Mike Roy (Middlebury College) and Charles Henry (CLIR)
In the electronically networked world of contemporary scholarship, the traditional role of the publisher as gatekeeper and paid distributor of scholarly argument is no longer tenable. Yet the editorial services a publisher provides to authors and the filtering service it provides to readers and promotion-and-tenure committees are more important in the Internet age than ever before. Scholarship cannot advance properly in the digitally mediated academy unless the role of publisher can be reinvented. This reinvention calls for new forms of publication, financial models, editorial skills, and peer review—all critical parts of the Anvil experiment. Anvil Academic (http://anvilacademic.org) was formed to tackle head-on the challenges faced by authors of born-digital scholarship, with a goal of creating services and policies that will allow such scholarship to have equal standing with print publications in the tenure and promotion process. In this presentation, we’ll discuss the origins of the Anvil project, provide some examples of works evaluated, explain the evaluation processes we’ve developed, and point to some of the future directions of our efforts. In addition to the specifics of Anvil, we’ll also provide a broader review of the current state of affairs in this exciting but vexing field.