Abstract
This chapter explores innovating in scholarly journal publishing through the lens of publishing as pedagogy, an approach where scholarly publishing practices are intentionally designed for learning. Scholarly publishing is described as a learning space with significant scope for innovating, with respect to both the scholarly publishing culture and its practices. Innovating in scholarly publishing is defined as a social, creative, disruptive, and intentional process. The critical intersections to innovating in scholarly publishing are considered and an example of what innovating in scholarly publishing can look like, in practice, is provided—by sharing personal reflections and experiences of conceptualizing, designing, and managing J-BILD, a scholarly journal. In exploring these intersections and the notion of innovating, an innovative model of publishing founded on the principles of open access, transparency, and collaboration is described. This chapter concludes with possibilities for future directions with respect to innovating in scholarly publishing.
TopDefining Innovation
Our definition of innovating in publishing is founded on an understanding of scholarship as “making meaning together” (Paré, 2016); that is, scholarship is, at its root, the social and participatory construction of knowledge (Vygotsky, 1978). Because scholarship is a social activity, there is space for the practices that are involved in the production of knowledge to be intentionally designed to enhance learning. We propose the following definition of the practice of innovating in the domain of publishing: Innovating in scholarly journal publishing is a social practice, involving intentionally doing something established in a new way, borrowing techniques from other fields and using them as tools to refashion older practices in ways that push boundaries and challenge existing hierarchies. There are four fundamental and interrelated concepts in our definition of innovation: it is social, intentional, creative, and disruptive. We unpack each of these concepts in the sections that follow.
Key Terms in this Chapter
Open Access Publishing: The publication of research and scholarship that is online and free of cost and other barriers to readers.
Publishing As Pedagogy: An approach to publishing that views publishing as a space and opportunity for learning “through the process of developing ideas, encouraging particular approaches in writing, or creating conditions for authors to work together and to influence one another’s approach to scholarship” ( Ramjewan et al., 2018 , p. 261).
Blind Peer Review: The anonymized process by which a submitted manuscript is reviewed by a scholar with expertise in the subject matter of the manuscript, usually with a view to provide feedback and recommend the manuscript be accepted, revised and resubmitted, or rejected.
Peer Mentor: An alternative to the traditional peer reviewer, a peer mentor supports authors by providing generative feedback and guidance on authors’ manuscripts through several rounds of collaborative non-anonymized review and revisions, focusing on the content and substance of the work.
Social Constructivism: A theory of learning which argues that individuals learn through the support and collaboration of others ( Vygotsky, 1978 ).
Innovating in Publishing: A social practice, involving intentionally doing something established in a new way, borrowing techniques from other fields and using them as tools to refashion older practices in ways that push boundaries and challenge existing hierarchies.
Scholarly Publishing: The distribution of academic research and scholarship through the publication of academic journals and books.
J-BILD: The Journal of Belonging, Identity, Language, and Diversity , an open access scholarly journal publishing manuscripts from all stages of the research cycle within the fields of sociolinguistics, critical sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, language education, linguistic anthropology, etc. and operating on a non-anonymized collaborative peer mentorship model.
Google Docs: An online word processing platform that allows multiple people to work collaboratively on the same document in real time.
Distributed Cognition: A theory of cognition which argues that knowledge is distributed across individuals, artefacts, and the environment ( Hutchins, 1991 ).