Scholarly Publishing in the Digital Era – IR11
Roundtable Discussion –
Scholarly Publishing in the Digital Era: Changes, Challenges, Innovations
Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), Internet Research 11.0 Conference
22 October 2010, Friday, 4:20 – 5:20 pm 
Abstract
Publishers, editors, and authors have been exploring ways to utilize the potentials of Web-based publishing for many years, but concern has intensified for a range of reasons: the current financial crisis in scholarly publishing, increasing interest in open access venues, funding agency demands for open repositories, reservations about blind peer review for determination of quality, and growing interest in the ‘added values’ of Web-based formats permitting participatory modes of intertextuality, inclusion of multimedia, and utilization of full-color and dynamic visualizations – formats frequently associated with Web 2.0 and social media. These developments and concerns suggest the panorama of issues to be addressed by the members of this roundtable discussion.
Participants (position statements)
Participants* include journal editors and experts on open access, peer review, and Web-based publishing. A diverse range of positions are reflected by these participants: some represent traditional scholarly publishing venues and others are on the forefront of innovation regarding scholarly communication. The participants are regular attendees of AoIR conferences and have contributed to previous AoIR conference workshops and panels on scholarly publishing. (*Click on participant names in the right side bar to review individual statements – or click here to review all statements.)
Organizers
Nicholas W. Jankowski is Visiting Fellow at the Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences (VKS) in the Netherlands. He recently edited e-Research: Transformation in Scholarly Practice (Routledge, 2009) and in the introductory chapter Jankowski considers some of the changes ongoing in formal scholarly communication. Jankowski has given workshops and conference presentations on scholarly publishing, most recently as keynote speaker at the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP). He is co-editor of the Sage Publications journal New Media & Society and editor of the Hampton Press book series Euricom Monographs: New Media and Democracy.
Clifford Tatum is a fellow at the Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences (VKS) in the Netherlands. His work at the studio is focused on transformation of Internet resources into a platform for Digital Scholarship. This initiative endeavors to increase access to VKS scholarship, increase direct participation in the communication of and discussion about research output, and to increase visibility of research practice as it happens in the field. Clifford holds an MBA in International Business, an MA in Communication, and a BA in Industrial Design. His PhD research examines the tensions between intellectual priority and competitive advantage in open collaboration.
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Position Statements for IR11 Roundtable-
Nick Jankowski
Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Alex Halavais
Steve Jones
Stu Shulman
Siva Vaidhyanathan
Clifford Tatum
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Nick Jankowski (bio) (website)
[founding co-editor of New Media & Society]
Visiting Fellow Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts & Sciences (KNAW)
Amsterdam, the Netherlands
A ‘Revolution’ in Slow Motion: Scholarly Journal Publishing in the Digital Age
Different sectors of society react, understandably, with varying degrees of embracement of the ‘Digital Age’. While acknowledging such diversity, scholarly publishing in the social sciences and humanities remains far from innovative with regard to incorporation of the range of Web features and of social media presently available. Those curious must look long and hard for illustrations of scholarly Web-based journal publications that provide opportunities for author-reader exchange or for more general (micro)blogging contributions and comments. Conventional Web 1.0 features (e.g., internal and external hyperlinks, color, video) are uncommon even among online-only periodicals; more sophisticated Web 2.0 features (e.g., dynamic visualizations, real-time updating of and linkage to literature databases) are found in few periodicals and most of these are distant from the humanities and social sciences, such as the Elsevier title Cell. Illustrations of traditional social science and humanities publishers experimenting with multimedia components on their journals (e.g., podcasts, video supplements) can be counted on a single hand (e.g., Journalism Practice, Television & New Media, Vectors).
There may be understandable reasons for the slow, incremental transformation of scholarly publishing in the digital era. There may be, for example, limited interest among readers for more than traditional and static textual presentations; there may be wariness among publishers to invest heavily in uncertain innovations; authors may be unconcerned about incorporating Web 2.0 into their formal, academic discourse. Although understanding the reasons for the slow pace of innovation is valuable, equally valuable is exploration through experimentation designed to extend the parameters of traditional scholarly periodicals. In my contribution to the IR11 Roundtable, I will suggest a range of innovations, some minor but others far-reaching, which may contribute to enhanced publication of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.
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Kathleen Fitzpatrick
[Author of Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy]
Professor of Media Studies
Pomona College
Peer-to-Peer Review
The 800-pound gorilla that looms in any discussion of new digital scholarly publishing models is peer review. And not without reason: it’s in some sense the sine qua non of the academic world. And yet, as I’ve argued in my book, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (forthcoming in print, but available in draft online), simply applying print-based modes of peer review to online materials threatens to miss the point. Print publishing has always, and of necessity, operated within an economics of scarcity: only so many pages, in so many journals and books, could be published each year. In the digital, this form of scarcity is over; there are no material constraints on what can be published. Moreover, given contemporary scholarly authors’ access to new modes of DIY publishing — modes of publishing that often produce a greater public impact than traditional publishing venues do — an enormous amount of new material is simply being published outside of the traditional systems of review.
