Associate Professor Maria Bonn will discuss Publishing Without Walls (PWW) at the National Federation of Advanced Information Science (NFAIS) 2019 Humanities Roundtable, which will be held on March 10 in Washington, D.C. The topic of this year's program is "Evaluation of Digital Scholarship in the Humanities and Its Impact." It will address the skills, tools, and resources required for digital humanities evaluation as well as how publishers, libraries, and content aggregators can better support digital humanities.
Her talk, "Supporting Self-Organized Peer Review in the Humanities," will share research developed in collaboration with Megan Senseney, former iSchool research scientist, who recently joined University of Arizona Libraries as the head of the Office of Digital Innovation and Stewardship. It will explore the experimental approaches adopted by PWW, a humanities-focused digital publishing initiative at the University of Illinois, to accommodate a variety of review models within the context of library-based publishing:
Members of the PWW team will present a set of cases demonstrating strategies for "self-organized" peer review, in which an author participates in designing and implementing a review plan based on individualized needs and goals. Presenters will conclude with a discussion of approaches that publishers can use to guide authors in organizing an individualized peer review plan that accommodates their research methods, modes of representation, and intended audiences.
Bonn's research focuses on understanding the needs of scholars in a contemporary publishing environment; comparing the collaborative practices of scientists and humanists and how they might inform each other; and examining best strategies for libraries to benefit from economies of scale while remaining embedded in local communities.
Prior to joining the iSchool in 2013, she served as associate university librarian for publishing at the University of Michigan Library, where she managed the University of Michigan Press and Scholarly Publishing Office. She also has served as assistant professor of English at institutions both in the United States and abroad. Bonn received a bachelor's degree from the University of Rochester, master's and doctoral degrees in American Literature from SUNY Buffalo, and a master's in information and library science from the University of Michigan.