As is being discussed a good bit around the academic blogo-/twittersphere this morning, Jennifer Howard reports in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education on a new report soon to be released by a committee organized by the National Humanities Alliance, entitled “The Future of Scholarly Journals Publishing Among Social Science and Humanities Associations.” This report seems to have a couple of compelling findings: first, that the per-article cost of journal publishing in the humanities and social sciences is more than three times as much as in the science, technical, and medical (a.k.a. STM) fields, and second, that this increased cost is due in no small part to the increased selectivity of those journals. Where the STM journals under study (which seem to be primarily the official journals of learned societies) have an acceptance rate of around 42 percent, the humanities and social science journals publish about 11 percent of submissions. Journal articles in these fields also tend to be about 50% longer, meaning fewer articles per journal issue. The tighter pre-publication filtering needs of these journals results in an extremely heightened expense for peer review in humanities and social science journals, resulting in a per-published-article cost nearly four times that of STM journals. And given that, as the Howard article notes, the author-pays model of journal funding will never work in the humanities, where the vast majority of research is either self-funded or funded by the author’s home institution, something else has got to change if journal publishing is going to remain feasible.

So here’s a wacky thought, one I’ve been writing and talking about for a while now: what if we stop doing pre-publication peer review? It’s of course the economics of print that require such gatekeeping — because there can only be so many pages and so many issues of any given journal, we end up only being able to publish a little over a tenth of the material submitted. But if the primary venue for the journal is the internet — and really, honestly, how many of a journal article’s readers come to it first through the print version? — then those economics radically shift. We’re no longer constrained by the bounds of what we can print and ship, but instead by what we can put into our publishing format. In that case, we’d be much better served, I believe, by eliminating pre-publication peer review. Perhaps the journal’s editorial staff reads everything quickly to be sure it’s in the most basic sense appropriate for the venue (i.e., written in the right language, about a subject in the field, not manifestly insane), but then everything that gets past that most minimal threshold gets made available to readers — and the readers then do the peer review, post-publication.

It’s those readers, after all, who are the article’s true peers, not the two or three editor-selected reviewers who now give the article the up-or-down vote. It makes no sense for the labor of the same small set of reviewers to be drawn upon again and again when there’s the potential for more broadly and fairly distributing that work. And it makes no sense for article publishing to be subject to the crazy delays that now hold a lot of work hostage, first waiting for the peer reviews to come in, and then waiting for the journal’s backlog of accepted articles to clear out. Why shouldn’t readers be able to read and respond to that work right away, and why shouldn’t that reading and response constitute the article’s peer review?

This of course depends on the assumption that readers will actually bother to respond — that they’ll be sufficiently committed to the maintenance of the collective enterprise of the publication that they’ll take the time to comment on and review submitted articles (as opposed to the mostly anonymous peer reviewers of today, who have proven themselves willing to do that work). One way to ensure such participation might be a pay-to-play model, in which readers are asked to do a certain amount of reviewing in order to earn the “credit” required to submit an article.

But another, even more basic, assumption made by such a model is that the “journal” function will continue to exist in a fully networked publishing model. After all, there would be no particular point in waiting for some arbitrary moment to release an “issue,” when new material could be made available as it is ready. A more likely scenario is that we develop either institutional or disciplinary publishing systems that function like blogs, featuring new articles (or texts of whatever length, as those restrictions fade away as well) as they appear, but keeping the archives available and in play in perpetuity.

This is the kind of publishing model we’re attempting to build at MediaCommons. It’s been very slow in developing, but the tools we need to put such peer-to-peer review in place should be ready for testing very soon. I hope that all of you with a vested interest in developing new publishing models — in ensuring that scholarly publishing in the humanities can survive — will keep talking about these issues, will join us when we start testing our new systems, and will find ways to help us build a working structure for the future.

Clicking through my Google Reader a few minutes ago, I read a TechCrunch article that Meg had shared, which details the increasingly egregious service failures of AT&T with respect to the iPhone. Some of them you probably already know about: their incomprehensible inability to get MMS and tethering up and running in a reasonable time frame, for instance.

