http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/papers/kirsch.html

It’s really just a conference paper but it’s something I’d like to get back to one of these days, hopefully with the benefit of your critical text at hand.

That’s not terribly clear—let me try again.  There are a few fields in which this publishing paradigm-shift might be possible today, including (perhaps) your own:  folks out on the edge of the study of electronic textuality might be able to forge a new system of peer-review and publishing that would serve the field well, because the nature of the field itself has produced a kind of consensus that electronic publication is a viable, respectable mode.  In fact, the forging of such a system would itself be an important scholarly project in that field.  And all of this would work in part because you (by which I mean “one”) could safely assume that your peers would find and take seriously and read and cite a project published in such a fashion.

I, alas, am writing about the ostensible death of print for scholars who are still attached to the print form, arguing (however ironically it now appears) that print is neither dead nor dying, but instead using representations of its death-throes as a vehicle for its continuance.  In order for the argument to work in some fundamental fashion, it’s got to appear in print.

Not to mention, of course, that the folks in my field—however narrowly one must define it in order to distinguish it from yours—are pretty unlikely to (1) find, (2) take seriously, and (3) cite an electronically-published text, no matter how it carries the markers of its peer-review process.  So however much I’d like to be involved in the forging of that new system, I could only do so by sacrificing the viability of my text as a player in my field.

Demoralizing.  In order to get out from under the collapsing old system, one has to be brave enough to imagine, build, and support a new system.  But all of our current standards of success are based around that old system, and leaving it behind appears to be a form of career suicide.

If the suck-o-meter is indeed analog (thanks for that, Jason!), the needle’s swung way over into the red…

In fact I completely understand why that’s not realistic, and I’m not seriously advocating it. Nor am I suggesting that we all become our own online publishers, at least not unless that’s part of a continuum of different options. But the point is, the system’s broken and it’s time we got busy fixing it. What ought to count is peer review and scholarly merit, not the physical form in which the text is ultimately delivered.

And while it’s certainly good and appropriate to recognize that you do have things going well in your life (healthy family, tenure, etc.), it’s also fine to realize that “suck” is an analog rather than a digital scale.

And academic publishing woes certainly register on the scale of suck.