Josh Brown from JISC has given his permission for me to reproduce the feedback from the peer-reivew of my last JISC grant which bounced. A shame, as it would have provided us with an opportunity to test out knowledgeblog on papers from the wild, while also producing an great demonstrator of the advantages of using the web to distribute papers with web technology rather than just dumping a link to a PDF.

With luck, we can rejuvenate this work in another way.

“One bid (Bid no 8: Newcastle University) was flagged by one of the markers as being out of scope, despite receiving good marks and positive comments from the other two markers.

The original terms of the call specifically state that projects must add value to existing peer reviewed journals. Projects seeking solely to create new publications are specifically excluded. (Please review the sections Expected Outputs and Requirements of the call for more detail on these conditions.)

Bid no 8 states:

“we will identify authors within Newcastle, take their open-access publications and recast them into a form suitable for Wordpress”

The bid is clearly designed to aggregate content that has been published elsewhere, largely based on content held within Newcastle’s institutional repository. No existing, peer-reviewed scholarly journal is involved in this project.

While the creation of a web-native publishing tool clearly has merit, as identified by the two markers who praised this bid, the funding call is, as stated, intended to add value to existing publications. In the absence of an existing peer-reviewed publication as a partner in this project, the bid is out of scope”

The panel agreed with this analysis, which meant that, despite the fact that the project was viewed unanimously as very strong proposal on its own merits, we were obliged to decline to fund this project. The requirement for direct partnership with an existing peer-reviewed scholarly journal for all projects in this strand was imposed after lengthy discussion, and for a range of reasons, including sustainability, tight time-frames and so on, and it was felt that this should be upheld.

— Josh Brown