Here's Kathleen...

On April 24, 2006, a group of academics, administrators, and researchers, all interested in figuring out how to rescue the scholarly book from what has begun to seem its imminent demise, met to spend a day discussing the future of that book in a networked environment. Our particular interest in hosting this meeting was to propose the formation of an all-electronic scholarly press. This document hopes to summarize both the substance of the discussion and the conclusions that we've drawn from it.

The first thing to note about the discussion is a point that, among those who've been thinking about the future of reading for decades, much less years, can only seem troglodytic, but that in the context of academia's hidebound conservatism was nothing less than stunning: no one around the table suggested that an all-electronic scholarly press was a bad idea, or even a misguided one. Everyone was entirely in favor of founding such a press, and nearly everyone seemed interested in working, in some fashion, toward making it happen. For those of us who have been fighting to get electronic work recognized as even remotely valid within academic circles, this is nothing short of amazing.

That said, much of our conversation was driven by the academy's underlying conservatism, though it seems to me a significant advance that the anxieties of those with whom we spoke localized not around the value of publishing electronically but around our ability to convince our colleagues of the value of publishing electronically. Because of this concern, much of the morning's conversation revolved around peer review, both how a new mode of publishing might transform it into a more valuable, public, interactive process and how that process might continue to be seen as providing a valid system of institutional validation. Much of this discussion circled around a crucial question, finally articulated by Morris Eaves: are we attempting to develop a peer-review process that will be accepted by existing academic culture, or are we attempting to change that culture? Many of the folks at the meeting came down firmly on the side of acceptance, but many others felt just as strongly about transformation.

My own feelings about this are clear: I want nothing less than to revolutionize scholarship, both what it looks like and how it gets done. Judging from our conversation, this is going to make many academics nervous, but I am increasingly convinced that the time for such change has long since come, and that we can build a new system of publishing and review that will be so richly textured and connective, while still maintaining clear (if new) means of institutional warranting, that a fundamentally conservative academy will nonetheless be persuaded to join us.

In the course of our conversation, we developed a series of principles that we feel the scholarly publishing process of the future will embody. As distilled by John Unsworth, these principles suggest that our new publishing environment will:

-- promote intellectual discourse in all its forms;
-- design its process to improve the quality of that discourse;
-- encourage openness in its process and its products, while offering a range of options to authors;
-- share the tools that underlie its process;
-- provide for the preservation of its products;
-- support collaboration and experimentation;
-- make visible the social networks that underlie intellectual discourse; and
-- leverage the information that results from the impact and use of material published by the press.

The first two of these principles are of the utmost importance: if the purpose of scholarly publishing is to further the dissemination of ideas, which in turn produces new advances in scholarship, then a process that takes advantage of the technologies that networked systems make possible can only be an improvement. The average scholarly book takes over a year to move from manuscript to published book, and that's after the lengthy delays produced by the current peer-review system. Adding to this the fact that getting reviews of such books published can take several years more, it begins to become clear that intellectual discourse is not being served, not even remotely, by print. It is little wonder that so many scholars have begun blogging; it's currently one of the few ways to have conversations about ideas in anything like a timely fashion.

The question of openness is fraught for many academics, who are accustomed to processes of blind or anonymous review, in which, as authors, their potential missteps are shielded from public view until corrected, and, as reviewers, they are free to express quite critical opinions without having their names attached to them. The results of peer review are of course important -- scholars need means of ensuring that the material they're basing their research upon is valid and respected -- but we are convinced that the form of peer review can be radically reformed, as long as the new system is clearly detailed for its users. Given that, what we propose is to move peer-review out into the open, as part of a multi-stage process that would guide a text posted in the system from submission, through review, to "approval," all in public view.

We currently imagine that such an open, post-"publication" (or, rather, post-making-public) review might be made possible through a system that contains multiple tiers: first, a repository, in which any text that any author wishes to submit can be made available for public reading; second, an in-process level, in which texts that have been selected by the editors for peer review are discussed, critiqued, edited, and revised; and third, a collection of "published" texts, which have been through the review process and received some form of appropriate validation and press seal of approval. The stage at which any given text exists can be easily conveyed to the reader, both in the search process and in reading the text itself.

