Presentation by: Karen Estlund, Sarah Hamid, and Bryce Peake At the CNI spring 2012 meeting, we presented on a new collaborative journal publishing project from The Fembot Collective and the University of Oregon (UO) Libraries, Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology. The Fembot Collective is a collaborative of feminist media scholars, producers, and artists engaged with the intersection of new media and technology and scholarly communication. One aspiration of this project was to reclaim the means of scholarly production through a community-centered model of open peer review and multi-modal publication processes. As a work in progress, Ada has continuously evolved to meet the needs of diverse authors, readers, and commentators. In the face of changing scholarly communication practices, the Fembot and library collaboration offers an alternative system of open-access publication and review that recaptures academic production structures in favor of cross-disciplinary, multi-modal, collaborative knowledge. Our community standards state that “responding is political work” emphasizing a space that demands constant redirection and active participation by its collaborators in order to generate new expressions of feminist open access scholarship over time. Now in our third year of publication and working on our ninth issue, we will review lessons learned about audience, production, infrastructure, design and assessment. We will discuss the ways in which our intervention has been transformed by, while also transforming, discussions about participatory media, open and collaborative peer review, production costs, and the intersections of technical and intellectual labor. http://adanewmedia.org http://fembotcollective.org https://library.uoregon.edu/digitalscholarship

1. Publishing Ada
A Retrospective Look at the First Three Years
of an Open Peer Review Multi-modal Journal
Karen Estlund, kestlund@uoregon.edu
Sarah Hamid, shamid@uoregon.edu
Bryce Peake, bpeake@uoregon.edu
http://adanewmedia.org

2. Outline
• Review Goals from 2011/12 - Karen
• What we learned: Open Access, open peer review, multimodal
• Production Lessons - Sarah
• Assessment - Bryce
• Cost / labor estimates - Karen

3. The Fembot Collective & Ada

4. Infrastructure & Hosting
Marrero, J. F. (2011 July 3),
https://www.flickr.com/photos/jfmfoto/5902024151/ CC-BY-NC-ND 2.0

5. Open Access -

6. Multi-level Peer Review
Accepted for
Publication
Suggestions for
Alternative Publication
Suggestions for
Resubmission
Not Accepted for
Publication

7. Collective Peer Review

8. Multi-modal & Interactive
Zylinska, J. (2014) iEarth. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New
Media, and Technology, No.5. doi:10.7264/N36W98CFRuberg, B., (2015) Curating with a Click: The Art That
Participatory Media Leaves Behind. Ada: A Journal of
Gender, New Media, and Technology, No.7.
doi:10.7264/N3PR7T8X

9. Questions of Indexing

10. Production Process
Sarah Hamid

11. Inter-personal
Challenges
● Demands of
production in an
era of
smartphones.
● Coordinating
meetings.
● Screen
communication.

12. Inter-personal
Successes
● Collaboration &
spanning
international time
zones.
● Google-docs &
forms.
● Emphasis on
feminist
production.

13. Personal-Medial
Challenges
● Author edits:
○ Edits vs.
feedback.
○ Digital
reading
habits.
● Comment press &
coaching OPR.

14. Personal-Medial
Successes
● Multimodal
collaboration.
● Social media.
● OPR access for
junior scholars.

15. Media-Infrastructural
Challenges
● Lack of control
over infrastructure;
ease of use vs.
inconvenience of
use.

16. Media-Infrastructural
Successes
● Easy-access,
easy-share.
● Last minute edits.

17. Assessment
Bryce Peake

18. Some Metrics

19. Metric-driven writing + building
● web is set up for articles about the web to succeed
○ 94k inbound links, 19k were originally pinged by our
articles.

20. Metric-driven writing + building
● People who show up not for a specific article are going
to issues, but not in ‘lead article’ order
○ We now randomize article order on front page.

21. Processual Assessments
● Special Issue Editor
○ 1 special issue a year, proposed 2-3 years in
advance
○ 8 month turn around from end of cfp to production
○ guided by process document built by webmistress at
acceptance of SI.
○ Shifting from ‘flexible’ to ‘set’

22. Processual Assessments
● Author perspective
○ Easy submission to author
○ Peer review is time intensive, requires responses
during peer review
■ “There aren’t enough hours in the day to keep up with the
conversation. If I didn’t have other things to do (other articles to
write/submit) then maybe I could be active in the peer review
process. It’s just unreasonable to expect academics to put that
work into review in the current job climate.”
○ Process is “fast,” but not rapid like news/editorial/
blogging norms.

23. Processual Assessments
● Production perspective
○ Team labor - SI Editor, Ada Editors, DSC,
Webmistress
○ Review - Invite Expert Reviewers - Format and
Posting - Send Formatted, Post-Review Version to
Editors, Editors Summarize Comments + Send to
Author - Copy Edit Revised Version - Post to Ada -
Advertise - Analytics Follow-ups (6mo, yearly)

24. Processual Assessments
● Peer Review Perspective
● “I like that it’s mentorship focused. I get to ask myself ‘how can I help make
this piece publishable,’ rather than acting as some kind of gatekeeper for a
competition-driven scarcity that is traditional journals.”
● “Anonymity is the bane of peer review. I’ve gotten reviews that are
insulting. Like this recent one from ______ “Impaling himself on the pole
arm of Marxist feminism, the author mistakes “gendered classed”
implications for “gendered classed” intentions. Removing the gender
dimensions of the analysis, we have the same old, reductive Marxist
understanding of telecommunications infrastructure.’ Thanks, that’s
absolutely helpful for understanding why you don’t like it. What’s scholarly
about this review, though?!”

25. Personnel Successes
● Graduate Students
○ Chelsea Bullock (early proj. manager) - Marion Brittain Postdoc Fellow
@ Georgia Institute of Technology
○ Mél Hogan (first Fembot Advisory Board member) - Asst. Prof. of
Media Studies, Illinois Institute of Tech
○ Brian Reece (DSC graduate student) - Assoc. Dir. for Assessment +
Communication, Toppel Career Center @ University of Miami
○ Bryce Peake (first Webmistress) - Intel fellowship, Asst. Prof. of Media
+ Communication Studies @ University of Maryland Baltimore County

26. Personnel Successes
● Faculty
○ Carol Stabile - ACLS
○ Radhika Gajjala - Fulbright Fellow, Norway

27. Costs
Infrastructure
• Web Hosting
•WordPress MultiSite
w/CommentPress
•URLs
•Email
•FTP
• Back-up
• Spam Blocker
• Google Drive / Dropbox
• EZID for DOIs
• Archive-It!
• Preservation Storage
Production Labor
• GTF
• Designer
• Manager
• Copy Editing
• System Updates
• CSS Modifications
• Interactive Development

28. Review Labor

29. Sponsors
http://adanewmedia.org