So, we’ve been thinking about how we manage the accepted papers for the conference so that we can get discussion going prior to the conference.
First though, we’re thinking of defaulting to a Creative Commons Licence for all accepted papers. For those that don’t know about Creative Commons it is a mechanism which has sharing and building on the work of others at its heart. As one of the conference themes is about ‘designing openness’ we feel this an appropriate thing to do. It means that anyone would be able to use a paper (given certain outline conditions) without asking permission, but that the author or authors get acknowledged.
The second thing is we’d like to get discussion about accepted papers started online before the conference so we can avoid those occasionally awkward and superficial questions that occur at academic conferences. The problem is that it’s easy to put something out there, expecting a conversation to break out but...
… nothing happens.
So we’re thinking of using edited versions of the peer-review comments that have made for all papers as the starting point to an open dialogue about the papers (with reviewer's and author's permission). At the very least readers would be able to check whether criticisms made have been addressed in the revised paper, and the criticisms themselves could set out some themes for subsequent discussion. In that way session chairs could better prepare for questions, and presenters might be able to use any comments to focus their presentations.
Let us know your thoughts on the above. Would you mind your peer-review comments being opened up? Is Creative Commons the way to go?