The New York Times discusses the possibility of a shift from peer-reviewed journals to online crowd-sourced reviews in the context of several recent projects, including MediaCommons, which has been championed by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, author of Planned Obsolescence, coming in Spring 2011. MediaCommons is a product of NYU Libraries.
In the humanities, in which the monograph has been king, there is more inertia. “We have never done it that way before,” should be academia’s motto, said Kathleen Fitzpatrick, a professor of media studies at Pomona College.
Ms. Fitzpatrick was a founder of the MediaCommons network in 2007. She posted chapters of her own book “Planned Obsolescence” on the site, and she used the comments readers provided to revise the manuscript for NYU Press. She also included the project in the package she presented to the committee that promoted her to full professor this year.