But others you may not. For instance: have you checked your voicemail lately? I don’t mean the little badge that the iPhone uses to tell you there’s a message via its visual voicemail system. I mean actually calling your own mobile number and going through the menu, old-skool. I just did, and discovered that I had EIGHT voicemail messages dating as far back as three weeks ago that AT&T had never bothered to inform me of. Two of which were from my mother, who was quite perturbed two weeks ago when I didn’t call her back — but I’d had no indication, no missed call badge, no voicemail badge, to let me know she’d called at all.

iPhone owners, it’s time to collectively raise your blood pressure: call and see if you have voicemail waiting. And then send a note to Apple about it. AT&T not providing new services is bad enough, but failing to provide the services for which we’re already paying, and then not even bothering to let us know there’s a problem, is unacceptable.

One of the best things I’ve been asked to do at Pomona College so far was getting to introduce Walter Cronkite before his commencement address a few years ago. He was extraordinarily kind and gentle when I met him, beginning to slow down a bit perhaps, but still brave enough to take on the Bush administration in a speech that caused at least a couple of irate parents to storm out of the ceremony. This was the introduction I gave him then; I still think every bit of it (and then some) was deserved.

—–

President Oxtoby, friends, colleagues, and graduating seniors:

I want to begin today with two admittedly polemical statements: first, that the institution most singularly influential in the history of the late-twentieth century United States is television, and second, that the individual most singularly influential in the history of that medium is Walter Cronkite.

Mr. Cronkite began his career in journalism as a campus correspondent at The Houston Post during high school and his freshman year at the University of Texas. He also worked as a sports announcer for a local radio station in Oklahoma City and joined the United Press in 1937. Mr. Cronkite became a correspondent to CBS News in July 1950, and became the anchor of the CBS Evening News on April 16, 1962. When, on March 6, 1981, he stepped down as anchorman and managing editor after nearly 19 years in that role, Mr. Cronkite became a Special Correspondent for CBS News, which he remains to this day.

What that listing of dates and jobs doesn’t tell you, however, is what Mr. Cronkite accomplished during his distinguished career on-screen: He brought an exacting sense of professional standards to broadcast journalism, insisting that reporting be “fast, accurate, and unbiased.” That said, he was also unafraid to add an editorial perspective when necessary, to take a principled position and stand by it. As such, Mr. Cronkite is thought of by many today as the man who brought an end to the Vietnam War. On February 27, 1968, CBS aired a special broadcast, “Report from Vietnam by Walter Cronkite,” at the close of which he added the following statement:

“To say that we are closer to victory today is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion… it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out, then, will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.” As legend has it, President Johnson, who was watching the broadcast, then turned off his set and said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.”

Mr. Cronkite could always be counted upon to speak for middle America; in 1972, a national poll was conducted in which voters were questioned about their levels of trust for various politicians (including Nixon, McGovern, and “the average senator”). Walter Cronkite, the write-in candidate, bested them all, and came thereafter to be known as “the most trusted man in America.”

Mr. Cronkite has received innumerable other awards and honors, from his peers in the fields of journalism and broadcasting, from universities and colleges, from national organizations. But perhaps no other honor is quite so telling as this: so synonymous with broadcast journalism has Mr. Cronkite become world-wide, that he has entered two languages as a common noun; in both Sweden and Holland, news anchors are known as “cronkiters.”

Mr. President, on behalf of the Board of Trustees and the Faculty of Pomona College, it is my great pleasure to present to you Walter Cronkite, for the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters.

The following was originally published as a guest post on Infinite Summer.

As you may have seen mentioned in a countdown post here, this past spring I taught a single-author course focused entirely around the work of David Foster Wallace. And as one of you noted, we read pretty much all of it — the short fiction, the long fiction, the non-fiction — with the exception of a few uncollected pieces. (Although, to be honest, I’m pretty certain that almost no one in the class actually finished reading Everything & More, except for the four students who’d signed on to give a presentation on it.) It was alternately a terrifying and exhilarating experience, spending a semester that deeply enmeshed in a body of work as rich, allusive, and smart as this one. And it was also a risky experience, emotionally speaking; Dave was a close colleague of mine, and the course was meant to give me and a group of students the time we needed to engage with both the loss we felt and the astonishing legacy that Dave left us.

And I don’t think I’m exaggerating, or at least not by much, when I say that it was the best teaching experience of my career thus far. Not that it was easy, either for the students or for me; they had an overwhelming amount of reading to do (though for many of them, at least some portion of it was re-reading) and a lot of writing as well, and I had a lot of preparation and a lot of grading to do. And then there were moments when I just felt unequal to the task of keeping the course from turning into a sort of Cobain-esque spectacle of mourning, in which we could all stew in the horror of his death by ferreting out — okay, they’re not all that hard to ferret — every reference to suicide or depression or more generalized anomie.