Another important aspect of this openness, however, is in the texts' accessibility; most of the meeting's attendees expressed strong interest in and support for the values of open access. Moving the peer-review process into public view and making the texts submitted for, undergoing, and resulting from that process publicly available will, we feel strongly, have important effects on community outreach -- both in terms of helping scholars connect with one another, creating discourse networks that facilitate collaboration and the development of new ideas, and in opening such scholarly discourse to a wider community of intellectuals outside the academy. Moreover, we want to make the systems that we build -- both the software systems and the human networks that support them -- freely available to any groups that would benefit from them.

Finally, we want to take full advantage of the networks that we build, encouraging the development of a fully networked scholarly environment. This means not simply encouraging experimentation in "born-digital" scholarship, in texts that effectively use rich media and internally networked structures, but also in forging links among a multiplicity of texts, ranging a wide variety of textual forms (from blogs through many different kinds of articles through full-length monographs and multi-author texts) alongside one another, allowing them to interact and enliven one another.

In order to facilitate the richest possible network of this kind, we propose to focus this publishing system, at its outset, on one field: media studies. From such a starting point, we can expand to other fields, avoiding the concern raised by some discussion participants that we might otherwise wind up with a "two cultures" problem, in which scholars in media studies are able to publish in a networked environment that's seen as being of dubious legitimacy for other scholars in the humanities. We're less worried about the two cultures problem at the outset than we are about our ability to maintain some kind of focus and relevance in our initial offerings, to ensure that they begin to create a reasonably cohesive network of scholars and texts working together as a community.

There are of course hurdles that remain: all of these processes will require careful design and testing, to ensure that they actually work with -- and are useful to the rethinking of -- actual scholarly practices. And we have a number of pragmatic issues that need careful consideration, including how such a venture can be made as self-sustaining as possible. But our conversations have made us even more excited about the possibilities ahead of us, and even more convinced that we're on the right track -- that the publishing system we want to found will help to shape the future of born-digital, fully-networked, open access scholarship.

Jump Cut
http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/SmallvilleFans/index.html

Screenpedia - Jeremy Butler's new site
http://www.screenpedia.org

Flow - not shameless self-promotion, I swear. This early piece by Henry Jenkins was actually something we wish we had done more of:
http://jot.communication.utexas.edu/flow/?issue=2004/09/20

Questions to discuss in the morning:

-- What problems are we aiming to solve by establishing an electronic press?

-- How might peer review be re-imagined in a peer-to-peer network environment?

-- How might academic publishing be reinvented as a gift culture? What are you willing to do for free? To give away? What do we stand to gain by taking an open source approach?

-- How much does accessibility have to do with the overall value of scholarship?

-- How might an electronic press help redeploy intellectual capital to the world beyond academia in ways the current print-based system is unable to do?

-- What kinds of projects would you like to see this press take on? What new forms of scholarship can you imagine taking flight from a born digital press?

After lunch we'd like to explore some concrete questions that we know we'll have to have answers to if we're going to be as innovative as possible while also being sustainable, and without losing the reasonably broad acceptance necessary to make a difference. This is the pragmatics portion of the day:

-- When we talk about establishing a press, are we talking about something that will conform to current scholarly conventions and processes such as peer review, tenure and promotion criteria, or something that will challenge -- even reinvent -- those conventions? If the latter, how do we make such change palatable to basically conservative bureaucratic systems? What else is out there that is already challenging those conventions? What is to be learned, borrowed, improved?

-- Many different approaches have been taken toward the notion of publishing scholarly work online, ranging from venues that distribute electronic versions of texts that maintain all of the structure and format of print, to those that aim at the production of new forms of critical discourse. Among the virtues of the former is a kind of backwards compatibility, easing a nervous academy into a new mode of publishing; among the virtues of the latter, of course, is radically opening the academy to new forms of work altogether. How might we reconcile or combine these approaches in the most productive way?

-- This press needs to be at least largely self-sustaining. What kinds of financial models should we consider as we move forward?

-- What kinds of workflow and production models should we consider establishing? Very pragmatically: how will the work get done? What will the role of the editorial/advisory board be? Whom should we ask to join us?

Please feel encouraged to challenge, reformulate or add to these questions. We've only got one day and want to make the most of it.

