At the e-publishing and blogging sessions that I attended during the 2010 Society of Biblical Literature meeting in Atlanta, presenters and respondents from the audiences repeatedly raised questions related to tenure and promotion committees’ esteem, or lack of same, for online journals. As far as I know, no one has done any kind of serious research project on this issue, at least as it relates to biblical studies. However, as a member of Seaver College’s Rank, Tenure, and Promotion Committee, I can certainly offer some anecdotal evidence related to this topic. As a blogger, I can also offer my personal opinion without having to pass it through any editorial control—and there’s there rub.

In my experience, it matters little or none whether you deliver your scholarship in physical or digital formats. Tenure and promotion committees, however, almost always draw their members from across the entire college or university. We have eight “divisions” in Seaver College, and our Rank, Tenure, and Promotion Committee consists of one tenured representative from each division plus one untenured representative elected by the faculty at large. Therefore, I—a biblical scholar—must evaluate research done by my colleagues in all other disciplines. The farther we get from the humanities, the farther we get from my ability to independently assess my colleagues’ research, never mind the time involved. Faculty sitting on tenure and promotion committees must therefore rely on the judgments of reviewers in the same field, and that’s why peer review is so important.

In my own applications for tenure and promotion, for example—as well as for research funding and such—I have no reason to think that the relevant committees have considered the Journal of Hebrew Scriptures inferior in any wise to Semeia (to use only two examples) just because Semeia was printed on paper and JHS is (note the different verb tenses!) distributed electronically (though you can get a paper copy). Quite the opposite, in fact: JHS rates higher than Semeia in the eyes of my Seaver College peers, because JHS is peer-reviewed while Semeia volumes were editor-reviewed. Both, however, carry much more weight with our tenure and promotion committee than my most brilliant Higgaion posts, precisely because the JHS and Semeia articles were reviewed by professionals in my field before they were published.

In short, the distinction between print and digital media matters far, far less than the path to publication, for most forms of research. Only if that path goes through an academic editor’s hands, and more desirably through several peer reviewers’ hands as well, will tenure and promotion committees consider the work to be “scholarship.”

When I came up for tenure, I asked Chris Brady to write a letter for my file addressing the value of iTanakh to the scholarly and student communities. However, I did not offer iTanakh to my tenure and promotion committee as “scholarship”; rather, I categorized it as “professional service.” Ditto with Higgaion; I (have) include(d) it in my applications for tenure, promotion, appointments, grants, and such as “professional/public service,” not as “scholarship.” The lack of peer review, in part, drives this categorization.

I very much support Chris Brady’s suggestion for a kind of peer review panel, under the auspices of the SBL, which could undertake such evaluations upon request. However, I think that tenure and promotion committees will still prefer material that has been reviewed before publication to material reviewed post hoc.

One final note: my comments here related to fairly traditional forms of scholarship, such as essays and papers. As Bob Cargill has pointed out repeatedly, including in the blogger session at SBL 2010, we still need to develop new forms of peer review for research that comes packaged in other media.