I learned about
this book (
Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy by. Dr. Kathleen Fitzpatrick) from the LSW (
of course) and it was a joy to read. Below are some of the best parts. Note that the quoted parts are from the preprint electronic version of the book. (The copyright notice is way at the bottom of the post.) Some of the text in the printed book may be slightly different from the online version. And, there were complete sentences and paragraphs that were in the book, but were not on the website.
Most of her work focuses on the scholarly book publishing industry in the humanities, but in order to explain some of the problems with the scholarly publishing book business, she had to examine how STEM journal budgets have eaten up academic library budgets. She does a great job of explain much of the scholarly communications crisis as the whole. She would like to save university presses by having their services merged with university library publication services. In doing this, university administrators will need to rethink the whole scholarly communication ecosystem within universities and with the rest of the world. She points out that technological change can be quick, but that cultural change can be slow to glacial in the academy.
This
bit does a good job of explaining the serials crisis. (page 3.)
Though the notion of a crisis in scholarly publishing was first aired
well over a decade ago (one might see Sanford Thatcher’s 1995 article in
the Chronicle of Higher Education, entitled “The Crisis in
Scholarly Communication”), things suddenly got much, much worse after
the first dot-com bubble burst in 2000. During this dramatic turn in
the stock market, when numerous university endowments went into free
fall (a moment that, in retrospect, seems like mere foreshadowing), two
academic units whose budgets took among the hardest hits were university
presses and university libraries. And the cuts in funding for
libraries represented a further budget cut for presses, as numerous
libraries, already straining under the exponentially rising costs of
journals, especially in the sciences, managed the cutbacks by reducing
the number of monographs they purchased. The result for library users
was perhaps only a slightly longer wait to obtain any book they needed,
as libraries increasingly turned to consortial arrangements for
collection-sharing, but the result for presses was devastating.
The scholarly communication system is
broken (page 7.)
"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” (Kirschenbaum).
Administrators should evaluate the work of scholars while being
format agnostic (page 8.)
Many of the recommendations put forward by the MLA task force (which
were of course later expanded upon in the task force’s final report,
published in December 2006) were long in coming, and many stand to
change tenure processes for the better; these recommendations include
calls for departments:
...
* to acknowledge that scholarship of many different varieties is taking
place online, and to evaluate that scholarship without media-related
bias.
and
These were extremely important recommendations, but there was a
significant degree of “easier said than done” in the responses that
these recommendations, and particularly the last one, received, and for
no small reason: these recommendations require a substantive rethinking
not simply of the processes through which the academy tenures its
faculty, but of the ways those faculty do their work, how they
communicate that work, and how that work is read both inside and outside
the academy. Those changes cannot simply be technological; they must
be both social and institutional.
She then discusses the
MediaCommons project and the
rate of social change within the academy. (pages 8-10.)
No matter how slowly such software development projects move, the rate
of change within the academy is positively glacial in comparison.
and
Those of us who have been privileged enough to succeed within the extant
[higher education] system are often reluctant to bite the hand that feeds us. Changing
our technologies, changing our ways of doing research, changing our
modes of production and distribution of the results of that research,
are all crucial to the continued vitality of the academy – and yet none
of those changes can possibly come about unless there is first a
profound change in the ways of thinking of scholars themselves. Until
scholars really believe that publishing on the web is as valuable as
publishing in print – and more importantly, until they believe that
their institutions believe it, too – few will be willing to risk their
careers on a new way of working, with the result that that new way of
working will remain marginal and undervalued.
She advocates for a
huge change in the peer-review system of scholarship. (page 10.)
In
what follows, then, I focus not just on the technological changes that
many believe are necessary to allow academic publishing to flourish into
the future, but on the social, intellectual, and institutional changes
that are necessary to pave the way for such flourishing. In order for
new modes of communication to become broadly accepted within the
academy, scholars and their institutions must take a new look at the
mission of the university, the goals of scholarly publishing, and the
processes through which scholars conduct their work....
