Here’s my dilemma: the fastest and most efficient way to disseminate our results is to share them on the website we’ve set up for the project. When I was an archaeologist we wrote up an interim report after each field season and a final report when the project was complete, and I’m thinking along these lines. However, I’m also a junior faculty member on the road to tenure, and the currency of the realm is, of course, the peer-reviewed journal article.

A peer-reviewed article will take considerably more time to be published, up to a year or even longer, especially if our submission isn’t accepted on the first try (as seems true for most article manuscripts). I’m a strong advocate of open access publishing, and it just seems wrong to keep our data to ourselves for all that time. But I do value the peer review process, and while I hope that posting a report on our website would generate comments, there’s no guarantee.

Ideally I’d like to write both a preliminary report, to be posted online by the end of the summer, and a scholarly article, submitted around the same time and (hopefully) published sometime next year. I’m not sure that we have time for both, though. While the summer months are slower in the library, we’re still open, and there are classes and reference desk shifts to staff and programs to plan for next year. So we are probably going to have to focus our energies on just one publication.

As I’ve been thinking on this recently there’s been lots of other news in the world of academic publishing. The University of California proposed a possible faculty boycott of the Nature Publishing Group. And an unusual scholarly publishing project came out of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University: Hacking the Academy, a book that gathered all of its submissions in just one week. I can’t help but think that we’re in an odd scholarly communication moment right now, stuck between old and new worlds of knowledge dissemination, and I’m not always sure how to chart my course.

That should resonate with librarians. Welcome to the club!

Even better, he plans to make improving communication with librarians, who he calls a “kindred community,” a priority this coming year. He recognizes how we are dependent on one another, and points out that open access isn’t free; it takes money to select, organize, make editorial improvements, and make scholarly work discoverable. (Doesn’t most of that sound eerily familiar?) Though some discussion at the conference focused on joining forces to make e-books available to libraries, it seems as if we’re still seen as a revenue source, as customers, not as partners in publishing. I’d much rather invest my money in books that my students and faculty can use without the hassle of DRM, that won’t disappear if I have a bad budget year and have to cancel a subscription, and that are available to everyone in the world. Chances are I’d still buy some of the books in print – for those that will be read closely, not just harvested for quotes, the cost of printing a copy is worth it. I just don’t want to invest in collections of e-books nobody uses. (I know some libraries have had success with e-books; most of our students don’t like reading anything longer than a paragraph unless it’s on paper or can be printed. No, I don’t want to pay for a database and pay a second time for printing. Google, I’m looking at you.) And until e-readers are affordable, platform-agnostic, and embraced by our students and faculty, I don’t see them as significant change agents; in any case, they’re design is based on the consumer market, not on the kinds of sharing and sampling that scholars need to be able to do.

The reason we need university presses is because they put their books through a far more rigorous peer review process than trade publishers and so have earned enormous prestige among scholars. They also publish research that may seem entirely without value to commercial publishers, to whom the only value is market value. For university presses, their work is a mission, not just a business, but it’s work that needs funding. We need to be more than customers; we need to be working together, making the best use of our pooled resources.

Jennifer Howard (she has been busy lately) also recently wrote a long piece about institutional repositories. It’s fascinating reading, and suggests that various models are meeting with some success, if libraries are willing to put a lot of time and energy into it. But while IRs are great for local materials, niche information (test reports on tractors – who knew how many people were eager to get their hands on that!) and gray literature, they are not the fix for the scholarly communication crisis, no matter how many institutions adopt open access mandates.

Rather than have university presses look for lessons from trade publishing while we try to coax faculty into using open access platforms, I’d like to see librarians sit down with university presses and talk about where our missions and our skills align, figure out how to fund publishing of quality scholarship, and embrace open access.

Is that so hard? Don’t answer that question.

The day began with four small workshops each organized around a specific theme relevant to digital scholarship. Deciding which workshop to attend was a tough choice, one that, judging from the Twitter stream (hashtag #du10), many of us were torn over; I chose the Academic Publishing workshop. There was a diverse group of academic publishers, faculty, librarians, and graduate students which made for an interesting and lively conversation.

