Academic Publishing in the Digital Age

What an extremely pregnant topic and one which, as someone more than a little turned off by the traditional academic publishing model, I have a lot I could say. But I'll try to keep this post manageable as I'm really looking forward to what others have to say.

Digital publishing is a medium that excels by leaps and bounds at allowing for feedback over traditional print media. Our participation in these forums is a testament to that, but this isn't just limited to open ended forums and discussion groups. With digital publishing even full fledged articles can have comments sections as I've seen over at TWC, Vectors, and other great journals I've learned about through HASTAC such as Harlot. So this is one of the areas I'd like to see explored here - particularly the downsides becuase not many come to mind at the moment.

I will admit to having a fair degree of academic ADD when it comes to getting feedback on my ideas. The traditional publishing route doesn't give you much opportunity for immediate feedback at all. Most comments come from shopping your paper around at conferences long before you even attempt to publish it. To me this is the where the real heart of academic construction lies, where immediate feedback is possible. Publishing is more of the end result when really it should be the starting point - not everyone gets a chance to attend the conferences where the ideas relevant to their work are being fine tuned and have a chance to offer their input.

Call me a cynic, but most of the time it seems that the end result of being published in traditional print media is a line on the CV. You may get to engage occasionally with others over what you've written if someone you meet in academic circles happens to have read it. If you're extremely fortunate then some one may take enough of an interest in your ideas to write and publish a response to it, but you're most likely going to be waiting a full year to see those results (unless they are sincere enough to engage with you directly while writing their piece). By that point I've moved on to other ideas and rarely feel the excitiment about the old idea that I did when it was new. All in all as a mode of advancing the ideas of the discipline, traditional print publishing is an arduously slow process.

Digital publishing speeds things up dramatically. Granted if we're still following a peer review model (which I won't go into here) then the process will still be time consuming, but articles will get from the publisher to the reader more quickly. More importantly, readers can instantly make comments without being forced to write a fully realized paper in response. Brief responses can inspire a more conversational style interaction with the audience of one's ideas that I and I imagine many others prefer over developing a time-consuming critique, articulated in the appropriate disciplinary style, that one then feels obligated to defend despite any possible shortcomings.

To really inspire feedback, of course, the results of digital publishing would have to be open to all who are interested and not just academic subscription holders. I'm sure there is plenty to discuss on the logistics of such a possibility but the question for feedback becomes one of quality. Is there necessarily an inverse relationship between the quantity of access and the quality of feedback? In many other online endeavors this hasn't necessarily been the case (Wikipedia, for example). Assuming there is an audience out there that consists of people interested in reading and responding to academic work that do not happen to have access to university subscription services (i.e. who aren't academics), and I hope there are such people, would they be capable of participating in a way that is meaningful to the authors?

Trolling aside (because I doubt there are many who would get a kick out of inciting flame wars among generally stoic academics) the real question is whether the, for lack of a better term, "casual reader" would be equipped with the necessary background to engage with the discussion without rehashing old material? (Though that material can sometimes use a good rehashing and it's often this casual reader - our (non-major) students - who make us aware of that IMHO.) Here digital publishing writ large comes to our rescue. Assuming answers to some of the other facets of this larger discussion, older ideas, links, citations, and sources can be readily available online for those who may not be familiar with it but aren't opposed to taking themselves on a little in-depth historical survey mission. Hyperlinks beat footnotes and bibliographies any day of the week, especially for the casual reader!

I find myself doing just this in a weekly column I write about video games and philosophy. The readership consists of gamers, not philosophers, so when I make reference to philosophical concepts or writers I'll offer a very brief explanation and a link to further information should the reader desire it. Unfortunately I am forced most often to link to a book listing on Amazon or to a Wikipedia entry as actual full text is rarely available online. While it requires a pretty severe paradigm shift, if open academic publishing becomes the norm then the problem of uninformed readership resolves itself as most if not all of the information and ideas a non-academic (or an academic from outside the article's discipline) would need are easily accessible.

