Why use a web-based publication platform?

Whereas traditional academic publication routes such as journals and monographs have an established process and infrastructure for peer-reviewing, editing and publication, digital and web-based publishing is a new and fast-evolving territory for academics.

An early and well-known example from the field of music performance studies of a web-based monograph published outside of the usual academic publishing channels is Daniel Leech Wilkinson’s The Changing Sound Of Music: Approaches to Studying Recorded Musical Performances, published online through the Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music (CHARM), a project funded by the AHRC between 2004–2009. Leech-Wilkinson has since experimented further with web self-publication with his 2020 ebook Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them, published on a web platform as part of the multimedia Challenging Performance project. Leech-Wilkinson presents both publications as a challenge to the cost and accessibility of traditional academic publishing, citing his concern to directly reach his intended audience and engage directly with readers.

It is this same desire to engage directly with readers beyond the academic community that made me decide to share my research on Carl Baermann through a web-based publication. Compared to a traditional monograph, even one available as an ebook, a website is more visible, free at the point of use, and offers enhanced navigation and accessibility features. Moreover, for a project primarily dealing in digital multi-media materials – audio, video, and digitised documents – it made far more sense to disseminate the work in a format that could handle these materials natively, rather than rely on the common model of a two-dimensional text and a ‘companion website’ accessed through hyperlinks. The Scalar platform was chosen because of its rich possibilities for linking media and text in almost limitless ways, both using a linear narrative on a single page and through non-linear ’paths’ that can bring together content from anywhere in the publication.

Web publication and the research process

What I hadn’t anticipated was the impact this decision would have on how I managed my research. When a project leads to a traditional article or monograph, the research trajectory is shaped by the need to present a finalised and complete argument or account in a linear format: a progression from private working notes and materials towards a publicly ‘written up’ final product, with a clear distinction between the two. Working with Scalar, however, I quickly started to see how the relationship between private process and public presentation could be much more open and fluid. For instance, why organise the myriad of source documents, library links, digitised scores, etc, in a private folder structure with my notes distributed across spreadsheets and text documents, only to later construct two-dimensional appendices listing the locations of the materials for public use, when I could build my own working ‘Virtual Archive’ of materials directly on the Scalar platform - a user-friendly way of viewing my materials alongside the contextual information I had collected that could simultaneously be made available to the wider community of artists and other researchers?

Thinking digitally also changed my ideas about involving the audience for my research in its creation. In traditional academic publishing, work is only released to the public once it has passed through a lengthy process of peer review and editorial revision. In this model, the identification of errors or the emergence of new information that undermines the work post-publication is every author’s nightmare scenario. But with web publication, it is possible to involve the wider community in the work as it progresses, by inviting feedback on drafts and allowing reader perspectives to shape the ongoing work. Moreover, it allows us to let go of the notion that our published thoughts and conclusions should somehow be definitive, a scholarly territory to be staked out and defended at all costs, and instead keep our work open to revisions as our own and others’ research moves understanding every forwards. It is my intention, therefore, that The Digital Baermann will continue to be updated, as an evolving discussion of the issues relating to Baermann himself and to mid-nineteenth century performance practice.

Open Peer Review

The review process for The Digital Baermann is planned in two stages. First, working drafts of selected sections will published during the project and shared with relevant communities of practitioners and scholars, who can respond using the comment section on each page of the site. This practice corresponds with two of the pillars of Open Peer Review: Open Participation and Open Pre-Review Manuscripts.

Open Participation is sometimes called ‘crowdsourced peer review’ or ‘community/public review’. The decision to use Open Participation reflects the fact that while the scholarly community working on C19th woodwind performance is very small, the experience and expertise existing in the wider community of professional practitioners is much larger and more developed. Opening up the draft contents to comment gives this community an opportunity to feed back on the research, engaging with expertise that would not be captured through the standard peer review process.

Draft versions of publications are also known as 'pre-review manuscripts'. Unlike the humanities, in science fields the publishing of pre-review manuscripts to publicly available 'pre-print servers' is common. This allows both completed and in-progress studies (known as ‘Registered Reports’) to be reviewed and commented on by the community, with reported benefits for both the transparency and the quality of the resulting research.

Once the first edition of The Digital Baermann is complete, a second stage of reviewing will take place: an independent party will solicit peer reviews solicited from experts in relevant fields and their feedback incorporated in the usual way.