citation
Ball, Cheryl E. (2008, April 4). Peer-review in new media: The process of evaluation as example for tenure and promotion committees. Conference on College Composition & Communication, New Orleans, LA.

abstract
The MLA Report on Evaluating Scholarship for Tenure and Promotion (2006) renews the legitimacy gap between refereed print articles and refereed electronic articles, indicating that, “print articles count […] in 97.9% of departments, as compared with 46.8% for articles in electronic form.” The report notes, however, that electronic forms often don’t take into consideration new media forms of scholarship, such as the “innovative webtexts” published by several online journals in composition and rhetoric, and which James English (2005) wrote in the Journal of Scholarship Publishing as being an inconsequential form of scholarship. As the MLA Report suggests, the value of peer-reviewed digital publications might be greater if tenure committees knew how to read them, a problem that is heightened by the unfamiliarity of new media scholarship. To help, I examine a webtext to show how authors, editors, and review boards value a new media publication so as to provide an example for understanding scholarly innovation, which T&P committees can follow.

accompanying materials

• CCCC 2008 paper (pdf)