<agu> editorial board list opening

[info at edu-factory.org]

Dear all,

Thanks for agreeing to participate in the editorial board of
the new journal stemming from the edu-factory project. We
have added you to this mailing list, which we hope to use to
discuss the directions of the journal as well as the
practical concerns involved in its production. Please let us
know if you would prefer to communicate with the other
members of the editorial board in another way.

After a round of invitations sent to various participants of
the edu-factory network, we have arrived at a provisional
list of editorial board members:

Marco Baravalle; Claudia Bernardi; Marc Bousquet; George
Caffentzis; Simone Capra; Sandro Chignola; Anna Curcio;
Alberto De Nicola; Paolo Do; Ludovica Fales; Silvia
Federici; Gabriela Garcia; Ezequiel Gatto; Andrea Ghelfi;
Gary Hall; Michael Hardt; Stefano Harney; Avinash Jha;
Camillo Imperore; Augusto Illuminati; Gasper Kralj; Geert
Lovink; Federico Marini; Randy Martin; Miguel Mellino;
Sandro Mezzadra; Eli Meyerhoff; Brett Neilson; Aihwa Ong;
Matteo Pasquinelli; Bojana Piskur; Carlos Prieto del Campo;
Nirmal Puwar; Gerald Raunig; Gigi Roggero; Andrew Ross; Ned
Rossiter; Davide Sacco; Ranabir Samaddar; Florian Scheinder;
Jon Solomon; Tiziana Terranova; Carlo Vercellone; Xiang
Biao.

There are also a number of network participants who have
agreed to be part of the wider scientific committee for the
journal.

At present discussion on this list will be confined to
editorial board members only. If you have recently consulted
the edu-factory website you will be aware that there has
been quite a bit of activity in the network recently. Some
of this has been associated with the publication of the
edu-factory book in Italian and the ‘anomalous wave’
movement against the Berlusconi government’s reforms to
the Italian education system. But the scope of the
edu-factory project has always been transnational. Part of
the purpose of starting a journal is to reconfirm the
project’s engagement with political concerns that extend
beyond those of the ESC Social Center in Rome where
edu-factory was begun. We are hoping you can contribute to
this process of opening, which should eventually see a
recomposition of the edu-factory collective. Other steps in
this process will be the English language publication of the
edu-factory book by Autonomedia in 2009, the participation
of edu-factory in the Winter Camp event organized by the
Institute of Network Cultures in Amsterdam (2-8 March 2009),
and the reopening of the edu-factory mailing list.

In this email we outline five issues on which we would like
to seek your advice and ideas:

1.	Title of journal
2.	Structure
3.	Software
4.	Zero issue
5.	Quality control


1. There has already been some discussion in the edu-factory
collective regarding the title of the journal. We thought it
would be good to stick with a relatively neutral name that
recalls the edu-factory project and to give a sense of the
political orientation of the journal in the subtitle. The
current proposal is:


Edu-Notes: Universities, Conflicts, and the Production of
Knowledge

We invite your discussion of this title and welcome any
suggestions you may have for alternative names for the
journal.


2. We suggest a three fold structure for each issue of the
journal:

i)	Theoretical materials: these will be scientific articles
of 5000-7000 words in length
ii)	Political materials: these will be shorter reports
analyzing conflicts in the production of knowledge and
university transformations in various global contexts
iii)	Book reviews: a reviews editor will be appointed to
manage liaison between authors, publishers, and reviewers

Please let us know what you think. We imagine that the
journal would produce two issues a year, although some
members of the editorial board have already suggested we
should not follow the classical model of issues but have a
rolling structure where materials are published as they
become available. 

3. We suggest to proceed with a web journal reserving the
possibility to periodically publish some chosen
contributions in a hard copy reader (the contacts
established during the publication of the edu-factory book
can prove useful in this regard). Clearly there needs to be
some central management system to organize the process and
avoid the generation of massive amounts of email. Perhaps
some of you are able to make suggestions about open source
software, servers, etc. that could be used for this purpose.
We will need a CMS flexible enough to handle the review
process we propose to discuss below.

4. To begin the journal we propose to proceed with the
production of a zero issue to be published in the northern
hemisphere summer of 2009. The suggested theme for this
issue is ‘The Double Crisis of the University and the
Financial System’. Please let us know if you have
suggestions for people who could make contributions on this
theme. We also welcome your input to the drafting of a call
for papers.

5. Given the political orientation of the edu-factory
project there has been rigorous debate about quality control
for the journal. We propose to separate the issue of quality
from the system of measure established through the
conventional academic system of anonymous peer review. There
have been a number of suggestions about how this might be
achieved: from having a peer review system that is not
anonymous to utilizing the edu-factory list. In any case,
the journal should have a strong quality control system.
This is an issue that open access publishing projects have
handled in different ways. For us the challenge is to invent
a new system of review that opens conflict over the meanings
and hierarchies established by the usual system.

We invite you to share your ideas about these matters with
the other members of the editorial board on this list.

Edu-factory collective