopy and pass around to a few colleagues for comments or suggestions.
While photocopies might come back with notes scribbled in the margins, the
scholar would look at Mr. Levin's version in a Web browser, where comments
would appear following each paragraph of the text. Readers can comment on
the comments of others, too.
Mr. Levin says the format allows readers to participate in a discussion that
is structured by the ideas in a paper, but not constrained by it. He also
says the format could be useful in the peer-review process for scholarly
journals.
"You would have a more-collaborative review process," he says. "Right now
the review process is pretty much individual -- you send out end copies to
end reviewers, and each one reviews it in isolation." He adds, "You may
still want to do that, but this gives you the opportunity to make it a
collaborative thing."
The project's Web site has a handful of papers, mostly articles on issues in
education and technology by professors at the university. The site is open
to anyone who wishes to read and respond to the papers. If a journal were to
use the format, Mr. Levin says, password protection could be added to limit
who had access to the papers.
Mr. Levin says the technology behind the archive is relatively simple and
could be duplicated by anyone who wanted to set up a similar system. The
texts of the papers and the comments are stored on a server using Filemaker
Pro, a common data-base program.
Readers can choose either to see other readers' comments inserted directly
into the text of papers or to have the comments appear in a separate file
linked to the text. Authors can easily drop the comments if they choose to
submit their articles for print without making changes to their work.
But choosing to leave comments in could also be useful, says Nicholas C.
Burbules, a professor of educational policy at the university who has posted
papers to the archive. Comments added to the papers "become not only
communications from the reader to the author, but part of the archive of the
text itself," he says. "Subsequent readers may react more to that material
than to the manuscript itself."
In an electronic-only publication, there's no reason why readers couldn't
continue to add comments to papers indefinitely, he says. Authors could then
revise their work, and readers could continue to comment. Then, says Mr.
Burbules, "the distinction between a draft and a final version is no longer
a sharp distinction." He adds, "The idea that something is only a draft
until it is published -- that's an artifact of a particular kind of
technology of producing papers."
That distinction has already been tested by "e-print" servers and e-mail
lists in which scholars have distributed their work on the Internet to seek
comment from colleagues. In some cases, however, such electronic
distribution has disqualified papers from print publication.
"How is that different from the person who made 10 or 20 photocopies of a
paper in draft form and sent it to people for feedback?" asks Mr. Burbules.
"Is it just a question of numbers?"
"We're using some outmoded categories that really don't help us come to
grips with what's different about this particular medium," he adds.
Mr. Levin also sees uses for the interactive-paper format outside of
scholarly publishing. "Everyone we show this to comes up with a new idea for
using it," he says. Among the works already on the university's server are a
proposal for a new instructional program and notes from a faculty meeting.
"You could put a paper up in this format for a class and have students
respond to a paper," he says. "You could encourage a class discussion
structured by a particular reading."
Copyright © 1999 by The Chronicle of Higher Education