I have little personal experience on this topic, but have discussed it over the years with my father, Jim Gentry, a professor of Marketing at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. He is the North American editor of the print Journal of Consumer Behavior, and was the managing editor for the online Academy of Marketing Science Review before its sponsorship was withdrawn earlier this year. Here are some words of explanation from him before I pose the questions his experience has raised for me:

 

The Academy of Marketing Science Review (AMSR) was founded 12 years ago as the Journal of Consumer and Marketing Research. Its founding editor tried to get it sanctioned by the Association for Consumer Research, but failed. Then he got support from the Academy of Marketing Science for the journal, so AMSR became a poor step-sister to this organization's somewhat mediocre print journal, the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (JAMS). We were limited in our mission, in that we were not to publish empirical work. The founding editor chose to go the traditional journal route in terms of the review process. He solicited a strong review board and early articles from leaders in the field. He also solicited non-traditional formats. But the quality standards were reasonably high. In 11 years, we published less than 80 articles and two videos. Everything was done on the cheap, with the authors and the editor doing the final editing of the papers.

The journal still has global access at www.amsreview.org and we did what we could by creating an international review board, with regional assistant editors. Our goal was a global journal that could be accessed by anyone free (a big issue given the limited journal coverage in libraries in the developing world) and that received contributions from the developing world as well. The latter goal was being met in the final years of the journal, but the editor spent a lot of time sending track changes to early drafts as non-Western trained scholars in India and elsewhere do not always write well in American English, the language of the journal. In January 2008 the AMS board decided to withdraw its sponsorship of the journal, and the last paper was uploaded around April 1. The review board supports the journal and it may be revived under the sponsorship of another society, the International Society of Markets and Development.

The journal made it to lists as a B journal, and work from it was being cited (infrequently) in A journals. But it did not count much for tenure and promotion decisions in the developed world and there is virtually no way for an electronic journal to be profitable. The AMS board wanted a second print journal instead. I see print journals as dinosaurs but they will last a few more years.

I'm guessing (hoping?) some of you may disagree with his assessment that "there is virtually no way for an electronic journal to be profitable." As someone with no real knowledge of this field, I'd be interested in learning more both about how profitable e-journals can be, and how profitable similiar print journals actually are. Sponsorship also seems to be an integral issue and I would be interested to hear from organizations that sponsor or publish traditional print journals why they are or are not branching out into all-electronic journals.

I am also interested in how electronic journals may be particularly accessible to scholars in the developing world. As my father points out, subscription access to journals may be limited in the developing world, and thus e-journals (that make their content freely available) may provide an essential venue both for access to research and as a place to publish. But are there many "A" journals that are entirely electronic? What forces determine whether a journal is an "A" journal, a "B" journal or something else and are all those forces transferable to an electronic platform?

I look forward to learning more! Thank you Chris & Julie for facilitating this forum!

This is Kristina, one of the founding editors of TWC. When we started conceiving of the project last year, we encountered again and again a peculiar dichotomy: everyone loved the idea of online publishing, including, ease of access, speed of publication, low publication cost, and ability to include multimedia and link. Karen and I both work as independent scholars, so that Open Access is central for us. In particular in fan studies, where the audience often can include those that may not have access to libraries who subscribe to a particular journal (whether as are international academics or fan scholars), it is crucial that anyone can access the journal.

Likewise, speed of publication is crucial in a field whose subject works at Internet (not academic) speed. Given that we are affiliated with and supported by the nonprofit Organization for Transformative Works (rather than a university), cost was important for us. Finally, given that our subject area includes transformative works such as videos, drawings, icons, etc., the online format allowed us to both include and reference the material discussed (rather than trying to describe a fan-created text that might have limited circulation and thus might not be accessible to readers in the same way more mainstream/canonical texts would be).

