Blog Post 2 - by Mike Roche

I agree with Quinn (who agrees with Hayley) that peer reviewing will increasingly be done online but I worry that this push (which seems ongoing) inevitably raises a concern: How do we (as scholars looking to read new, interesting work) know who can be counted on to offer up a qualified, unbiased peer review. The Blog to the Future? article showed us how the existence of journals helps manage "quality control". Discerning which new journal articles are worth looking at in the Sciences is made easier by the tools that show us how often they've been cited (in Google Scholar, for example). And though many journals in the humanities have made the transition to being web-based, there are so many more ways to conduct peer reviews now that so much else is being done online. (As someone who reads poetry collections, I often visit blogs of contemporary authors whose work I know as a reference. John Gallagher's blog, Nothing to Say and Saying It, is a good resource for any contemporary poetry reader!) However, I worry that the convenience of web-based peer reviewing might dilute the quality of it, and that the prevalence of peer reviews on the internet might actually serve as an impediment to finding the peer reviews that are actually unbiased and credible.

Though I do in fact participate an "invisible college" with blogs, etc., one of the reasons I'm in an MFA program is because I like the old-school, word-of-mouth way of communicating about my work. Instead of a low-residency style, distance-learning style program, I chose a traditional, full-residency program because I love the merits of the workshop (where fellow poets meet around a table to discuss each others' work).