by: Patricia Cohen
Digitally savvy academics have been struggling to reconcile new media with traditional scholarly publishing, which is painfully slow and generally locked behind paywalls or unavailable online. One answer has been offered by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, which on Wednesday unveiled PressForward, a new open access platform for online scholarship.
“It’s a major new initiative we’re launching to change the landscape of scholarly communication,” said Dan Cohen, a historian and the director of the center. With an $862,000 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, PressForward will collect everything from blogs to conference papers, reports and other projects created specifically for the Web.
What PressForward will also provide is an accelerated version of peer review, the essential quality control that advocates of traditional scholarly publications argue is what distinguishes their discipline from others. The Rosenzweig Center has signed on two journalists, Alexis Madrigal at The Atlantic and Adam Aston, a former editor at BusinessWeek and The Economist, to serve on its advisory board. Mr. Cohen said he wants to serve all of the traditional scholarly constituencies, “as well as a broad audience currently locked out of gated scholarship.”
from: NY Times
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