Not surprisingly, we spent most of our workshop discussing the crisis in scholarly publishing (both journals and monographs). While there’s an enormous amount of money in the academy allocated towards scholarly publishing, it’s primarily spent on scholarly journals published by commercial publishers rather than academic presses (which are under extreme economic pressure) or open access journals. Workshop participants agreed that the entire community of stakeholders must come together to address these issues, including academic administrators, who often seem absent from these discussions. On a positive note, while scholarly publishing has been slow to adapt to digital technologies, many suggested that the current economic situation may begin to speed collaboration and change.

Academic authority was another recurring theme of the conference, and especially the implications of digital scholarship for the tenure and promotion process. Faculty participants in the two afternoon panels discussed their own efforts in pushing for change in “what counts” for tenure, though that may be perceived as risky for junior scholars. Of course the scholarly publishing crisis and academic authority issues are intimately related, and as they evolve will likely continue to influence each other. Many also pointed out that the more open and accessible our scholarship is, the more widely it can be seen and read, which has ethical and moral implications as well, especially for federally-funded research.

It was great to see academic and research libraries so well-represented at this symposium. There was a lot of love for what we do and how important we are to the future of the academy, which for me was a nice counterpoint to the recent Ithaka Faculty Study. I sometimes feel that while librarians talk a lot about open access and related issues, it can be hard to gauge how much they resonate with faculty in other departments. While the symposium attendees were a self-selected group of academics interested in digital technology, it’s heartening to see so many faculty and graduate students who do embrace open access to research and scholarship, and who are interested in pushing these boundaries in their own scholarly work.

Often we focus on the economics of our libraries (i.e., fallout from the serials crisis) when we discuss open access publishing with other faculty and administrators at our institutions. Last week in the class I’m teaching my students and I discussed scholarly communication. I’m a strong supporter of open access publishing, and it was great to have the opportunity to see these issues through the eyes of my students. They were genuinely surprised to find that the results of scholarly research are often so difficult to access for those outside of academe.

After my class discussion I was particularly struck by one aspect of the economics of open access: accountability. It’s likely that as the effects of the recession continue to be felt over the next few years, the calls for accountability in higher education budgets will grow more insistent. Open access advocates can use this situation to highlight the advantages of OA scholarly journals. Broad access to and wide dissemination of the research and scholarship happening at colleges and universities can provide visible proof of the relevance of higher education.

Increased access to research can also bring positive publicity to our institutions. The importance of research is growing even at institutions that have traditionally focused on teaching, and recruiting and retaining talented faculty is crucial. Widespread good publicity can also help attract students, and especially highlighting increasing opportunities for student research. Many institutions run ads in the local media promoting their scholars and programs. Wouldn’t it be great if prospective students could easily find and read about some of the research going on in those programs?

While it’s hard to say whether discussions of accountability will, in and of themselves, win the open access movement many new converts, I think accountability is a valuable addition to the growing list of arguments in favor of open access publishing.

The authors describe the way Oregon State University has adopted Boyer’s definition of scholarship – which embraces not just discovery of new knowledge, but application, teaching, and integration. After examining what librarians have been doing, they concluded the problem isn’t being productive, it’s explaining the “breadth and impact” of librarians’ scholarly work. This includes not only traditionally-published research, but additional modes of communicating ideas.

Blogs are vehicles to teach and communicate to both broad and specific audiences. Their format precludes them being taken seriously as scholarship in current tenure review processes, but their content often demonstrates engagement and suggests impact in ways rarely seen in the print library journal. This raises questions about the concept of format and vehicle. Expanding acceptance of new forms of communication along with reconsidering what constitutes scholarship will benefit librarianship as a whole. A first step is accepting open-access, peer reviewed journals as outlets of high impact and validity. The next step will be integrating non-traditional peer reviewed work such as blogs that have an active readership and generate comments and commentary.

The outsourcing of faculty evaluation by peers – relying on university presses and journal rankings to determine whether a colleague is worthy or not – has contributed to the problem libraries find themselves in: having to somehow fund access to a bloated body of research, much of which is only produced to gain job security. (Two years ago an MLA survey found a third of institutions required progress toward publishing a second book. This, when libraries’ budgets can’t keep up with bare necessities.)