Where scarcity lingers in scholarly communication, however, is in time and attention: scholars need help finding the most important new research in their fields within the increasing amount of discourse online. Further, scholars who are getting their work out in DIY, born-digital ways need access to the kinds of evaluation that will grant their work the sort of imprimatur that can be used in tenure and promotion reviews. In other words, if scholarly publishing in the digital era is increasingly moving to what Clay Shirky has famously termed a “publish, then filter” ethos, we need to work on developing the “filter” end of our communication systems.
For these reasons, I argue strongly in my book, and am working on developing through MediaCommons, a post-publication system of what I call “peer-to-peer review,” one that uses the responses of a community of practice to a text not as a means of determining whether it should be published (creating a sort of artificial scarcity online) but instead as a means of assessing how the work has been, and should be, received, and what its impact on the scholarly community has been. I’ll discuss a few of the driving forces, the issues, and of course the obstacles involved in developing such a system in this session.
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Alex Halavais (bio) (website)
Author of The New University Press
Associate Professor, Interactive Communications
Quinnipiac University
Publishing no longer has much to do with ink on paper–as if it ever did. But that particular historical form has given us what we consider the “published” work. This is a text that is “fixed” in form, a statement for posterity, as opposed to part of a conversation. The record we make when we publish should be an added bonus, something that happens beyond our primary aim: engaging in distributed scholarly communication. For this to happen we will need to give up some of our dedication to fixity.
When we set aside publishing as a process of memorializing, it frees us from a number of constraints. We no longer need to filter strictly–the temporary record is as important as the permanent record. We do not have to publish only the successful or perfected, since there is a built in assumption that our work is always in progress. It means an end to unidirectional citation, and provides space for debate.
We lose some things as well. Some of these are ornaments that embellish the act of publication, and are best left behind. (Traditional publishers often say “but what about tenure requirements” as if these were ends rather than the means of scholarship.) But it also requires new innovations in archiving, sorting, and mechanisms of discovery.
These new needs hint at new requirements of the scholar. Being “open” means more than merely providing for free access–though this is essential. It means making discovery, citation, and reuse ridiculously easy. In practice, for a text to be “open,” it must be usable, in every sense of that word.
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Steve Jones (bio) (website)
[founding co-editor of New Media & Society]
UIC Distinguished Professor, Department of Communication
Associate Dean, Liberal Arts & Sciences
University of Illinois at Chicago
I would like to take this opportunity to ask a question that I find not often asked about scholarly publishing. I believe we take some things for granted about journals and publishing, not the least being whether or not we need journals, and if so, how many?
First: Do we need journals? In this day and age of plentiful publishing opportunities online, and opportunities for peer review online, what purpose do traditional journals serve? What caused me to think to ask this question was reading a report by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) that more than 50 percent of faculty appointments in U.S. universities and colleges are “contingent,” that is, not on the tenure track. (The chart at illustrates this nicely, though it only has data through 2007.) If one of the main motivations to publish is to earn tenure, will contingent faculty publish in them?
The question points to the complicated and interdependent relationships between publishers, scholars, and institutions. Practices not considered part of publishing per se (hiring, promotion, status) nevertheless have consequences for it.
Second: Do we have too many journals? It is interesting to consider how we decide where to publish. We typically have a hierarchy of journals we value, and the ways we value them are often varied and often have less to do with their content as such and more to do with their reputation (sometimes assigned by us, sometimes by others, sometimes both). That hierarchy is, I suspect, not very dynamic, and in many cases unchanged from the time we were in graduate school. (As an aside, it would make for an interesting longitudinal study to empirically verify this assertion, and I would quite like to find a collaborator with whom to work on it.) How might that hierarchy change if we were required to pay for subscriptions ourselves? To put that another way, if the payment for subscription were coming directly and only from your pocket, to which journals would you subscribe? Would that list differ from other journal lists you might have in your head (e.g., “top journals in the field,” etc.)?
Both questions are ones that have value, and values, at the center. We are near a point, I think, whose arrival is hastened by decreases in funding for institutions of higher education (particularly in the US and UK most recently), when our values will be put to the test, for there will be (and in many cases already is) too little financial wherewithal to let a thousand flowers bloom. But, will there be sufficient motivation, energy and interest in finding other gardens, beyond that of traditional publishing, where they might grow?
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Stu Shulman (bio) (website)
[Editor of the Journal of Information Technology & Politics]
Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science
Director, QDAP-UMass – Associate Director, NCDG
University of Massachusetts Amherst
The future of digital scholarship is bright. Imagine a “SuperGoogle” (credit to Eduard Hovy and Andrew McCallum for this idea) for capturing scholarly impact in a more robust and seamless manner. This intelligent, Web scraping aggregator will suck up every citation, link, referral blog post, tweet and News Feed entry that indicates something about a scholar’s digital footprint and in an open and transparent way will let users better understand how the world interfaces with a scholars work online.
