In the category of things that I used to post to the blog that now land on Twitter instead: the link. In an effort to maintain a better archive for myself, I’m experimenting with moving these things back here again.

Today, Chris Kelty’s post on Savage Minds, “How Not to Run a University Press (or How Sausage Is Made)”. In this post, Kelty thinks through the reported demise — or, more accurately, the institutional doing-in — of Rice University Press. Among the issues he raises, perhaps the most significant is the university’s refusal to understand that publishing requires actual labor and financial support:

If you judge the experiment in digital publishing on these facts, it’s sure to look like a failure, but the failure is not in the vision or ideas articulated by the press, but a simple failure to maintain good business judgement. It speaks volumes about how university administrators and many others (including many academics) see academic publishing: as something where no labor is required, only a great big print-a-book machine, a warehouse and some stamped envelopes.

This assessment resonates strongly for me, as in chapter 5 of Planned Obsolescence I focus on the role of publishing within the university, and the university’s responsibilities with respect to publishing. My fear is that universities will take on this responsibility without committing resources to it, assuming (as Rice appears to have done) that because the new mode of publishing is digital, it must be cheap.

The fact is that while the costs involved in publishing can be reduced in some areas, the costs of labor cannot — and, if anything, digital publishing requires more, and more kinds of labor.

This is perhaps not the moment at which institutions want to hear that they have to make additional investments in something that feels optional, but they really need to hear this:

• If you expect your faculty to publish, you must provide the means for them to do so.
• If you expect scholarly publishing to turn a profit, or even break even, you may want to stop holding your breath.
• If you allow commercial entities to take over scholarly publishing, because they can afford to do so, you must expect their predatory, monopolistic practices to encroach on the access you have to your own faculty’s work, and to diminish the impact that their work can have both inside and outside the academy.

There is no solution to this conundrum except for institutions to recognize that they must become responsible for supporting scholarly communication, and that this support will require treating the technologies and the labor involved in publishing as part of the institution’s infrastructure.

I’m way more pressed for time than I’d like right now, finishing up a bajillion details involved in moving myself and a subset of my stuff across the country for the next ten months, but I want to be sure to take a second to note the absolute awesomeness of Anthologize, the new WordPress 3.0 plugin developed by the One Week | One Tool workshop, sponsored by the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities. The plugin is designed to take you from blog to book — or, even better, from many blogs to many kinds of book-like outputs. I’ve only just begun playing with it, but can easily imagine it become a key part of my Intro to Digital Media Studies class, and I can also see its utility in repurposing thematically-linked blog posts in more permanent, more “official” form.

Huge congratulations to the Anthologize team, and I look forward to watching — and participating in — the project’s further development.

[Crossposted from MediaCommons.]

Today’s Chronicle of Higher Education brings us a wonderful article from Jennifer Howard, exploring our recent experiment in open peer review, conducted on behalf of the eminent journal, Shakespeare Quarterly. This review process, which is at the heart of MediaCommons Press’s experiments in new modes of publishing for scholarship, has been so successful for SQ that, as the article notes, the journal’s editors plan to use it again for future special issues.

One interesting point in the article is the comparison between the Nature experiment with open review conducted in 2006 — an experiment declared by its editors to have been a “failure,” and used by many in scholarly publishing since then as evidence that open review can’t work — and the SQ review. Howard notes one participant’s sense the “the humanities’ subjective, conversational tendencies may make them well suited to open review — better suited, perhaps, than the sciences,” and yet, of course, the humanities have in general been very slow to such experimentation.

We at MediaCommons are extremely proud to be taking the lead in developing new models for transforming scholarly communication in the humanities, and we’re thrilled to have had the opportunity to work with a journal as important as Shakespeare Quarterly, modifying the open review process that we used (and advocated for) with my own Planned Obsolescence for the journal’s needs. Thanks to SQ‘s editors, and especially special issue editor Katherine Rowe, for making such a successful experiment possible.