Maybe in a backhanded way the work we do, documented in a way that people in other disciplines can understand, could provide a model for sanity.

CC-licensed image courtesy of Kristina B.

We kept the presentations short to allow plenty of time for discussion (fueled by coffee and cookies, of course). There was a smallish group in attendance with a nice mix of newer and more seasoned faculty from many different disciplines across the college. Many junior faculty members (including me) are concerned about how articles published in open access journals will be regarded in the promotion and tenure process. It was great to have a forum to share the information that there are open access journals with prominent scholars on their editorial boards that employ a rigorous, double-blind peer review process, just as do subscription-based journals.

We also spent a fair amount of time discussing the means of production for open access journals. At the beginning of the program my library colleague mentioned the Open Journal Systems platform, an open source system that can be used to publish an open access journal, including managing the peer-review process. As the discussion progressed we began to consider the feasibility of publishing an open access journal at our college. It was a fascinating (and enjoyable) direction for the conversation to take, one that I hadn’t really anticipated when we planned the program.

I’m hopeful that our lively discussion indicates an growing interest in open access scholarly publishing at my college. Recently we’ve seen an increasing emphasis on faculty research at the college and university, and perhaps open access scholarly journal publishing will have a role to play. We’re pleased that our Open Access Week program was a success, and are already thinking ahead to planning for next year’s event.

Did your library plan any events to celebrate Open Access Week? Did you learn anything new about faculty attitudes towards scholarly communication on your campus?

The beginning of open peer review for Planned Obsolescence also marks the launch of MediaCommons Press, the latest project from MediaCommons (which Barbara first alerted us to a couple of years ago). MediaCommons uses the CommentPress theme for the popular, open source WordPress blogging platform. Manuscript text is displayed side-by-side with reader comments, facilitating paragraph-level discussion of the book.

Of course this isn’t the first experiment with open peer review of scholarly works. Fitzpatrick published an article about CommentPress in the Journal of Scholarly Publishing in 2007, and also made it available online for comments. Noah Wardrip-Fruin opened up the manuscript for his book Expressive Processing to “blog-based peer review” on the group blog Grand Text Auto; it also went through the traditional peer review process before being published by MIT Press this year.

What’s most interesting to me about the Planned Obsolescence project is that the book itself discusses the process of peer review and scholarly publishing. Browsing the chapter titles and subtitles there looks to be lots of interest to academic librarians: discussions of authority, intellectual property, preservation, and the sustainability of university presses. I haven’t had a chance to read more than the first few pages yet, but I’m looking forward to continuing (and commenting, too).

First Mondays (an excellent and long-established open access journal) has an article by Brian Whitworth and Rob Friedman on “Reinventing Academic Publishing Online.” In a nutshell, it examines the fact that the “top” academic journals remain vested in a traditional system in which maintaining barriers and exclusivity because their exclusivity is perceived as rigor and therefore value. The higher your rejection rate, the prouder you are. But there are two mistakes academic publishing can make: publishing stuff that isn’t any good and not publishing stuff that turns out to be good. It’s the cost of the latter – failing to publish something innovative and challenging for fear it might be wrong – that these authors feel is left out of the equation.

These error types trade off, so reducing one increases the other, e.g., a journal can reduce Type I errors to 0 percent by rejecting all submissions, but this also raises Type II errors to 100 percent as nothing useful is published. The commonsense principle is that to win a lottery (get value) you must buy a ticket (take risk). In academic publishing the rigor problem occurs when reducing Type I error increases Type II error more . . . Pursuing rigor alone produces rigor mortis in the theory leg of scientific progress.

The authors point to the fact that the publishing industry essentially determines who is hired and fired in universities, which flies in the face of the mission we are supposedly on and the intellectual freedom that should enable our work.

When a system becomes the mechanism for power, profit and control, idealized goals like the search for truth can easily take a back seat. Authors may not personally want their work locked away in expensive journals that only endowed western universities can afford, but business exclusivity requires it. Authors may personally see others as colleagues in a cooperative research journey, but the system frames them as competition for jobs and grants. As academia becomes a business, new ideas become threats to power rather than opportunities for knowledge growth. Journals become the gatekeepers of academic power rather than cultivators of knowledge, and theories battle weapons in promotion arenas, rather than plows in knowledge fields.

