There are many details to work out with this journal, not the least of which will be the submission and review guidelines. Two of the many issues to discuss include the following:
1) Turnaround time
One of the greatest advantages of an online journal, and a fitting one for covering a field which prides itself on rapid posting of information, is the ability to publish articles in a timely fashion. Not constrained by a print publication schedule, we can publish an article as soon as it is reviewed, revised and ready to be uploaded to our site. Naturally, that means also having a quick turnaround time for reviewers. Tim B shared with me that an online journal he works with required from its reviewers a three-week response to submissions. I don't want to impose such a requirement unless we have consensus about such a time frame. As for myself, my background in journalism has led me into the bad habit of lacking motivation until deadlines approach--and thus I'm better off with a short response cycle and don't have the guilt accompanying projects hanging over my head for a long time. And, unless it comes at a bad time in the semester, three weeks is usually sufficient time to juggle a review with my other work.
But, what say you? Is three weeks too onerous? Should we go with a month or more? Or cut it down to two weeks?
2) Submission methods
Since we'll be publishing hypertexts on our website, it makes sense to have the authors submit these same hypertexts--but, do we want to require them to submit them via CD-ROM/DVD? Or just give us a hyperlink to their submission that has been placed on the web--which is probably much better, outside of the concern that the hypertext could be altered during the review process. Thoughts?
Feel free to also use this thread to raise other concerns about the submission/review process. I strongly encourage you to visit the submissions guidelines page for the Kairos journal I mentioned earlier (http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/submissions.html). There are a lot of technical and other guidelines we may want to borrow/revise/consider, and using their guidelines page as a starting point might prevent us from having to reinvent the wheel.
6 comments:
Bob -
I think the 3-week turnaround time is doable, as long as we're not flooded with content (which would be a nice problem to have!).
Also - I think your link may be wrong on Kairos - here's what worked for me:
http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/cfht.html
Unfortunately, the "Technical Considerations" page was experiencing "technical difficulties" when I looked at it, but overall, I think the journal becomes MUCH easier to manage if we require those who submit the material to post it online and we simply provide a headline/summary/maybe visuals + hyperlink.
Thanks, Deb. I mistakenly added the www in front of their web address. I've corrected the link in the original post. For ease of use and in case there are, ironically, technical problems on their site in the future, I've copy/pasted their technical considerations here.
Technical Considerations
For webtexts, your markup should be clean and simple.
• Markup that validates to the XHMTL 1.0 Strict DOCTYPE is preferred.
• Markup that validates to XHTML 1.0 Transitional DOCTYPE will be accepted (strict is preferred).
• External style sheets are required to facilitate the editing process. Please do not use inline styles.
• Please check for cross-browser compatibility before submitting. Your text should work in current browsers (Internet Explorer 5.5+, Firefox 1.0+, Safari 1.0+, Opera 8+) and degrade gracefully when elements such as JavaScript are not enabled by a user's browser or when images/CSS fail to load.
A few other guidelines for webtexts:
• The H1 tag is reserved. Please use H2 through H4 tags to format your webtext.
• Use lowercase for inline elements to maintain compliance with W3C standards and improve readability.
• Use alt-tags with each image to provide a clear and concise description of the image and improve accessibility.
• Please do not use blind links; choose link text that clearly identifies the linked document.
• Whenever possible, link to established sites whose links are not likely to change or disappear in order to avoid link rot.
• Do not link terminal punctuation.
• Video files should be in Quicktime (.mov) format. MPEG is also accepted.
• Image files are accepted in .jpg, .gif, or .png formats.
• Flash (.swf and .flv) files are accepted.
• Texts created using sophie are accepted.
• Leave a left margin of at least 80px for the Kairos Toolbar on all your pages.
• Beginning with issue 13.1, Kairos will require the inclusion of specific metadata for accepted submissions.
See the Kairos Style Guide for information about metadata requirements.
Mindy Adams uses a WIKI site effectively for writing the AEJMC Viscom program. Everyone can change anything, but the alerts warn other users and all changes are tracked.
Who would have thought even peer review journals are subject to disruptive media?
As for organization of the journal, The traditional organization (Conventional (peer reviewed articles, book/scholarship reviews, perhaps teaching tips, etc).) will give the journal gravitas among the traditionalists who still wield power in AEJMC and on campus.
In addition to teaching tips, I would ask the board to consider an applied research section also, in which we garage mechanics road test ideas. I was told Missouri organized its convergence department on this model.
I'm OK with a two or three week turn around. What I've found is that when stuff comes to me either online or via snail mail, I'll knock it out when I get it. If it sits, it'll sit to the last minute. Even then, sometimes, I get a "hey did you finish this?" note and I'll knock it out that day.
As for submissions, I'd make a case that not all convergence submissions are fully digital, so opening the aperture to be as wide as possible for submission formats would be in our best interest.
My two cents.
Vince
I guess I could support a three-week turnaround. But, a month would be better.
Three weeks seems to be a manageable time frame. Two weeks would probably push some of us to the limits, particularly if those submissions hit at rough or busy parts of the semester, particularly around midterms or finals.
Like you, Bob, my journalism background makes me particularly susceptible to "deadline motivation sickness." I think we need some kind of specific timeframe in place to move a submission through our review process in a timely manner.
As far as submission method, it only makes sense to have the submission via hyperlink to their text. We might even consider creating a google account for the journal and then we can share the submissions among each other in Google Docs. We would be able to see each others comments and edits on the site, and we would have instant sharing of the submission and its iterations. Also, we could then be taking a copy of the original submission and putting it on our site, and that would alleviate the issue of the submitter being able to alter it during our review process. Just a thought.
After reviewing the kairos page, I like a lot of what they do. I do wonder if it might be too technical for some of our potential authors, though.
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