It's academic publishing Jim, but not as we know it

I have a manuscript currently in press with an academic journal which describes work that we performed three years ago. In part, the fault for the delay in publication lies at my door, but the original version of the manuscript now in press was written 18 months ago and first submitted for publication over a year ago. There followed a catalog of errors, some due to me, others due to editors and journals. The current incarnation of the paper was submitted to the journal where it will appear shortly six months ago. It is still not published. I should feel lucky - others have had worse experiences than this:

"Because of the work described in the paper had already been talked about in public forums and included in grant applications, and because publication was important for moving forward with our grant applications, job applications and other papers, we felt we could not spend another year in the review process. The very essence of the scientific process is to challenge paradigms and share the experimental details with other scientists who can then reproduce or refute the findings. Publication is key for this process. We needed to publish."

I have recently been depositing my papers in our institutional repository (How to fix academic publishing again already), but now it's time to move up to the next level: post publication peer review.

I invite reviews of the following original manuscript:


An efficient and effective system for interactive student feedback using Google+ to enhance an institutional virtual learning environment (PDF download via Dropbox) Update: Final version now published
Abstract:
Whether or not you take a constructivist view of education, feedback on performance is inevitably seen as a crucial component of the process. However, experience shows that students (and academic staff) often struggle with feedback, which all too often fails to translate into feed-forward actions leading to educational gains. Problems get worse as student cohort sizes increase. By building on the well-established principle of separating marks from feedback and by using a social network approach to amplify peer discussion of assessed tasks, this paper describes an efficient system for interactive student feedback. Although the majority of students remain passive recipients in this system, they are still exposed to deeper reflection on assessed tasks than in traditional one-to-one feedback processes.

How it works:

1. Please read the manuscript then leave your review as a comment on this blog post. Please use page and paragraph numbers to refer to specific sections of the manuscript.
2. Reviews may be named or anonymous as you wish.
3. To expedite the publication process, this manuscript will be open for review for 14 days from today.
4. Following the review period, all substantive reviews will be taken into account and the manuscript revised accordingly. (My best estimate from blog stats is that between 1,000 - 2,000 unique visitors view the content on this site. If 1% of visitors take the trouble to leave a substantive review, that's a much more rigorous review process than any academic journal I am aware of.)
5. If the majority view is generally positive, the revised manuscript (including reviews and author responses) will be published on the Leicester Research Archive.

I think this is as efficient and transparent as I am able to make the academic publishing process, but if you have any comments or suggestions, I welcome them. Most of all, I would welcome your review of the manuscript as a comment here. I cannot offer you any payment or other inducement beyond the knowledge that you will be helping to fix the broken model of academic publishing. And of course, given the opportunity, I will be happy to reciprocate your time in reviewing any papers I feel competent to comment on should you wish to participate in a similar process.



Notes:
Other options considered for sharing the provisional PDF were Slideshare and Google Docs. These were rejected due to problems with PDFs being reformatted and Dropbox selected as the best general purpose solution, but potentially any site which allows free PDF downloads would be suitable. if this blog had been hosted on Wordpress, that would have been a suitable choice, but Blogger does not allow PDF uploads.

A.J. Cann