My students, however, were way more than equal to the task. Having given them, the first week of the semester, Wimsatt and Beardsley’s essay on the intentional fallacy, along with Wallace’s essay on Joseph Frank’s Dostoyevsky and an interview Larry McCaffrey did with Wallace pre-Infinite Jest, we had a long conversation about the complexities of the relationship between any text and its author, and more importantly about the distinction between the author as we think we understand him from the text and the actually existing human being who set pen to paper, all as a way of getting at why the class was going to be focused on this figure named “Wallace,” and not on “Dave.” A solid subset of the class strongly resisted Wimsatt and Beardsley, and held tight to the idea of the meaning of a text deriving from some idea held by the author, but they all got the distinction between the imagined author of a text and the biographical person, and were more than generous in going along with my insistence that because we couldn’t conceivably know what Dave might have meant by something, an appeal to his biography in interpreting his writing wouldn’t help. What we had before us were the texts, and rather than use what we knew of his life to help make sense of them — or worse, to use the texts in an attempt to make sense of his life, in a way that would treat the work as mere autobiography, utterly discounting and dismissing the role of imagination in his writing — we needed to use the texts themselves, and the references and allusions to other texts that they contain, as the sources for our interpretation. And that’s what the vast majority of the class had signed on for. We all somehow understood without saying that reading these novels and short stories and essays as nothing more than evidence of the tragedy to come not only sold the texts themselves short but also missed the crucial point that the act of imaginative identification with someone outside himself was precisely what had kept Dave alive, and that we owed it to the texts to focus on their search for human connection rather than its failures.

I’d taught Infinite Jest twice before, as part of a course called The Big Novel. In that one, we read Gravity’s Rainbow, Underworld, Infinite Jest, and Cryptonomicon, attempting to think through the impulse of a subset of recent authors toward producing such encyclopedic novels, and what they have to do with the state of U.S. culture after World War II. In each go-round of that class, Infinite Jest was both a highlight and the odd-novel-out, the one that seemed to be most about us and who we are right now, but the one at the very same time not about how we got here, but where we’re going if we don’t watch out. Reading Infinite Jest this past spring, not in the context of Pynchon and DeLillo, but in the context of Wallace’s own previous and following work, took some of the emphasis off of the particular forms of cultural change the novel posits and focused it more on the philosophical questions that recur throughout his writing, and in particular the relationship between self and other as mediated by language, or perhaps that relationship as complicated by the impossibility of ever really saying what you mean, coupled with the absolute necessity of trying to do so anyhow.

But I was left with the puzzle of how to structure the class. If we read the texts in chronological sequence, Infinite Jest would fall much too early in the semester, and would threaten to take the wind out of the sails of everything that fell behind it. But leaving it for the end of the semester, as the culminating text, wouldn’t allow us to see how Wallace’s thinking developed after its publication. I finally settled on a kind of half measure: we started Infinite Jest at the proper moment in the chronological sequence of the texts, but stretched it out across the rest of the semester, spending one day each week on another of the books and one day working through another section of IJ. On the whole, I think it worked out really well, though I suppose you’d have to ask my students for confirmation. The hardest part of that schedule — for me, at least; for them it was no doubt the quantity of reading — was trying to figure out how to talk in sufficient detail about the 100 pages on the table for that week, drawing attention to the things I knew were going to turn out to be important, without giving away too much about why they were important. But as you can tell from my students’ blog, they had lots to say, lots they wanted to consider, and discussion only very rarely flagged.

The first semester I taught my “Big Novel” course, on the last day of class, I did my usual “any lingering questions that you’d like us to talk about” schtick, and one student raised her hand and asked me why I hadn’t had David Foster Wallace come talk to them while we were reading Infinite Jest. And I was so surprised that I wound up blurting out the truth: because I had never talked with him about the class I was teaching. Because he would have hated it, hated the idea that his work was being discussed in the very building in which he was trying to be someone other than the Famous Author of Infinite Jest. Because both of us suffered from a kind of self-consciousness that made it absolutely necessary for him to pretend like he didn’t know I was teaching the novel (and it was pretending, I’m certain; it’s a very small college), and for me to pretend like I didn’t know he knew, if we were going to be able to function. So no. No visits from Dave.

