Q:What is Kairos ?

Q:How can I contribute?

Q:Peer reviewed? Really?

Q:What are your Editorial Policies?

Q:How can I subscribe?

Q:Who works on this journal?

Q:What else can you tell me about?

Kairos  FAQ: Peer Reviewed? Really?

Peer-reviewed? Like a real academic journal? You can't be serious.

Yes, but like a real virtual academic journal, not a real print academic journal. And we're very serious about this. Peer review is valuable and helpful, provided peers are constructive in their critiques and supportive. Since we have more space, the shift in emphasis is less about keeping items out, although we do reject pieces, and more about guiding a piece so that it can come in. So no, we're not liberatory and open, but we do care about quality and our readers' needs.

We're experimental and will try new things; we make room for teachers to include their students not just as objects of study or subjects of essays on pedagogy, which is the print norm, but also as co-authors. This is tricky, but appropriate for many projects, such as a student review of an OWL or a textbook, or a student perspective on writing on the web. Hearing there voices directly, rather than through the filter of a their teacher, offers a new dimension to the journal's contents.

This introduces students to peer review of a new degree, and requires editors and editorial board members to carefully articulate their concerns. -Nick Carbone

No, Kairos  is not peer-reviewed like "real academic journals," if by "real" you mean print journals. Too many print journals in the academy are too quick to give a simple thumbs-up or thumbs-down to a piece; it's pretty much ready as-is or it is rejected. And those of us who have received rejection notices will quickly admit how much more we respect an editor who provides useful, professional feedback, whether or not our article was accepted for publication. Realizing current editorial practice reflects little of the collaboration and collegiality we profess as writing instructors, we have instituted a collaborative peer-review system: The first phase is blind in that the editorial staff collects responses to a hypertext from the members of the Editorial Board and passes them along to the author, along with the decision on whether the work will be moved along to the next stage. Once a hypertext makes it to the second tier, the process becomes more collaborative; a number of Editorial Board members are assigned to work interactively with the author to further refine the work--in both content and hypertext style--and prepare the piece for publication. Making it to this interactive stage of our peer-review system is certainly not a guarantee that the work will be published, but we feel that our interactive methods lead to a better journal and a better field. -Greg Siering

If I'm published in Kairos , will it count as much as if I'm published in a journal like College English?

It depends on whose approval you are looking for and how you view your professional identity. If you are looking for the approval of the more traditional, "old school" establishment, and if your professional identity centers around printed text, then don't plan on getting the benefits from a Kairos  publication that you might get from College English, CCC, JAC, or other print journals. If technology, hypertext, electronic publishing, and innovation are central to your professional identity, however, it makes far more sense to publish in an electronic journal like Kairos . We'll be the first to admit that publication in Kairos  doesn't carry the same "ethos" that a CCC publication does... but we will also be the first to argue that we carry an entirely different kind of ethos that may be just as important-or even more so-in other situations. -Greg Siering