And yet, in early discussions we quickly realized that most people thought of online publications as second rate and less valuable in terms of academic promotions. In other words, online publishing was something everyone supported in theory but didn't really want to "waste an essay" on. As frustrating as that was, it wasn't all that surprising. My experience in academia had often been that while trendsetters were encouraged, they were often not rewarded in a system that at its base tended to be quite traditional and hierarchical. [And I should acknowledge that my degree's in English, but my experiences of the past few years in media studies have not really altered my opinions all that much.]

Moreover, the very features that made our journal exciting as a tool that might bridge the gap between academics and fans, namely the Symposium, were also the aspects that made the journal less scholarly sophisticated. After all, that section isn't blind peer reviewed, and we invite non-academics to contribute and engage. Again, this is a concept much lauded within academia but one that at the same time is looked at with a certain amount of suspicion.

We've been lucky so far. Our editorial board believed in our project and supported us. Enough contributors have taken a chance on us and submitted their excellent work. Our first issue was strong and diverse and, I think, managed to reach both academics and fans (judging from page access numbers and delicious links at least some of the essays were heavily read and recommended by non academics as well).

But the question remains on how to bridge that dichotomy. How do you get a tenure committee to judge an online journal as equal to a print one? How do you even submit your essay when the journal (as have we) has chosen to not provide PDFs so as not to encourage/privilege print publication? Now, some of these issues will resolve themselves as TWC continues to exist, i.e., some of the problems I’m describing are launch-related rather than online-only ones. Also, the way online journals are regarded can differ from department to department, discipline to discipline.

It remains true, however, that in general online only publications still have a slightly more difficult time to be seen as equals in terms of rigor and reputation. We all tend to idealistically embrace alternative forms of knowledge and dissemination, but the academy can be very slow in accepting change, and I fear online publications will have to deal with those prejudices for a while to come.

As I know very little about academic publishing in digital contexts, I'll keep my comment short. Nevertheless, expanding on Kylie's fascinating post about the pace and quality of paper feedback, I wonder about the ways that online publications might encourage better (or simply different) forms of collaboration. Certainly Vectors promotes interactions between writers and designers. As these sorts of journals hopefully proliferate over time, I wonder whether a digital format, or more foundationally the type of connection that goes with online composition, might increasingly disrupt an individualistic academic culture. In other words, I wonder if online journals, which plenty of scholars certainly still view with skepticism, could someday challenge a culture that celebrates lone researchers gathering archival materials and producing scholarship that is primarily shared with others once it is in a state of virtual completion.

Since my direct experience with online publishing is so minimal, I'd like to extend my questions to other participants. Have those of you who have experimented with online publishing discovered types of collaboration that you hadn't experienced previously? What forms of intellectual partnerships or communities have you seen established through this route of production and publication?

Patrick Jagoda (Duke)

One of the questions I have for participants in this discussion is how broadly we want to define academic publishing, and whether the editorial and peer review processes as we currently know them are essential to our definition. Is this forum itself, for example, a form of academic publishing?

I think a big part of how we still imagine the world of publishing has to do with a time when it was expensive to produce, distribute, store, find, and get access to the written word. As all of these things become cheaper to do in the digital world, to the point where we almost don't think of the associated costs anymore, one of the key values added by the publishing process (and one of the most expensive ones) is high quality filtering. "Content" (how I hate that term) is abundant, and it's our time to read that's limited. So we rely on peer review and editing processes to be a filter for us before publication, and these form the basis of the brand of the publishers and publications we trust. And to a certain extent in universities we rely on our libraries to be another layer of filtering - if something was deemed worth purchasing and cataloging and storing and circulating in a library we can have some assurance that it was vetted by a librarian.

