As hinted yesterday, I spent part of last week working on a response to some reviews of The Anxiety of Obsolescence. Those reviews (five of them!), and my response, are now up at the Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies, where mine is one of three books-of-the-month. (And I’m happy to find that I’m in good company; the other two books under review this month are by Alex Galloway and Lori Kendall, both of whose work I admire greatly.)

Pop by, take a look, and if you have responses, I’d love to hear them!

I just got the following email message from a colleague on the far side of the country, with whom I actually haven’t been in contact in at least four or five years:

Hi, Kathleen–

I hope you’re well. I wanted to tell you that I just received a great packet from V.U.P. (with a color copy of the book jacket) hawking your book for my classes on lit. & technology, where it would indeed be a good fit. I’m requesting an examination and can’t wait to read it. The press seems to be promoting it energetically–a nice surprise, from an academic publisher.

I think I’m even more surprised than he is. I’ve been afraid for a while now that — well, the book’s been out for over a year, and I was afraid it had run its course. Reviews are yet to appear, naturally, given the painful slowness of academic publishing cycles, but I was quite afraid that the book was drifting into backlist senescence. Needless to say, I’m thrilled to know that the publisher is not only keeping it in active circulation, but marketing it smartly. To echo my colleague’s subject line: Vandy rocks!

From the Chronicle of Higher Education today comes an announcement of a report conducted by the University of California’s Office of Scholarly Communication that indicates that, generally, scholars accept the notion of innovative modes of electronic publishing in theory, but remain resistant in actual practice. According to the Chron, the report concludes that “the UC faculty largely conform to conventional behavior regarding scholarly communication, such as publishing in traditional venues, but widely express a need for change in the current systems of scholarly communication.” Such resistance seems to stem from fears that new modes of publishing might undermine the quality or value of scholarship.

At the same time, however, the report suggests that the force for innovation is coming from what its authors consider to be some surprising locations: according to the Chron, “identifies ‘more appetite for change among faculty in arts and humanities than within the social sciences, life and medical sciences, or the physical sciences.’ And it concludes that senior professors are often ‘more open to innovation than younger faculty.’”

So, the perennial question: how do we bridge the theory-practice divide? How do we translate the recognition of a need for change into actual change? How do we get those open-minded senior professors to make clear to their departments and their administrations that such changes are positive, that the quality of scholarship can in fact improve if institutions are open to innovation? And, most importantly perhaps, how do we get those institutions to convey to junior faculty — and to stand by those assurances — that new modes of publishing are not just valid, but valued?

A while back, I mentioned the release of the Ithaka report on University Publishing in a Digital Age. Ithaka has now partnered with the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library and with the Institute for the Future of the Book to post the report online in CommentPress (which I also wrote about a while back), making the text open to fine-grained commenting and discussion. Ithaka and the SPO are serious about seeking comment on the report; reactions and responses to this document may have a profound effect on shaping the future of academic discourse. Please stop by, read, and leave your thoughts and concerns for discussion.

(I’ll also take this opportunity to re-plug my paper on role of the social network in digital publishing, which focuses in part of CommentPress, which is also available for commenting in CommentPress. I’m beginning revisions on the piece, so your thoughts would be much appreciated.)

[Edited to add: Somehow I managed to let this post sit there for days without realizing that I hadn't actually linked to the CommentPress version of the report. Sheesh.]

I haven’t gotten to read the full report yet, but the Chronicle’s article today on the release of the Ithaka report, University Publishing in a Digital Age, is extremely promising. The report calls universities to task for their failures to recognize the ways that digital modes of communication are reshaping the ways that scholarly communication takes place, resulting in, as they say, “a scholarly publishing industry that many in the university community find to be increasingly out of step with the important values of the academy.”

Perhaps I’ll find this when I read the full report, but it seems to me that the inverse is perversely true as well, that the stated “important values of the academy” — those that have us clinging to established models of authority as embodied in traditional publishing structures — are increasingly out of step with the ways scholarly communication actually takes place today, and the new modes of authority that the digital makes possible. This is the gap that MediaCommons hopes to bridge, not just updating the scholarly publishing industry, but updating the ways that academic assessments of authority are conducted.

The Institute for the Future of the Book has today announced the release of its open source WordPress theme, CommentPress, which allows for easy online publication and discussion of a wide range of documents. My article on scholarly publishing, released earlier this spring by MediaCommons, was published in an early draft of CommentPress, and I’ve now put the finished release into use on a paper-in-development that’s, appropriately, about CommentPress.

Stop by if:book, download CommentPress, and read (and discuss) all about it…

Ben has just reminded me of something that I meant to post, both here and at MediaCommons, after the New Structures, New Texts summit: Nature has recently announced the launch of a new pre-print server, Nature Precedings, intended to be an open-source, Creative Commons-licensed repository for material ranging from pre-publication articles to conference papers to other kinds of scientific ephemera (posters, slide presentations, and so forth). On the one hand, this is an exciting development — a recognition of the ways that scholarly communication is changing in the peer-to-peer era. On the other hand, as one speaker at the summit noted, this raises concerns for university-based repositories. As I just commented over at if:book, publishing “precedings” will allow Nature to claim some degree of “ownership” of scholarly material far sooner in the process of its development than it has to this point. And given that the Nature Publishing Group is a for-profit organ (a division of Macmillan), one has to wonder what how they might seek to capitalize on such ownership, and what the unintended consequences for scholars might wind up being.

Session 4: New Economics

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Finishing up the notes from yesterday’s meeting:

Session 3: New Structures

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Session 2: New “Texts”

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