And it’s the structures of peer review that I argue in chapter 1 we need
to begin with, not least because of the persistence of the problem that
peer review presents for digital scholarship, and the degree to which
our values (not to mention our value) as scholars are determined by it.
Peer review is at the heart of everything we do – writing, applying for
grants, seeking jobs, obtaining promotions; its presence is arguably
that which makes the academy the academy. But I want to suggest that
the current system of peer review is in fact part of what’s broken, part
of what’s made a vibrant mode of scholarly communication undead.
We need new ways to cite works. (page 12.)
We may instead need to develop new citational practices that acknowledge
the participation of our peers in the development of our work.
And, we need to figure out ways to encourage administrators to accurately evaluate different modes of scholarly communication. (pages 12-13.)
We must find ways for the new modes of authorship that digital networks
will no doubt facilitate – process-focused, collaborative,
remix-oriented – to “count” within our systems of valuation and
priority.
Publishers will continue to experiment with different business models. (page 13.)
Publishers, for instance, will need to think differently about their
business models (which may need to focus more on services and less on
objects), about their editorial practices (which may require a greater
role in developing and shepherding projects), about the structures of
texts, about their ownership of copyright, and about their role in
facilitating conversation.
Chapter 1 is all about the peer review system. She touches on some library things. (page 17.)
As one librarian frames the issue, “Banning a source like Wikipedia
(rather than teaching how to use it wisely) simply tells students that
the academic world is divorced from real-world practices” (Badke, qtd in
Regalado). The production of knowledge is of course the academy’s very
reason for being, and if we cling to an outdated system for the
establishment and measurement of authority at the very same time that
the nature of authority is shifting around us, we run the risk of
becoming increasingly irrelevant to the dominant ways of knowing of
contemporary culture.
In the course of changing the peer review system, this may entail the loss of "
power and prestige" for the academics involved. (page 19.)
She has good overviews of the
history and
possible future of peer-review. She also provides touches on the aspects of
anonymity,
credentialing, the
reputation economy of academics, and more. There is a good quote in the book that is not in the online version. (page 31.) Junior scholars are advised to
focus not on the important but on the publishable, avoiding risk-taking in the interest of passing the next review.
The scholars who have achieved status in the prior system would like to
keep the status quo. (page 31.)
The result, conventionally, has been the dismissal by many faculty and
administrators of all electronically published texts as inferior to
those that appear in print, or, where those authority figures are
sufficiently forward-looking as to argue for the potential value of
electronic publishing, the insistence that the new forms adhere to older
models of authorization — and thus the reinforcement of “the way things
have always been done” at the expense of experimental modes that might
produce new possibilities. Such conservatism shouldn’t come as much
surprise, of course; those faculty and administrators who are in the
position of performing assessments of the careers of other, usually
younger, faculty are of necessity those who have sufficiently benefitted
(sic) from the current credentialing system as to rise to that position.
She touches on the
scarcity of information vs abundance. (page 37.)
Print-based publishing operates within an economics of scarcity, with
its systems determined in large part by the fact that there are a
limited number of pages, a limited number of journals, a limited number
of books that can be produced; the competition among scholars for those
limited resources requires pre-publication review, to make sure that the
material being published is of sufficient quality as to be worthy of
the resources it consumes. Electronic publishing faces no such material
scarcity; there is no upper limit on the number of pages a manuscript
can contain or the number of manuscripts that can be published, or at
least none determined by available resources, as the internet operates
within an economics of abundance.
She also cites Clay Shirky (page 38) on the scholars' ability to "publish-then-filter," instead of filtering (peer-review and rejection) before publication.
She introduces a concept called peer-to-peer review, which she describes as a "
review of the reviewers." (page 43.)
Chapter 2 covers
authorship.