But how about all the good stuff that's "published" through more informal venues - blogs, discussion forums like this, pre-print archives, course web sites, mailing lists, services like Seesmic or SlideShare, or library digital collections? These aren't so much edited as they are curated, and the peer review, if any, is done by the community of readers who contribute their thoughts in comment forms, by responding in discussion threads, or by writing about it in their own blogs. There's also a form of commentary that can be implied by links, citations, and other references to items in these informal spaces - this is what Google and others aggregate to form the basis of their relevance ranking. By looking for patterns in links and citations on the web or in journal literature and books, Google surfaces a kind of collaborative filter, and by data-mining co-occurrences of references in personal citation libraries like Delicious or CiteULike, or in the profiles we build in services like Amazon or Netflix, one can begin to see latent communities and networks of "peers" emerge. These are filters too, and their strengths lie where traditional publishing leaves off - they scale better (and in fact only work well at a very large scale), and do their filtering only after publication, and only after the "publications" themselves been read and commented on by enough members of the community to begin to detect patterns.

So if we start to broaden our definition of academic publishing (and I think we should) then we have to start thinking about what filtering mechanisms we'll need to help separate the signal from the noise. And if we want to help develop collaborative filters as described above, some other things need to be in place.

First, we need to have references that are persistent. A lot of what's exciting on the web these days is being rendered dynamically out of databases, and the URLs for these resources are full of query strings and other non-human-readable gobbledygook that only a computer can love, and that make it difficult to cite something with the confidence that it will be the same the next time you go back to it (or if you go back to it 10 years from now). Looking at the two electronic journals cited in this thread, one (TWC) has URLs that are slightly more readable than the other (Vectors), which at least makes it easier for a human to cite. But TWC also has (in the HTML view of each article) a DOI (digital object identifier - such as doi:10.3983/twc.2008.0059 which points to the link http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2008.0059 ) that acts as a persistent actionable link to digital objects, independent of the current hosting platform and namespace. So if TWC moves to a different server or URL in a few years, the DOIs can be redirected to the new locations and will still work, and if readers cited the DOI rather than the potentially ephemeral URL in the journal.transformativeworks.org namespace, citation mining systems will know that the items in both the new and the old location are in fact the same item. In the blogosphere, permalinks perform a similar function, though only within the namespace of the blog itself.

Second, we need the resources to be open, or at least for the references to be able to be cited openly and mined for patterns, so that we can detect places where networks of citations are forming. In addition to arguments about open access generally being in the public good, it's also important for the purely practical reason that resources that are openly available can also be more easily linked and then be mined for patterns of links. If you can make your reference an actionable link, then the target of the link can know where the reference came from, and services like Google, Technorati, or even the New York Times can aggregate these references and use them to surface patterns in resources that are the most frequently cited around particular terms, in particular contexts, or in particular timeframes. Tools like these make it easier to judge impact, but if the citations are inconsistent or not actionable on the open web, then the resources will likely be less visible and less discussed. Again, the blogosphere is ahead of the academic journal world in the extensive use of trackbacks and linkbacks (based on permalinks, as mentioned above). The vibrant discussions that happen in the blogosphere are in part, I think, based on the connections that are surfaced by these two-way links and the openness of the material on both sides of them, and I think we need to do more in the academic publishing world to promote these same effects.

I'll conclude with a tentative answer to the question raised in the introductory post about how we might increase the academic credibility of emergent forms of scholarship and publication. I think it has to do with being able to show the impact that publications in these new forms are actually having. Server logs with hit counts and download counts are not enough because they're just raw numbers with only tenuous value judgements that can be implied from them. But if you could show with confidence how many times a work is being cited or discussed or even just bookmarked, which individuals or communities are citing and discussing and bookmarking it, and continue to track these over time, you potentially have something much more powerful than the number of monographs or subscriptions sold. And these effects might provide a stronger stimulus for us to rethink and reformulate the economics of academic publishing...

It seems that one of the major arcs of resistance offered by alternative forms of publishing is the possibility for resistance to assessment/evaluative devices like impact factors and bibliometrics. How do we as academics who *need* to publish in order to achieve things like promotion, tenure, and in the case of some graduate programs, graduate, resist the inclination to publish in 'top-ranked journals' (most of which are mainstream journals) without placing our livelihood in the balance? How do we resist the creation of alternative forms of assessment/evaluation for our alternative forms of publishing?

