"Profiles in Digital Scholarship & Publishing: Cheryl Ball"
Download PDF About the IntervieweeCheryl Ball is the director of the Digital Publishing Collaborative at Wayne State University Libraries. Since 2006, Ball has been editor of the online, peer-reviewed, open-access journal Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy which is the longest continuously publishing digital journal focusing exclusively on digital media scholarship. She is also the project director for Vega, an open-access, multimedia academic publishing platform due to be released in 2019. Ball also serves as the executive director of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. About the InterviewerElizabeth Barnett is an MA candidate in Rhetoric and Writing in the University of New Mexico's Department of English Language and Literature. Her interests lie in the pedagogy of multimodal digital composition and technical writing. ContentsAn Evolution of Scholarly Multimedia Teaching Decoloniality & Multimodality |
The Rigor of Digital ScholarshipXchanges: Does the rigor of digital scholarly publishing still need explaining/justification? CB: All day long, every day! Within our discipline we have certainly come to understand that publishing online is not predatory within our own discipline. Predatory is a word that crops up a lot with open access journals. We have a lot of open-access journals in rhetoric and composition studies that were open access before open access was a thing. That phrase, “open access,” which means free to readers to access without any paywall or anything, didn't really come about until the early 2000s. Kairos and many other journals like it started well before that, five, six, seven years before that phrase became popular. Along with the rise of open-access publishing in all disciplines, people have gotten the concept that it's really easy to publish online, which delegitimizes online publishing. There is, certainly, a rise in predatory publishers, which is when people create this publishing house facade, create a lot of journals within it and then target authors with the promise of quick publishing and quick peer review. If you've been through the peer-review process for any legitimate journal you know it can take months and months and months sometimes, and yes, it takes a long time and there's a lot of reasons for that that we can talk about if you want, which are not all good and not all reasonable. But these predatory publishers prey on that and on the need of junior scholars to get things published very quickly. So open access gets conflated with predatory publishing, which then gets conflated with digital publishing at large. Textual publishing of the kind that Kairos does can often get lumped in there, even though a big part of what I do at every talk that I give is talk about the peer-review process within Kairos: what the process looks like at our journal and at journals that are like us. People are amazed at the level of rigor that we bring to the table with these kinds of text. We have to because we're dealing, again, with rhetoric, design, and code. We have to be able to attend to all three of those layers simultaneously in a web text, which means we're peer reviewing each of those in concert. They can't be divorced from each other and be adequately peer reviewed or adequately copyedited for that matter. The argument for online publishing, as it gets conflated with digital publishing and as it gets conflated with whether something is peer reviewed, has gotten slightly better over the years, but these texts will always be new to someone. A big part of what I talk about with people these days is just introducing them to the 25-year history of publishing this kind of work in this particular discipline to say, "Hey, look at this example of what one disciplinary community can do and allows you all these different affordances that web affords you to communicate your research. Here's how you might adopt it to your discipline.” They're always amazed by that back history because they think it started two years ago.
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