Anthropology Group Will Test a Faster, Digital Approach to Book Reviews – Wired Campus - Blogs - The Chronicle of Higher Education

"It takes years to research, write, and publish a scholarly monograph. It can take just as long to get that book reviewed by a scholarly journal once it’s in print. But a review that appears years after the book does, even if it’s a rave, doesn’t help an author whose tenure clock is running. Nor does it help a publisher hoping to attract attention to front-list titles. The lag time between publication and review 'is, for lack of a better word, appalling,' says Oona Schmid, director of publishing at the American Anthropological Association, a major publisher of scholarly journals. The association announced on Monday that it would test a prototype designed to expedite the review process by moving it online, in an experiment made possible by the backing of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Speeding up the process is one goal. Another is to test the idea that, in a digital publishing environment, reviews no longer need to be tethered to print vehicles for long research articles, Ms. Schmid says. With a 12-month, $80,000 Sloan grant, the association will develop an online platform that scholarly publishers can use to upload metadata about new titles as well as digital versions of the books themselves. Once a journal editor identifies a reviewer for a particular book, the reviewer will be given access to the e-version of the title to work with. The new platform will build off Open Journal Systems, an open-source journal-management-and-publishing system created by the Public Knowledge Project. To succeed, the association’s platform will have to be easy for publishers to navigate—part of the system they already use to deliver books to Amazon, Baker & Taylor, and other entities in the book-supply chain, Ms. Schmid says. 'We want to be just another item on that list.' With that in mind, the association plans to make its platform compatible with ONIX feeds, ONIX being 'the metadata standard we use in the industry,' says Darrin Pratt, director of the University Press of Colorado ..."