I think the humanities could learn a thing or two from the scientific, technical, and medical (STM) market, even though their imperatives are different. Both want to get ideas out there, but the sciences are all about timeliness. They print received/accepted dates on articles to prove it. (As someone who works in the field of STM publishing, I actually scoff at journals that don't come out weekly. What wimps!) You can tell what's important to each discipline merely by checking out their citation styles. The sciences use numerical or author-year styles, the latter in particular highlighting the recentness of the work. The humanities use author–short title styles, because it's all about who said what, and the when, although pertinent, may not always be that important.

Let's be honest here. The sciences have all kinds of money that the humanities don't. In the STM market, the authors pay page charges for their articles to appear. The journals published by the Public Library of Science (PLos), which are all Open Access, pay for peer review, journal production, and online availability by charging the authors. As an example, the fee to publish your rigorously peer-reviewed, accepted article in PLoS Biology is, for 2007–2008, $2,850. In my work, I've seen print color reproduction fees exceeding $30,000. Authors write the cost into their grants, because, and I really believe this, publication is the last step of research. I don't know about you, but I've never been charged to have an essay appear in a humanities journal.

Further, many organizations that publish journals outsource the editing and production to professionals. They don't rely, as the humanities all too often do, on talented amateurs. Buying that expertise, so important to timely and professional-looking publication, also costs. I'd say that cost may be worth bearing: I joined a humanities organization last year that publishes a journal, only it hasn't appeared for the last 3 years. I didn't renew. Another humanities organization I am a member of is 2 years behind in their journal and is trying to catch up. Neither of these cases is unusual. It is very unprofessional to not print your journal, if you ask me.

Let's also talk about timeliness. In the sciences, two versions of each document are prepared: the online version, which will appear asap, and the print version. All these dates are logged and published to show the timeliness of the work, because in the sciences, timeliness is the watchword. The articles I'm copyediting right now were accepted in early October, and they'll be out in December, which includes copyediting, author approval, and SGML/XML tagging/typesetting (usually done by a vendor in India from the same file). This makes wait times of a year or more in the humanities seem utterly ridiculous.

Big publishers like Elsevier and Springer (disclaimer: both are on my client list) can do what they want and charge what they want because they have such a lock on the content, even though that cost is subsidized by authors via page fees. One way journals make money is to charge for reprints; this is an especially big deal in the medical field because applications for, say, new drug submissions to the FDA must include official offprints of supporting research. At $30 to $120 a pop for each article, that's some major money. If you're Open Access, you can probably forget using reprints as a source of income.

Realistically speaking, for journals in the humanities, constraining availability of content is probably the only way to permit it to serve as a source of income. One way to do this is to lock content so only paid subscribers can obtain access to the most recent research. However, this will adversely affect citation of cutting-edge work, which is related to prestige (the higher the quality, the more rigorous the peer review, and the more cited, the more prestigious). I currently see no way to avoid having to rely on the kindness of supporting institutions—support that, as Erin Gentry Lamb points out, may be withdrawn at any time.

Regarding the general prestige of online versus print: this is far less an issue in the sciences than in the humanities, and I am confident, despite my coeditor Kristina Busse's general pessimism about the issue, that as journals move online to save costs, online will become far less of a stigma, as long as the quality is good and the peer review rigorous. Give it a few years and let's revisit this issue, because by then, the landscape will have changed radically. Right now we're working against hidebound deans who sit on promotion and tenure committees. The question shouldn't be online or print, but peer reviewed versus non–peer reviewed. And the more (young?) scholars who appear in and cite online publications, the more there won't be a stigma.

Content appearing online does not give us carte blanche to sidestep the tenets of academic rigor. Peer review provides all sorts of credibility. Blog posts, even by thinky scholars, are just blog posts, but they have their place in academic discourse as sources. It's up to us, as scholars, to assess and use content in appropriate ways—and ultimately, we decide what is appropriate.