I ran into a tweet that caught my eye from the NMC conference this year.  There was a presentation about an online peer-reviewed journal that allowed for the integration of multimedia called Academic Intersections.

One of my favorite places to publish is Academic Commons, an online journal with funding from a Mellon grant.  The “essays” for Academic Commons are not peer reviewed, though there is a submission and editing process.  The lack of a recognized peer review in a subject area doesn’t matter much to me, but for professors and people in other positions that have tenure, this is a significant advantage for Academic Intersections.

I did a quick perusal of the site.  On the positive side, in addition to the peer review, the site receives roughly the same amount of traffic as Academic Commons according to compete.com.  The articles are also viewable by anyone online.

The negatives include it’s own “story” format for publishing, which means you could write your piece, have it rejected, and be stuck with a format that isn’t applicable elsewhere.  Other aspects of the journal don’t appear as professional as well.  The bad clip art for the journal issues doesn’t inspire confidence, nor does the lack of a homepage set on the  OSX server (http://edcommunity.apple.com/).   Of a more serious note are the irregular release of the issues, and the obvious prominence of Apple hardware or software in the articles leads me to question the role of Apple in the whole process as well.

I’ll be sticking with academic commons, but if you’re intrigued you can see the presentation here, https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/alanwolf/web/AI_NMC_2009_Final2.pdf