In what follows, I argue that we all need — myself not least among us –
to rethink our authorship practices and our relationships to ourselves
and our colleagues as authors, not only because the new digital
technologies becoming dominant within the academy are rapidly
facilitating new ways of working and new ways of imagining ourselves as
we work, but also because such reconsidered writing practices might help
many of us find more pleasure, and less anxiety, in the act of writing
itself. This is of course not to suggest that digital publishing
networks will miraculously solve all of the difficulties that we face as
writers; rather, it is to say that network technologies might help us
feel less alone and less lost in the writing process.
Concerning the remixing of content... (page 79.)
We might, for instance, find our values shifting away from a sole focus
on the production of unique, original new arguments and texts to
consider instead curation as a valid form of scholarly activity, in
which the work of authorship lies in the imaginative bringing together
of multiple threads of discourse that originate elsewhere, a potentially
energizing form of argument via juxtaposition. Such a practice of
scholarly remixing might look a bit like blogging, in its original
sense: finding the best of what has been published in the digital
network and bringing it together, with commentary, for one’s readership.
But it might also resemble a post-hoc mode of journal or volume
editing, creating playlists, of sorts, that bring together texts
available on the web in ways that produce new kinds of
interrelationships and analyses among them.
Chapter 3
covers texts and
CommentPress.
Chapter 4 is about digital
preservation including bits about standards, metadata, LOCKSS and CLOCKSS, and the economics of preservation.
Chapter 5 covers
the University. She envisions great changes for the future of university presses.
Page 159 has a quote that is not in the online version. The university press system exerts "a conservative influence over scholarship, as genuinely new ideas would present concrete financial risks" when they consider publishing the first work of a junior faculty member.
Here is another big blockquote on the
serials crisis. (page 159.)
In fact, the degree to which the largest commercial scholarly publishers
have put the bite on universities (by obtaining the products of
scholarship, most of which were produced through university, foundation,
and government funding, without compensation to authors or their
institutions — indeed, at times even demanding payment from
them — and then selling those products back to universities via
obscenely expensive journal subscriptions) might encourage us to rethink
the profit-model of scholarly publishing altogether, to consider
whether there’s another option through which universities can reclaim
the core of the publishing endeavor from the commercial presses. The
commercial presses can’t be beaten at their own game, as the large
commercial publishing conglomerates will always be able to conduct such
business more efficiently, and more ruthlessly, than the university
should want to do. But nor can we simply abandon the business of
scholarly publishing to them; as Thompson notes, in times of economic
slowdown “commercial logic would tend to override any obligation they
might feel to the scholarly community” (98), leaving nothing to stop
them from eliminating monograph publishing entirely. We can’t beat
them, and we can’t join them; what we can do is change the game
entirely.
Ahhhh, here is where she goes into the benefits of Open Access. (page 160.)
One clear way of changing the game, dramatically and unequivocally, is a
move toward the full embrace of open-access modes of digital
publishing. While the notion of open access has generated a great deal
of controversy among presses, who given current financial realities
declare its proponents naive and its ideals untenable, we need to
understand, as John Willinsky has argued, that “open access is not free
access… the open access movement is not operating in denial of economic
realities. Rather, it is concerned with increasing access to more of the
research literature for more people, with that increase measured over
what is currently available in print and electronic formats” (Willinsky
xii).
But, the roots for open-access publishing models lie not in the "subversion of market forces in the distribution of scholarship" but it is
the ethical
desire to break down the barrier between the information “haves” and
“have-nots” of the twentieth-century university structure, enabling
institutions without substantive endowments, institutions in
less-wealthy states, institutions in developing nations, to have access
to the most important new developments in scholarly research.
On page 165, she recommends that universities consider
locally produced publications and journals (eg. university presses) be
considered to be fully part of the core research mission of the
Institute... in the same way that an experimental
laboratory is considered part of the core research mission in the
sciences, employing both graduate students and technical professionals
working on an ongoing program of research — would it be funded
differently? Would we begin to understand publishing ventures not as revenue
centers nor as idiosyncratic one-off experiments, but rather as part of
the infrastructure of the institution, as key an element in its research
mission as is, for instance, the library?
She argues for
greater collaboration between the university press and the university library system. (page 166.)