These tools are getting better all the time and new metrics for measuring scholarly impact as well as the contribution of credentialed referrals and recommendations will change the way we think about impact factors. We should advocate for the elevating these innovative ways of measuring the impact of scholars, but with a sober sense that, until a generation of entrenched scholarly gatekeepers die off, the new metrics will play a very small role.
In the period of transition, which may be another 5-25 years long, the existing rules and norms for hiring, promotion and tenure review will rule the day. Scholars on the bleeding edge of this change should be wary of neglecting the current paradigm; to do so can be career threatening.
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Siva Vaidhyanathan (bio) (website)
[Author of The Googlization of Everything (and why we should worry)]
Associate Professor of Media Studies
University of Virginia
First, I want to applaud and second Kathleen’s astute analysis of the needed change in norms to deal with a publishing world in which publishing is far too easy and influencing minds far too difficult. If she is right that abundance is both the luxury and the challenge to manage, and I believe that she is, we can derive two assumptions about long-term needs of scholars in this new environment.
First, scholars should not need traditionally curated and restricted scholarly journals. What journal publishers add is significant but replaceable. What they subtract is significant: cost and time. Undermining the political economy of journals will take at least another decade. But we have a good head start and we have begun to articulate the issues effectively.
Second, there are too many books published in the world in general. And the surplus is extreme in academic publishing. There is no need for a book that is merely a collection of scholarly articles with no coherent theme or argument. There is no need for a book that will sell fewer than 3000 copies. Interestingly, even as it becomes harder to sell any individual scholarly title and harder for each scholar to secure a contract, the number of scholarly books published each year continues to hold steady. Some years it climbs. Why? Because publishers take seriously their mission to disseminate quality work. But they also take seriously the imperative to do more with less. That means less editing, shoddy copy editing, poor indexing, cheaper design, cheaper materials, less marketing, and more books handled per editor. The massive growth in the number of potential authors in the past 20 years has fueled this problem.
For complex reasons, the shift to purely digital publication that has already essentially taken over the journal world would not necessarily solve the problems of the book world.
In our flurry to focus on platforms, innovation, and connectivity, let us not forget that this is at its heart a political problem.
In North America and Europe subsidies for university presses have been slashed. In the United States academic publishers are now required to break even. And they are even encouraged to turn a profit with major trade titles (“Hey, if Oxford can do it …”).
And on the demand side, funding for the major market for all scholarly publications — university library — has been slashed as well. What meager collection enhancement funds remain get sucked away by monopolistic commercial journal publishers.
The solutions are thus far from easy:
1) We must lead a political movement to generate an open-access journal system that thrives in every scholarly field.
2) We must lead a political movement to fully fund higher education and research — especially subsidies for university presses and university libraries.
Doing anything less or seemingly clever misses the mark and merely contributes to the fundamental problem of civic disengagement and obsolescence.
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Clifford Tatum (bio) (website)
[Co-author of Openness in Scholarly Communication (with Jankowski)]
Digital Scholarship Fellow
Virtual Knowledge Studio for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts & Sciences (KNAW)
Amsterdam, the Netherlands
With the diffusion of digital technologies there is increased attention on the possibilities of openness. Although the open access movement has made great strides, dominant models of scholarly publication persist. Complicating matters, the success of a few well-publicized open projects, such as Linux and Wikipedia, have contributed to exaggerated expectations of openness. Need for economic return and quality control mechanisms, such as peer review, present enduring barriers to increased openness.
Meanwhile, informal scholarly communication practices exhibit forms for openness that extend beyond access to published work. Participation on variety of web-based platforms, creates situated discourses structured by use of hyperlinks, tags, and comments. Formal publication of scholarship could benefit from this form of intertextuality.
Publishers often work to align with (or resist) principles of open access, a movement that can be seen as an affront to their economic reward system. The closed, pay-for-view model remains dominant among top, high impact journals. Publishers continue to enjoy support from the majority of scholars through their preference for high impact publishing venues. More than open access, peer review, central to the academic reward system, seems to be a crucial barrier to increased openness.
The peer review system is criticized for being inefficient and over-burdened. Even so, experiments with open peer review have yet to strike a resonate cord within the academic community. A likely problem with open peer review is reconciling the intended social distance afforded by double blind configuration. Other forms of open collaboration suggest alternatives to fully open or fully closed. Crowd sourcing, for example, could be used to facilitate connecting qualified reviewers with manuscripts in need of assessment.
Features and functions of social media can be used as a place for editors, publishers, and reviewers to facilitate the role of peer review by leveraging affordances of scope and scale. Editors can post the need for discipline/topic specific reviewers and reviewers can search for manuscripts to review when they have time to review — or vice versa. Such a system could increase transparency (a form of openness) in the process while maintaining blind review where circumstances warrant.
If the relative efficiencies of digital media can be leveraged to better utilize intellectual resources in peer review and to reduce the duration of the process, it might make sense to separate it from the publication process. Editors might then be able to compose a journal issue from articles already peer reviewed. Reviewer comments would remain private but would be accessible through authentication by either the author or editor.
