MediaCommons - more than a digital journal
While academic journals are becoming more ubiquitous online for subscribers, they invariably end up in book form. Academia, it seems, still needs to have journals printed to give prestige and weight to the information they contain. But the Media Commons program is hoping a peer-reviewed site aimed at academics will attract the legitimate scholars of media studies it needs to be successful
The model is somewhat like a Wikipedia for scholars. The hope is that contributions would be made by members which would eventually lead to tenure and promotion lending the project solid academic scholarship.
"We're convinced that media studies scholars will need to lead the way in convincing tenure and promotion committees that new modes of publishing like this network are not simply valid but important," writes Kathleen Fitzpatrick of the IFB.
But don't think about it as a digital journal, Fitzpatrick says. The model is more scholarly network. "The more we thought about the purposes behind electronic scholarly publishing, the more we became focused on the need not simply to provide better access to discrete scholarly texts but rather to reinvigorate intellectual discourse, and thus connections, amongst peers (and, not incidentally, discourse between the academy and the wider intellectual public)."