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.

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.

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.

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?