If such publishing ventures are understood as part of the core mission
of the university, and thus become funded as part of the university’s
infrastructure, however, there are some potentially fruitful avenues
through which we can think about streamlining the labor that must take
place, about finding ways to avoid the reduplication of efforts, and
ways to bring together work already being done in disparate
administrative units in order to expand their potential. For instance,
new scholarly publishing initiatives will require significant new
resources for programming, design, and distribution, but will presses or
libraries need their own teams of programmers, or can a fruitful
partnership be developed with the programmers located elsewhere in the
institution? Do presses need metadata specialists, when this is one of
the key aspects of contemporary library and information science
programs? While the library, the press, and the information technology
center all currently serve different aspects of the university’s
communication needs, and while all are often stretched to their limits
in meeting the full range of those needs, joint experimentation amongst
these three units might enable fruitful reimaginations of the university
as a center of communication, with a reduced need for perpetual
reinvention of the wheel.
But, this would be an
interesting challenge. University presses and libraries have different thoughts on experimentation. (page 169.)
Such new partnerships, however, present challenges for institutions, and
even many of the institutions that are working to build such strategic
relationships encounter difficulties in the process. These difficulties
are less due to any dearth of administrative imagination than to the
real, material differences between these various academic units. As
Brown et al point out, for instance, libraries (as well as, I’d argue,
information technology centers) often have resources for experimentation
available, but their positions within the institution do not serve to
provide them with a broad sense of the fields in which such experiments
might operate (what audiences, for instance, the experiments might
address, and how they might fold into ongoing projects within the
disciplines). Presses, on the other hand, have a clear sense of their markets, but
often lack the resources with which to experiment, as well as the
mandate for that experimentation.
More and more scholars are getting recognition for the work that is online and at the leading edge. (page 170.) She noted that "at this point very few scholars have been hired, granted tenure, or promoted primarily based on this kind of open online work, there are a few, and there will be more in the years ahead. More and more scholars are rejecting publication venues that don't provide open access."
Concerning the publication of knowledge, she cited David Perry--"Knowledge which is not public is not knowledge." She goes on to say that if faculty research is not public, then the "university has not completed its job." (page 173)
This seems to be the basic thesis for the book, that universities should merge the functions of the university press with the university library. (page 180.)
What if the press were reimagined, in parallel with the library, as
another point of pivot between the institution and the broader scholarly
community — if, as the library brings the world to the university, the
press brought the university to the world? What if, rather than serving
particular scholarly fields through the current list-based model, the
press instead focused its attention on the need to publish the work
produced within the university, making it available for dissemination
around the world?
However, she recommends that the university press publish the works of the faculty at the university instead of publishing the works of those outside of the university. (page 181.)
The changes I’m proposing here thus have broad implications for every
academic institution, and not just for those relatively few institutions
that currently house university presses, as shifting the focus of the
press’s publishing efforts from the list model to publishing the work of
its own faculty will require every institution to take on this publishing mission, to invest in bringing the work of its own faculty into public discourse.
This requires university administrators to think of university presses in a different way. The proposal "requires a radical reexamination of the funding model under which scholarly publishing operates, moving the press from being a revenue center within the university toward being a part of a broader service unit within the institution." (page 186.)
In the conclusion of the book, she notes that this is an "extraordinary challenge that change presents for the academy--the degree to which 'We Have Never Done It That Way Before' has become our motto--we might do well to ask how much of what I propose in this volume is really feasible.... I do believe, however, that change is coming, and coming more quickly than we imagine." (page 194.)
Lastly, she said that "Change is coming to scholarly publishing, one way or another--but what form that change will take, ans whether it will work for or against us, remains to be seen." (page 195.)
---------------------
Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy
by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, published by NYU Press. Copyright (c) 2009 New
York University. This text may be distributed in part or in whole on
condition that (1) distributed text is not sold, whether or not such
sale is "for profit" and (2) distributed text bears this notice in full.
Except as permitted by law, all other uses are prohibited without
written permission of the publisher.
