I’m acting editor for the Hypertext Criticism theme of JoDI, the Journal for Digital Information. I’ve been co-editing the theme along with Susana Tosca for a couple of years now, but this year’s Susana’s on maternity leave and has left it all to me. Since we haven’t had a specific call for papers for the theme for a while now there haven’t been many submissions, but having just sent out reviews to an author I was pleased with the system: peer review may have failings, but really, it’s pretty damn good having a system where anyone can send a paper in to a journal and have 2-4 scholars in the field provide feedback. Certainly the quality of reviewers reports varies, but when I send papers to reviewers for JoDI almost all of them respond promptly and with useful, thoughful comments to the authors.

One of the nice things about JoDI is that it tries to publish papers fast. If you submit a paper, we try to let you know within two weeks whether its accepted, rejected, accepted with revisions or recommended for resubmission after revision. I’ve got to admit that two weeks is a pretty tight deadline, and realistically 3-4 weeks is more likely, given that reviewers are busy. If the paper’s accepted it can be published immediately (or after requested revisions) and then when about five or six papers have been published, an issue is announced. I like that. It’s kind of like blogging – you don’t have to save it up for print when you’re working on the web.

The hypertext criticism theme started off being literary approaches to hypertext theory and to hypertext fiction, and we particularly wanted to find close readings of hypertexts. I still want more of them, but now I’m also thinking that reading blogs as literature or hypertext could be really interesting as well. And of course JoDI has other themes as well.

So anyway: I’d love more submissions. Susana and I were too busy to rustle up a new special issue on hypertext criticism, but we don’t need a special issue to publish papers on hypertext criticism. You can write it as a traditional paper, or using links, video or anything else that’ll work in a standard webbrowser. I can’t promise we’ll publish it, but I’ll definitely get you feedback from experts in the field! Oh, and yes, JoDI is on all those lists of peer-reviewed journals your university will give you credit for, even here in Norway.