Rethinking Academic Publishing

In : Uncategorized, Posted by Laura Blankenship on Mar.03, 2009

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For my upcoming talk at Faculty Academy, I’m going to be exploring academic publishing and peer review and its relationship to teaching and learning.  It’s a complex topic as the whole idea of academic publishing rests on years of accepted practices, practices that directly affect not just publishing itself, but the employment requirements for most faculty.  Trying to untangle the mess of what to do about academic publishing in the world of blogs and Google entails trying to untangle the mess of tenure review processes and work load distribution for faculty.  But change is coming in this area and there have been a number of interesting articles related to these issues.  It’s clear that people are thinking about what needs to be done, but aren’t quite sure what, and I would place myself in that category.  As someone who is gradually moving away from the academy and having access to peer-reviewed literature, I keep thinking about access issues, while those within the academy are often thinking about quality.  My thinking right now is that we need some way to give more people access to quality, peer-reviewed material and we need to teach our students how to determine what is quality material.  What I haven’t untangled yet is the second piece–how to use a new system to determine quality for the tenure process.  Publishing companies have traditionally facilitated this process and review committees have often used a kind of shorthand of “impact number” plus quantity to decide whether someone is tenurable.  As distribution moves to the web, however, that formula seems to be breaking down.

Here are some articles that have addressed this issues.  I don’t think I’ll come to any major conclusions by May when I give my talk, but I do think that it’s important to have the conversation:

Do you have thoughts about this issue or other articles that might be worth reading? Please let me know in the comments!

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7 comments for this entry:
    7 Responses to "Rethinking Academic Publishing"
  1. #1 Bryan Alexander
    Mar.03.2009, 02:44:59

    How exciting! I can’t wait to hear how it goes, and to experience what I can of it.

    Let’s see.

    -Ithaka’s research into scholarly communication. The brilliant Roger Schonfeld is point on this. http://www.ithaka.org/research

    -Yochai Benkler. Wealth of Networks is emerging as a crucial tome for this era. Several articles of his might work, too – example: try applying this one, http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=c84d2eda-0e95-42fe-99a2-5400e7dd8eab .

    -Herbert Van de Sompel, the leading person for scholarly communication and digital repositories. http://public.lanl.gov/herbertv/

    -Check out this ARL paper: http://let.blog.nitle.org/2009/02/13/campus-should-use-digital-tools-to-disseminate-faculty-researcharl/

    -It’s worth running through a series of Web 2.0 platforms, showing actual examples. Juan Cole’s blogging (both his main one, and the Napoleon book), publisher podcasts (http://www.journalofamericanhistory.org/podcast/),

    -Separate out textbook publication. For example, http://www.smartmobs.com/2008/08/16/watching-the-textbook-unbundling/.

    -Be sure to address Bamboo. http://projectbamboo.uchicago.edu/

    -There was a Kairos issue in 2008.

    …does this help?

  2. #2 KF
    Mar.03.2009, 02:48:19

    I’ve got a chapter on peer review in my project-in-process; it still needs some work, but I’d be happy to send the draft your way if you’re interested…

  3. #3 Laura
    Mar.03.2009, 02:57:08

    Bryan–thanks for all the links! I had to retrieve your comment from spam!

    KF–I’d love to see that chapter if you don’t mind sending it.

    I’ll admit that it feels weird being on the outside of this now, but working mostly with people inside it. Although I know there are plenty of people inside thinking and working on what’s next in academic publishing, I also find that people on the inside have a hard time thinking about how to change the system. It’s what they’ve always known.

  4. #4 Bryan Alexander
    Mar.03.2009, 03:40:53

    Oh, make sure you get Christine L. Borgman’s Scholarship in the Digital Age (2007).

  5. #5 jmcclurken
    Mar.03.2009, 08:40:31

    I can’t wait to hear what you have to say in May. This is a particularly tough issue and one that has gotten a great deal of resistance when broached (at UMW and elsewhere) in formal or informal ways in a variety of conversations I’ve been a part of lately.

    On one hand the change to a new system is always complicated (and frankly, even in the old system, the disciplinary differences are enough to make university-wide review committees shudder–e.g., how many psychology articles equal a book in the humanities?). So, that resistance isn’t that surprising. Yet, on the surface, online publishing should make a lot of things easier, not harder, to assess for tenure and/or merit pay:

    1) Financial limitations that restrict #/size/scope of published works exist on a completely different scale in the online world, especially once a system for peer-reviewed academic e-publishing was built.

    1a) It seems almost a no-brainer that scholarly journals should be on-line given the large percentage of costs that publishing those journals entails.

    2) Measuring impact — There must be some way of measuring the number of readers/links/hits/formal citations in other peer-reviewed articles or books/presence in syllabi. Now, obviously these things could be gamed (i.e., hits and uniques) or narrowed by restrictive access to some of the examples (BB course syllabi aren’t accessible, for example, nor are many online, but peer-reviewed articles in collections like JSTOR).

    As I said, I’m looking forward to your “conversation-starter” in May.

  6. #6 Laura
    Mar.03.2009, 09:21:54

    Jeff, I think the distribution issue (#1 and 1a) will somewhat resolve itself, except for the fact that the publishers, like their movie and music counterparts, are reluctant to let go of their stranglehold on this. It seems that a consortium of some kind, made up of a variety of institutions, might need to tackle the practicalities of putting stuff online, indexing it, etc. and that may solve some of #2.

    I think what lies behind #2 in many ways is a questioning of impact in general. The whole issue of what counts as scholarship and what makes an impact or not has been in discussion for 10 years.

    By the way, an independent person wanting to view peer-reviewed material, will pay around $30-50 or more for a single article.

  7. #7 Why does research still bother with print? « Tom Van Hout
    Mar.03.2009, 11:19:16

    [...] cannot wait for academic publishing to go online. Memo to self: read this post, subscribe to this site, learn about Herbert Van de Sompel’s work, discuss the issue with [...]

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