The PressForward Project and Scholarly Communication on the Open Web

A healthy ecosystem for scholarly communication requires a continuum from independently distributed work to postpublication peer review. With funding from the Sloan Foundation, the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University created the PressForward project to explore and produce the best means for collecting, screening, and drawing attention to the vast expanse of scholarship that is currently decentralized across the web or does not fit into traditional genres such as the journal article or the monograph. In this presentation the PressForward team will provide an overview of current efforts to distribute and evaluate scholarly work available on the open web. We also will explain the experimental methods behind PressForward’s Digital Humanities Now and Journal of Digital Humanities. Finally, we will preview the open-source adaptations to WordPress software that PressForward is developing to enable scholarly communities to easily aggregate, select, and credit work published on the open web.