We very much look forward to collaborating with scholars, journals, and presses on future such projects!

What follows is a rough transcript of the talk I gave this past weekend at the annual meeting of the Association of American University Presses. The panel was organized and chaired by Eric Zinner, Assistant Director and Editor-In-Chief at New York University Press, and the presentations before mine were by Monica McCormick, Program Officer for Digital Scholarly Publishing at New York University Press, and Shana Kimball, Co-Director of the Scholarly Publishing Office at University of Michigan Libraries. Their presentations had focused on library-press collaborations, and Monica in particular had mentioned the difficulty she had with hearing press representatives refer to what they do (in contrast to what libraries do) as “real” publishing, pointing out the equal realness of library-based publishing initiatives. I began by connecting my remarks to that comment, saying that authors themselves are producing a number of online publishing ventures that are similarly real, and that need to be treated as such if they’re going to be adequately understood.

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I come to the question about digital publishing that we’re discussing today from the perspective of an author, rather than a publisher, which is to say that your mileage as editors and publishers will no doubt vary. But I want to begin by being clear we are in the age of DIY publishing, even in scholarly circles. More and more journals are being founded in platforms like Open Journal Systems, which allow their scholarly editors to do the work they have done all along, while making the results of that work freely and openly available to the scholarly community and the broader world beyond. And more and more scholars are developing online presences via platforms like blogs that allow them to reach and interact with an audience more quickly, more openly, and more directly, without the intermediary of the press. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a fascinating exchange around open access publishing and the reasons scholars might resist it developing right now, beginning with Dan Cohen’s post, Open Access Publishing and Scholarly Values, which he wrote for the Hacking the Academy volume, a crowd-sourced book he and Tom Scheinfeldt are editing (to be published by the University of Michigan Press’s Digital Culture Books). Dan argues for the ethical — as well as the practical — imperative for contemporary scholars to publish their work in openly distributed forms and venues.

Stephen Ramsay then published a response, Open Access Publishing and Scholarly Values (continued), in which he points out that the ways we substitute what we now understand as “peer review” for real evaluation and judgment by our peers, particularly at the stage of tenure and promotion reviews, so overwhelms this ethical/practical imperative that we never even really get to the stage of deciding whether publishing openly could be a good thing or not.

I’ve left a comment on that response, which got lengthy enough that I thought I’d reproduce and expand upon it here. Steve writes, in the latter paragraphs on his post,

The idea of recording “impact” (page hits, links, etc.) is often ridiculed as a “popularity contest,” but it’s not at all clear to me how such a system would be inferior to the one we have. In fact, it would almost certainly be a more honest system (you’ll notice that “good publisher” is very often tied to the social class represented by the sponsoring institution).

My response to this passage begins with a big “amen.” At many institutions, in fact, the criteria for assessing a scholar’s research for tenure and promotion includes some statement about that scholar’s “impact” on the field at a national or international level, and we treat the peer-review process as though it can give us information about such impact. But the fact of an article or a monograph’s having been published by a reputable journal/press that employed the mechanisms of peer review as we currently know it — this can only ever give us binary information, and binary information based on an extraordinarily small sample size. Why should the two-to-three readers selected by a journal/press, plus that entity’s editor/editorial board, be the arbiter of the authority of scholarly work — particularly in the digital, when we have so many more complex means of assessing the effect of/response to scholarly work via network analysis?

I don’t mean to suggest that going quantitative is anything like the answer to our current problems with assessment in promotion and tenure reviews — our colleagues in the sciences would no doubt present us with all kinds of cautions about relying too exclusively on metrics like citation indexes and impact factor — but given that we in the digital humanities excel at both uncovering the networked relationships among texts and at interpreting and articulating what those relationships mean, couldn’t we bring those skills to bear on creating a more productive form of post-publication review that serves to richly and carefully describe the ongoing impact that a scholar’s work is having, regardless of the venue and type of its publication? If so, some of the roadblocks to a broader acceptance of open access publication might be broken down, or at least rendered break-down-able.