- assume a broad definition of "published"
- example can be inside or outside of the academic realm
- no need to limit yourself to only one if you have multiple good examples

The basic idea is to make this Wiki a place where people who read the book can do at least four things. First, collaborate on writing a summary of the ideas and claims of the book, as an initial point of entry. Second, provide an easy platform through which to access underlying research materials: both those used in the book's notes, and more importantly, resources that are useful for further research, refinement, and updating. Third, the Wiki should be a place where participants can describe, link to, and analyze examples of the phenomena the book describes. The purpose is not to "make the case" for the book or find "gotcha" counter examples. What we are trying to do is provide a real research tool, annotated bibliography, and platform for collaborative learning. Examples and counter-examples should be selected and described with that purpose in mind. Fourth, the Wiki is itself a learning platform about what is valuable in a learning platform. Through separate pages devoted to ideas and experiments of what can be done with an online book to make it a learning platform, we hope to expand the range of uses to which this Wiki can be available.

In certain ways, a wiki is of course the ideal format for such a project, allowing as it does for multiple, collaborative authorship and a relatively boundless expansion. But the wiki seems also to maintain a separation between the primary text and its related paratexts -- here are the static PDFs from which the author speaks, and here are the malleable wiki pages on which readers chime in. How might we imagine bringing those voices into closer conversation?

From the Washington Post (March 30, 2006):

The panel reviewed the National Endowment for the Humanities' proposed budget, which is $141 million, last year's appropriation. Bruce Cole, NEH chairman, said the funds would continue the current programs and start a new program on "digital humanities." He said the humanities endowment wanted to be a catalyst between the public and the researchers "to help narrow the gap between the scholar and the citizen." An NEH initiative has now put 30 million pages of historic documents and history texts online.

I'll look forward to hearing from all of you!

One of the concerns that often gets raised early in discussions of electronic scholarly publishing is that of business model -- how will the venture be financed, and how will its products be, to use a word I hate, monetized? What follows should not at all suggest that I don't find such questions important. Clearly, they're crucial; unless an electronic press is in some measure self-sustaining, it simply won't last long. Foundations might be happy to see such a venture get started, but nobody wants to bankroll it indefinitely.

But what I do want to argue for, building off of John Holbo's recent post, is the importance of collective, cooperative contributions of academic labor to any electronic scholarly publishing venture. For a new system like that we're hoping to build in ElectraPress to succeed, we need a certain amount of buy-in from those who stand to benefit from the system, a commitment to get the work done, and to make the form succeed.

I've been thinking about this need for collectivity through a comparison with the model of open-source software. Open source has succeeded, in large part, due to the commitments that hundreds of programmers have made, not just to their individual projects but to the system as a whole. Most of these programmers work regular, paid gigs, working on corporate projects, all the while reserving some measure of their time and devotion for non-profit, collective projects. That time and devotion are given freely because of a sense of the common benefits that all will reap from the project's success.

So with academics. We are paid, by and large, and whether we like it or not, for delivering certain kinds of knowledge-work to paying clients. We teach, we advise, we lecture, and so forth, and all of this is primarily done within the constraints of someone else's needs and desires. But the job also involves, or allows, to varying degrees, reserving some measure of our time and devotion for projects that are just ours, projects whose greatest benefits are to our own pleasure and to the collective advancement of the field as a whole.

If we're already operating to that extent within an open-source model, what's to stop us from taking a further plunge, opening publishing cooperatives, and thereby transforming academic publishing from its current (if often inadvertent) non-profit status to an even lower-cost, collectively underwritten financial model?

I can imagine two possible points of resistance within traditional humanities scholars toward such a plan, points that originate in individualism and technophobia.

Individualism, first: it's been pointed out many times that scholars in the humanities have strikingly low rates of collaborative authorship. Politically speaking, this is strange. Even as many of us espouse communitarian (or even Marxist) ideological positions, and even as we work to break down long-held bits of thinking like the "great man" theory of history, or of literary production, we nonetheless cling to the notion that our ideas are our own, that scholarly work is the product of a singular brain. Of course, when we stop to think about it, we're willing to admit that it's not true -- that, of course, is what the acknowledgments and footnotes of our books are for -- but venturing into actual collaborations remains scary. Moreover, many of us seem to have the same kinds of nervousness about group projects that our students have: What if others don't pull their weight? Will we get stuck with all of the work, but have to share the credit?

