Asking the Big Questions | Peer to Peer Review
Two scholars ask why we publish the way we do. It's time for some answers. Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN Jul 29, 2010Steve Wheeler, a senior lecturer in education at the University of Plymouth, asks a good question: "What if They Threw a Party and None of Us Came?" The "they" of the title are traditional publishers, and he wonders why scholars continue to engage in practices that are "prohibitive, discriminatory and increasingly outmoded." He thinks it's time to simply say no. He writes:
We should make our knowledge freely available to anyone who wants to read it using free and open services. That is the 'prime directive' of the open access, open educational resources movement. The powers that be don't like it, and neither I assume, will the publishers if everyone starts doing it. What if they threw a party and none of us came?
Sadly, that's not likely to happen anytime soon. The self-interest of scholars whose careers and livelihoods depend on publishing through traditional channels, the conservatism of evaluation committees that award tenure and grants, and the financial underpinnings of scholarly societies all marshal their weight against such a boycott. No matter how persuasive the idea that scholarship should be available to all, not just to those happy few who can pay for it, the invitation to the party seems to be one of those offers you can't refuse.
What's really going on?
At The University of Venus (a blog written by "GenX Women in Higher Education from Around the Globe"), Mary Churchill digs deeper into the roots of the self-interest and prestige issues that make it so challenging to make progress on the open access front. She asks a pointed question: "Are We Playing the Game, or Have We Become the Game?" She maps the changes in higher education to a neoliberal turn that has commodified education and research.
Individualism and that which brings in the most money are valorized over old-fashioned virtues such as collegiality and sharing knowledge for the common good. She writes, "the individual is at the center of the university and their value is determined by the dollar . . . research is valued over teaching, research income is valued as institutional income, and the most valuable research is that which can be transformed into a corporate commodity and sold to the highest bidder for the highest profit margin."
She points out that as what we do as academics is monetized, how we do it has been debased through making part-time, underpaid, under-supported faculty members the majority of the academic workforce. When permanent positions are a rarity, survival takes precedence over concern for the greater good, particularly when attending to the greater good doesn't earn you points. At the same time that faculty work is individualized and made more competitive, the old structures for shared governance are being dismantled and replaced by an administrative class, which doesn't have "sharing new knowledge" high on its list of Things To Do Today.
Exploring our motivation
Churchill raises another related question: "Why Do Academics Write?" In reality, given that the scholarly definition of legitimacy doesn't take into account how many people will read and find insight in what a scholar writes, writing is done for all the wrong reasons. She says:
An academic monograph does not reach a large audience. This type of writing is necessary for tenure and promotion, for legitimacy within an elite group. It takes years to publish our work in the form of a book. We are often required to eliminate the most ground-breaking parts of our work and what we do write is often outdated by the time it is published. More and more, it seems that our books are written for tenure and promotion rather than for making a difference and/or changing the way people think. . . .
Do we write to be read or do we write to be published?
Do we write to make a difference or do we write to secure a job?
I would like to believe that we write because we have something to say not because we are supposed to say something.
What a shame that the rewards system works against so simple, elegant, and profoundly obvious a proposition.
Is there an audience for this text?
Both Churchill and Wheeler see some irony in the fact that the "non-scholarly" writing academics do these days reaches a wider audience than traditionally published scholarship. One of Churchill's mentors looked at the number of hits her blog posts were getting and observed that any book she writes—whether written for a general or popular audience—would never gain so many readers.
Wheeler, in his charmingly "well, duh!" style argues that scholars who have embraced web publishing enjoy these benefits:
. . . they can reach a larger audience more quickly, and in a more interest driven and user-centric manner. There is no waiting for peer review, no publishing contracts to sign, and no production fees to pay . . . Rather than as a barrier to overcome, peer review through comments and feedback directly to the author, becomes more open, honest and accessible for all to read and learn from. I can see their point, as increasingly, I am publishing my ideas and research up here on this blog, so everyone can see it and access it freely, rather than waiting for it to be published in a reputable peer reviewed journal a year or so down the road, when it is out of date.
In a just-published article in First Monday, Sara Kjellberg of Lund University interviewed scholars who blog. Though they don't see their blogging as helpful in establishing their careers, and weren't substituting it for traditional endorsements of their worth, they reported that they benefit from a combination of factors: blogging helps them remember, connect, share information, express opinions, and support their other writing activities. They planned to continue blogging, even though this work was incidental to their "real" work.
It's strictly business
A few years ago, a study, "Scholarly Communication: Academic Values and Sustainable Models" found that UC Berkeley faculty in several fields valued peer review highly, yet had trouble disentangling the process of peer review from traditional publication. Many believed, incorrectly, that open access journals are not peer reviewed. (Apparently some publishing hack handed them a cup of Kool Aid and they drank it.)
Oddly enough, senior faculty seemed more open to innovative publishing practices than their younger counterparts, perhaps because they feel more secure in their careers. The authors of this study suggested that scholars' relative openness to sharing work in progress, as Kjellberg's bloggers do, might provide a lever for change but cautioned that creating new publishing models first and then trying to seek buy-in would fail, because for the most part, faculty regarded change with either suspicion or indifference.
But something has to give, and the minority of scholars who have made it, who work in tenure-track jobs at prestigious institutions, don't always realize how fragile the current system is. Faculty interviewed for this study assumed that their library would be able to provide for their needs because, well, it's a big university, right? They weren't concerned about how much it cost to sustain the system; that's someone else's problem.
This returns us to the philosophical issue of whether we're in this together or not. If we're content to let other people worry about costs or how the university is run, if we're simply interested in getting ahead as individuals, if we're willing to abdicate our responsibility to the common good so we can spend our time adding more unread publications to our CVs, things will only get worse.
I wonder whether the budget crisis that's crippling California has made the unsustainability of the system any clearer—or if it has only sharpened the survival instinct.
Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her latest mystery, Through the Cracks (see review), has just been published by Minotaur Books.
