Chronicle of Higher Education From the issue dated June 4, 1999 An On-Line Format for Scholarly Papers Lets Critics Aim Their Barbs Precisely By KELLY McCOLLUM An interactive system for publishing scholarly papers, created by a professor and a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, offers instant gratification for critics and precise feedback for authors. The system, called the Interactive Paper Project, is an electronic format that lets readers insert comments within scholarly papers as they read (http://lrsdb2.ed.uiuc.edu:591/ipp/). Forms at the end of every paragraph encourage readers to comment on specific ideas or points, rather than to give a broad critique at the end of the paper, although they can do that as well. The project was created by James Levin, a professor of educational psychology, and James Buell, a graduate student. Mr. Levin likens the format to a printed draft that a scholar might photocopy and pass around to a few colleagues for comments or suggestions. Whereas photocopies might come back with notes scribbled in the margins, the colleagues would look at and comment on Mr. Levin's draft in a Web browser. Readers can comment on the comments of others, too. Mr. Levin says the format allows readers to participate in a discussion that is structured by the ideas in a paper, but not constrained by it. He also says the format could be useful in the peer-review process for scholarly journals. "You would have a more-collaborative review process," he says. "Right now, the review process is pretty much individual -- you send out n copies to n reviewers, and each one reviews it in isolation." He adds, "You may still want to do that, but this gives you the opportunity to make it a collaborative thing." The project's Web site has a handful of papers, mostly articles on issues in education and technology by professors at the university. The site is open to anyone who wishes to read and respond to the papers. If a journal were to use the format, Mr. Levin says, password protection could be added to limit who had access to the papers. Mr. Levin says the technology behind the site is relatively simple and could be duplicated by anyone who wanted to set up a similar system. The texts of the papers and the comments are stored on a server using Filemaker Pro, a common data-base program. Readers can choose either to see other readers' comments inserted directly into the text of papers or to have the comments appear on a separate page linked to the text. Authors can easily drop the comments if they choose to submit their articles for print without making changes in their work. But choosing to leave comments in could also be useful, says Nicholas C. Burbules, a professor of educational policy at the university who has posted papers on the site. Comments added to the papers "become not only communications from the reader to the author, but part of the archive of the text itself," he says. "Subsequent readers may react more to that material than to the manuscript itself." "When I give the U.R.L. out, I'm saying, 'Look at what I wrote, but look at what other people wrote in response,'" says Mr. Levin. In a printed document, he says, the author would have to either share authorship or remove the comments of others. In an electronic-only publication, readers could continue to add comments to papers indefinitely, says Mr. Burbules. Authors could then revise their work, and readers could continue to comment. Then, he says, "the distinction between a draft and a final version is no longer a sharp distinction." He adds, "The idea that something is only a draft until it is published -- that's an artifact of a particular kind of technology of producing papers." That distinction has already been tested by "e-print" servers and e-mail lists in which scholars have distributed their work on the Internet to seek comment from colleagues. In some cases, however, such electronic distribution has disqualified papers from print publication (The Chronicle, July 17, 1998). "How is that different from the person who made 10 or 20 photocopies of a paper in draft form and sent it to people for feedback?" asks Mr. Burbules. "Is it just a question of numbers?" "We're using some outmoded categories that really don't help us come to grips with what's different about this particular medium," he adds. Mr. Levin also sees uses for the interactive-paper format outside scholarly publishing. "Everyone we show this to comes up with a new idea for using it," he says. Among the documents already on the university's server are a proposal for a new instructional program and notes from a faculty meeting. "You could put a paper up in this format for a class and have students respond to a paper," he says. "You could encourage a class discussion structured by a particular reading."