The authors suggest that under the color of “rigor” this model sustains a system in which cross-disciplinary and innovative research is unwelcome. “As more rigorous and exclusive ’specialties’ emerge, the expected trend is an academic publishing system that produces more and more about less and less.” (And hey, it’ll make the Big Bundle even bigger and more expensive, therefore more profitable.) They think instead technology could offer ways to facilitate information exchange rather than creation of further citadels of isolated specialization. Paying more attention to the mistake of failing to publish something that turns out to be worthwhile will require the creation of a democratic open knowledge exchange which can better balance the equation.

The funny thing is that this tension has existed for a long time. Well before the Internet enabled the opportunity for fundamental change in the way we share research, both Michael Polanyi and Thomas Kuhn described the delicate tension between maintaining an agreed-upon understanding by fending off crackpot theories and the need to allow something new to challenge the dominant paradigm. Both self interest and a more idealized notion of rigor conspire against innovation. What I find interesting about this First Monday article is the idea that our current dominant publishing model has let self-interest reign supreme, and that a new open model could let the more idealized urge to preserve that which is solid and true duke it out with ideas that challenge it. It could balance the risk/reward tradeoff involved in choosing what to publish and which questions to pursue.

By the way, what is your library planning to do for Open Access Week?

(Photo courtesy of rptnorris.)

But as my workdays fill up I’ve begun to worry that my strategies for keeping up with library and higher education news and scholarship are wearing thin. It’s so much easier during the summer. Not only is there more time to breathe at work – fewer meetings and classes, quieter reference desk – but there’s also less to read. The publication pace of everything seems to slow down, especially online information sources. My summertime RSS feeds are well-mannered and easy to control, my email inbox usually hovers near zero.

Now that the new academic year has started, there’s much more to read and browse. Items linger in my feed reader for days at a time and emailed table of contents alerts from library databases pile up. On my desk there’s a stack of articles I’d planned to read over the summer, and several books I requested from other libraries at my university have come in all at once. This week I realized that I’m suddenly swamped by my information streams.

Clearly this calls for a new strategy. This week I re-read Sarah Houghton-Jan’s excellent article on information overload published in Ariadne last year, which offers loads of good advice for keeping up and staying sane. Encouraged by her suggestions, I headed to my RSS reader and weeded feeds mercilessly. I also reorganized them by priority into several folders—critical, desirable, and optional—which I hope will make it easier for me to ignore less important items until there’s time to read them.

I also plan to cull many of my table of contents alerts, as I’ve found them to be something of a double-edged sword. It’s important to me to keep up with what’s new in the library literature, but ultimately I’ve printed more articles than I’ve had time to read (which accounts for the pile on my desk). So I’m going to cancel several of my alerts and let myself off the hook with the journals that remain. If an article catches my eye, I’ll try to take the time to scan through it before adding it to my To Read folder. I’m hopeful that this will help shrink my current stack of articles, and maybe facilitate more thorough reading of the articles I do print out.

Finally, I’m going to try and build intentional time for reading into my schedule. For many of us this time is built into the daily commute. That won’t work for me, but I still think I can carve some time out of my daily schedule to devote to reading. Once I’ve made all of these changes I’m not sure if I’ll end up reading more than I do now, or less. But if these strategies help me read more thoughtfully and feel less buried, then that’s a worthwhile trade.

Dr. Crazy, an anonymous literature professor, is beginning to ponder her topic.

Anthropologist Auto Ethnographer is in the throes of research - research that goes to show why sometimes we just need the original print texts.

Flavia, an anonymous professor of renaissance literature, is substantially revising her dissertation - and has come to some interesting realizations about her book-in-progress.  Check out the comments here, too.

Notorious Ph.D., a historian, is revising and ambivalent about her readers’ feedback.

Finally, John Holbo, a philosopher at National University in Singapore, has just published a book on Plato (with translation by Belle Waring).  This post is interesting for two reasons: it’s an experiment in simultaneous free e-publishing with a print book for sale, as well as reminding us how the scholarly conversation doesn’t end with the book’s publication.