I thought about that moment all last semester, and the fact that I could only teach perhaps the best class I’ve ever taught precisely because he wasn’t there anymore. And I still don’t know what to do with that, but I hope that if he’s out there, wherever, he’ll understand.

The newest issue of M/C, the Journal of Media and Culture, is out, and it’s focused on a topic near and dear to my heart: the Obsolete. There’s an excellent cluster of articles there, and the editors invite active discussion, as they have a larger series of projects focused on obsolescence in the works.

I’m not sure exactly why I find this as funny as I do. The sad thing, however, is that I’m quite sure someone’s going to fall for it.

From: System Administrator [email address redacted, but trust me when I say it's not my sysadmin's]
Subject: Mailbox Update.
Date: 15 July 2009 6:16:57 PM PDT
To: undisclosed-recipients:;
Reply-To: System Administrator [at a whole other email address, also redacted]

Attn: Webmail User,

This message is from our Helpdesk Team to all webmail account owners.

We noticed that webmail account has been compromised by spammers. It seems they have gained access to webmail accounts and have been using it for illegal internet activities.

The center is currently performing maintenance and upgrading it’s data base. We intend upgrading our Email Security Server for better online services.

You are to send us your account information immediately to enable us reset your account. A new password will be sent to you once this is done.

Send the information as follows

*Username:
*Password:
*Alternate email:

In order to ensure you do not experience service interruptions, please reply this email immediately and provide the following information above to prevent your account from being deactivated from our database.

Thank you for using our online services.
Helpdesk Team

I’m a bit off the grid for the next several days, but wanted quickly to draw your attention to an article by Jeffrey Di Leo published a couple of days ago at Inside Higher Ed, entitled “Against Anonymity”. The article makes the general case that anonymity should be used only sparingly in academic life, and that while we claim that it allows for greater honesty and fairness in assessments, it instead hinders such assessment in some cases by enabling cowardice preventing free and open dialogue. This is an argument I’ve been making about peer review — that whatever benefits anonymity might provide, it does far more harm than good in preventing open exchange. As Di Leo suggests,

Anonymity in manuscript review allows reviewers to disengage from dialogue. It of necessity keeps the author of the manuscript outside of the dialogic process.

I recognize that any transition to open review processes will be bumpy, but I increasingly believe that we as scholars have to be willing to take responsibility for the assessments we make of others’ work, to make those assessments in the open where we are held accountable for them, and to make those assessments part of a process of constructive conversation.

I’m deep in the thick of the chapter I’m writing on issues of preservation for digital scholarship, and am feeling fairly acutely the extent to which these issues have not been on my radar before now, so I need to ask for your help, particularly the digital librarians among you.

While there are a number of extremely important reports that have been published around these issues of late (see, for instance, the Blue Ribbon Task Force interim report, “Sustaining the Digital Investment,” the MITH white paper “Approaches to Managing and Collecting Born-Digital Literary Materials for Scholarly Use”, and the ARL report, “Safeguarding Collections at the Dawn of the 21st Century”, among others), I’m focusing the chapter around a few particular projects of which I could really use a deeper sense.

What I’m looking for is critical accounts of the histories of the histories of projects such as TEI, COinS, DOI, and LOCKSS, accounts that both convey the development and administration of the programs as well as any lingering issues with which the projects need to contend. I’ve found some basic stuff about each project, but if there are particularly good resources out there, I’d love to hear about them!

[Ed: Just critical accounts of the histories of the projects, not critical accounts of the histories of the histories. Not enough coffee yet...]

Because I had a rather amazing exchange about the future of open access publishing via Twitter last night with Brett Bobley (@brettbobley), Dan Cohen (@dancohen), and Steve Ramsay (@sramsay), and unless you were following all three of us, you probably missed it. And I’d love to repost it here, but that would mean a lot of manual cutting and pasting, attempting to rebuild the thread out of last night’s stream. From what I can tell, Google Wave will cluster that stream for me, and allow me to embed it here directly, where, should you choose to join in the conversation, it’ll self-update.

I want all the many conversations that I have, at various levels and on various platforms, to become visible to me as conversations, and to be repurposable as various kinds of publications. And I hope I’m not being over-optimistic in anticipating that Google Wave will make a good bit of that possible.