Refract: An Open Access Visual Studies Journal

For my digital monograph I worked with a traditional academic press to get my work peer-reviewed by colleagues in my field. But the digital aspect certainly added new wrinkles to that process. The peer reviewers evaluating my work did so before the final version of the project was ready—they did an early review of the written manuscript, images, and some videos, but they weren’t reviewing the fully final published project with all the interaction that was part of the final web-based publication. So I think it is clear that making a direct one-to-one transition between traditional book publishing and web-based publishing doesn’t necessarily work.

We may decide that in the digital environment we should emphasize postpublication peer review in the form of scholarly reviews and critical engagement with digital publications instead….