Scholarly Publishing: the Formal, the Informal, and the Ugly

Yesterday on Twitter Ted Curran asked me if UMW Blogs supports scholarly publishing, as opposed to just “informal” publishing. Hey @jimgroom- does UMW use @umwblogs to support scholarly publication or just “informal” publishing? Could/should it be able to do both? — Ted Curran (@tedcurran) January 10, 2013 It’s a good question, and it helped me realize that I’m increasingly blurring the distinction between scholarly and informal publishing. An occupational hazard, I guess. That said, and in fairness to Ted, there are a number of very clear indicators for scholarly publications: peer-reviewed, usually within a journal, and the author usually has three letters after their name. For all the amazing stuff we have going on in UMW Blogs, we don’t actually publish a formal scholarly journal. That said, we do have more than 40 student-created literary journals, 100s of student created research sites (here are just a few), the student newspaper, the UMW … [Read more...]