Soraya's Scholarly Reflections

As Hayley and Quinn wrote, the future of peer review in indeed contingent upon the existence of on-line journals. The article, “Blog to the Future? Journals Publishing in the Twenty-First Century,” discusses how open access may be the way of the scholarly future. I also agree with Hayley that it is easier to efficiently discuss ideas, support each other’s work, etc. in an on-line format. I don't completely agree with Mike that on-line scholarship needs to lead to more bias. I feel that academia is already quite biased and in print form far fewer have access to what “scholars” write. I put “scholar” in quotations because I don’t feel that one needs to enter the narrow field of academia to call themselves a scholar. I personally don’t understand how it benefits society to have so many academics writing articles that no one outside of their field will ever read. I think it would be more beneficial to have people translating what is written in academia so that it can be used to educate the masses. Instead there is a lot of redundancy in academia and few people willing to look critically at the function of academic scholarship itself. I think it is beneficial for us as a graduate community to be able to have the type of discourse we have here on this blog to really see what our peers are thinking in a more efficient way.

On the other hand, I agree with Mike that it is great to have in person contact in our fields as well. In our program there is a lot of networking both in person and on-line (blogs, facebook, etc.) so I am part of an invisible college.

I find out about important works through personal recommendations, school assignments, conferences, etc.