Mistakes Were Made: What We Can Learn from the Political Theory Affair | Peer to Peer Review

Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN -- Library Journal, 7/9/2009

A quick glance at heated Internet chatter about the journal Political Theory, and Sage's short-lived decision to change its editorship, is an illustration of why reforming our wasteful system of scholarly communication is so complicated. Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed  asks the big question: “who controls journals?” And the answers are complicated.

The rumor mill at work
Political Theory was founded by Sage, a well-respected publisher of books and journals, primarily focused on the social sciences. Though academics expect the shared decision-making that is a hallmark of academic culture and is the lifeblood of scholarly inquiry to inform the way a scholarly journal’s editorship operates, that understanding appears to be more traditional than contractual.

When the news surfaced that a new editor had been appointed  for Political Theory without consulting the editorial board, readers hypothesized all kinds of reasons for the decision. (These are political theorists, after all.) One blog post, picked up by David Glenn in the Chronicle of Higher Education,  racked up over 260 comments, most of them anonymous and many of them deleted by the harried blog administrator who had asked posters to avoid personal attacks.

Of course, that's not too surprising: the blog is called Political Theory Rumor Mill and has a job market focus, so it is a particularly uninhibited water cooler where you can stand around and watch how job market forces and the economics of scholarly publishing come crashing together.

Theories proposed to explain the mysterious incident included the notion that one school of thought was making a rearguard assault on another, that the editors involved were jockeying for position and power, that Sage was deviously trying to alter the theoretical stance of the journal and, therefore, influence the field, and that the publisher was worried about a slipping impact factor and wanted to sex it up with a more popular theoretical focus. There were even suspicions that one of the editors might be engaging in sock puppetry, posting anonymous comments and pretending to be someone else. As one of the anonymous contributors said, “this is getting to be a real exegetical challenge!”

The Wikipedia article profiling the would-be editor had a statement added that he was part of an “editorial takeover… a move that has a great potential for compromising the journal's academic integrity." It was quickly edited out by Wikpedians as unverified information. And as it turned out, the would-be editor resigned before even taking up the position, saying he had no idea that there were irregularities in his proposed appointment. Sage staff and the editors in question have all said the issue has been resolved amicably and was an anomaly. Still, the rest of the world is unsure what exactly happened in the first place.

Taking the long view
The issue was also examined, more thoughtfully, at the Crooked Timber blog (with a follow-up post) where the nexus of academic publishing and academic prestige were nicely summed up in a comment by Ron Steiner:

…the bottleneck [e.g. limited subscription access] imposed by commercial publishers has become a feature rather than a bug… academics are motivated by renown, that is the currency of the realm. And, not to be too crass, it converts into real currency through tenure, promotion, grants, and bidding wars to poach or retain prominent faculty. The prestigious commercial journals have only so much space, so they function very effectively to create a valuable exclusivity that results in pay-offs in currency of both the tangible and intangible sorts.

When people persist in doing something that initially appears irrational, there usually is some sense to it if you look close at their material interests (or, as Deep Throat said, follow the money.) Because powerful people find utility in terms of renown and money in the current system, they conclude that its benefits outweigh its costs, and will work to preserve it.

Lessons learned
That’s a cogent analysis of the situation. Perusing the mostly-anonymous Rumor Mill comments lead me to these depressing observations that bear out what Ron Steiner says, all of them significant stumbling blocks on the road to open access:

• Academics can spend an inordinate amount of time parsing power politics and tribal allegiances in the microcosm of a sub-field while remaining totally oblivious to the big picture.

• The artificial currency of impact factors—invented by a commercial publisher to measure the importance of traditionally-published journals—still carry weight among scholars, even though there are now so many other avenues for sharing ideas and achieving fungible academic renown.

• Our rewards system privileges the “valuable exclusivity” of prestigious journals rather than access, equating scarcity with quality; our up-and-coming scholars know the traditional reward system inside out and aren’t inclined to challenge it.

• Choosing where to publish your research, closely linked to success, is studied carefully in grad school, like an obscure branch of divination that induces symptoms of paranoia in its practitioners.

• Our graduate training promotes management of self-interest (tenure and promotion) but pays less attention to the value of knowledge as a common good. Many new faculty are highly attuned to the prestige value of various traditional publications but have no idea of what they cost or how few readers may actually have access to them. Nor do they apparently see much reason to care.

• There is very little institutional support for change. Scholar/editors, whose labor is paid for by their institutions, strike Faustian bargains with commercial publishers because they can’t get institutional support—in terms of time or administrative assistance—to handle the day-to-day management of publishing and distributing scholarly work. Likewise, many university presses can’t get sufficient funding to keep their publishing programs running while developing new sustainable models. Commercial publishers step in to provide the back-office support—and institutions then pay even more for support they wouldn’t fund up front through exorbitant library subscriptions that have a nice, fat profit margin added.  

When I think about the challenges we face in reinventing scholarly communications, I tend to ponder how to find new revenue streams for non-profit publishers or how to provide the back-office operations traditionally undertaken by publishers in new ways. But clearly, breaking the hold that "valuable exclusivity" has over our rewards system, so deeply inculcated in young scholars, is going to take significant work. So will renewing a sense in our new generation of scholars that the common good and the search for knowledge should take precedence over self interest—and that their success and public access to their work are not mutually exclusive, but actually a good match.

Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her next mystery, Through the Cracks, will be published by Minotaur Books in 2010.

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