There seem to me two key imperatives in the implementation of such a system, however, which get at the personnel review issues that Steve is pointing to — one of them is that senior, tenured scholars have got to lead the way not just in demanding the development and acceptance of such a system but in making use of it, in committing ourselves to publishing openly because we can, worrying about the “authority” or the prestige of such publishing models later. And second, we have got to present compelling arguments to our colleagues about why these models must be taken seriously — not just once, but over and over again, making sure that we’ve got the backs of the more junior scholars who are similarly trying to do this work.

It comes back to the kinds of ethical obligation that both Dan and Steve are writing about — but for the reasons Steve articulates, the obligation can’t stop with publishing in open access venues, but must extend to working to develop and establish the validity of new means of assessment appropriate to those venues.

From Ted Striphas comes news of an exciting project: the crowd-sourced production of a text-to-speech audiobook version of his fantastic book, The Late Age of Print. Ted has opened a wiki for the project, through which interested volunteers can help him clean up the text for audio conversion. Instructions and details are available on the wiki.

This is an exciting project, not least for its attempt to manage the labor involved in creating a public resource that will be given away freely. I hope you’ll get involved.

I’ve got that cringing feeling that I haven’t been getting enough work done lately, but I at least have a few links to remind myself otherwise.

First, both the slides and the audio of the talk I gave at the University of Michigan a few weeks ago are now online, courtesy of Deep Blue.

And second, an article about the open review experiment with Planned Obsolescence coming out in the next couple of weeks in Information Systems Quarterly. I’m particularly happy to share this as the managing editor emailed it to me saying explicitly that I had the right to share it as I wish, including depositing it in my institutional repository or posting it on my blog. So here it is!

A promo video produced by DK Books for a Penguin sales conference has gone something like viral in the last two days, getting a lot of attention in my circles. In case you haven’t seen it:

I saw this video when DK first posted it, and have been thinking about it since then, mostly because I’ve been trying to figure out what makes me crazy about it.

When I watched it again yesterday it started to hit me: couched in the “hey, maybe social media isn’t going to kill reading after all; hey, maybe we really do need to start thinking about a new business model” stuff is an essentially conservative message about the ongoing primacy of the book. That only by reading everything exactly backward can you turn “books are dying” into “books are not dying!” That either the kids today only care about pop media crap or they care about reading, with no possibility that they can care about both, or that what appears to be pop media crap might in fact be important.

I dunno. It’s clever. It’s very nicely designed. And I’m happy it’s undoing some of the “kids today” rhetoric. But I’m not sold on the message overall. I genuinely believe that publishing has a future, but my feeling is that the future is going to look more like this video than like the book as we have known it. And no amount of running the tape backward will change that.

Yet another month-long absence. At least this time I have a major project to show for it!

It’s perhaps a tiny bit ironic to be launching this particular new MediaCommons Press project on the Ides of March, but nonetheless: we at MediaCommons are thrilled to unveil the open review experiment being conducted here on behalf of Shakespeare Quarterly, in conjunction with the journal’s forthcoming special issue, “Shakespeare and New Media.” Special issue guest editor Katherine Rowe has brought together four fantastic articles plus three review essays, each considering the impact of media change on Shakespeare studies.

Please visit the site, read the articles, and leave your feedback for the authors. We very much look forward to your participation.

Over the course of the last year I’ve been very excitedly following the developments at the University of Michigan Press, as the press became an academic unit housed within the library, and then developed a very forward-looking collaborative strategy called MPublishing, bringing together the strengths of the press and the library’s digital publishing services group.

I’ve been paying close attention to these developments not just because of their implications for Planned Obsolescence, but also because I’m a member of the advisory board for a new series being planned by the press focusing on groundbreaking work in digital humanities. Now, UM and HASTAC have jointly announced a new publication prize associated with the series.

I’m thrilled to be involved in this project, and look forward to seeing the work that it fosters.