I want to answer that latter concern by suggesting, as John has, that a collective publishing system might operate less like those kinds of group assignments than like food co-ops: in order to be a member of the co-op -- and membership should be required in order to publish through it -- everyone needs to put in a certain number of hours stocking the shelves and working the cash register. As to the first mode of this individualist anxiety, though, I'm not sure what to say, except that no scholar is an island, that we're all always working collectively, even when we think we're most alone. Hand off your manuscript to a traditional press, and somebody's got to edit it, and typeset it, and print it; why shouldn't that somebody be you?

Here's where the technophobia comes in, or perhaps it's just a desire to have someone else do the production work masquerading as a kind of technophobia, because many of the responses to that last question seem to revolve around either not knowing how to do this kind of publishing work or not wanting to take on the burden of figuring it out. But I strongly suspect that there will come a day in the not too distant future when we look back on those of us who have handed our manuscripts over to presses for editing, typesetting, printing, and dissemination in much the same way that I currently look back on those emeriti who had their secretaries -- or better still, their wives -- type their manuscripts for them. For better or for worse, word processing has become part of the job; with the advent of the web and various easily learned authoring tools, editing and publishing are becoming part of the job as well.

I'm strongly of the opinion that, if academic publishing is going to survive into the next decades, we need to stop thinking about how it's going to be saved, and instead start thinking about how we are going to save it. And a business model that relies heavily on the collective -- particularly, on labor that is shared for everyone's benefit -- seems to me absolutely crucial to such a plan.

I'd like to encourage all of you to read his post, and let's discuss.

Before attempting to guide any kind of exploration and discussion of those projects, however, I want to make sure that our list is as complete as we'd like it to be. Are there projects that aren't included in our list, but ought to be? Projects that you think bear discussion as our conversations move forward? Please nominate them here, and we'll add them to the list. And in the coming days, we'll begin taking on a collective reading and examination of some of this work.

We're beginning, of course, from the assumption that academic publishing is in disarray and in need of new and workable solutions. One potential path toward a solution, and the focus of this meeting, is the formation of an electronic press.

Lots of folks -- many of you, in fact -- have of course been working in this arena for some time, and thus we have the luxury of building on those admirable models. We'd like, between now and the time of the meeting, for us to consider and discuss some such models -- what in them has worked; what has been difficult; what could bear alteration -- as a means of thinking about what it is that we'd ideally like an electronic press to do.

At the moment, the ways in which we imagine this new press innovating are in the conjunction of fully exploiting the possibilities that the network presents to scholarship -- scholarly endeavor meets social software -- and creating a venue for the publication of a range of born-digital texts up to and including the monograph. This combination of factors has the potential not simply to allow us to continue doing the kind of work scholars have done for decades, but in fact to radically transform the nature of scholarship, creating the kind of ongoing conversation among scholars that can produce bold new experimentation. But these transformations can only succeed if they're (at least eventually) seen as valid within the academic mainstream, and so we must keep that acceptance in mind, remaining conscious of the compromises we're making, and why.

Take peer review, for example. Historically, the way that it has worked is familiar: someone writes an article or monograph and submits it for consideration; the text goes through various cycles of review, cloaked in varying levels of anonymity, involving a small number of readers; the readers communicate their thoughts to the editor, who may or may not pass on a redacted version of these thoughts to the author; the text is eventually published, or not. Peer review thus currently happens behind the curtain, and before publication. When academic writing becomes fully networked, it will be possible for peer review to go beyond this purely gatekeeping function, to engage a much larger number of readers at many points along the way -- while the article is being written, in response to each draft, and of course after the article is "published." Peer review could thus happen in front of the curtain, as a productive conversation between readers and authors. But how far can we go in trying to re-imagine peer review?

Or take the forms of academic writing. The expected path is to simply reproduce the standard forms of the journal article and the monograph electronically. But how might blogs and other new forms which are afforded by locating writing on the network shift our thinking about articles and monographs? If we were to imagine a system in which the many different kinds of academic writing we produce -- ranging from the relatively casual blog all the way through the most complete monograph -- were able not only to coexist but to interact, to produce a sense not of isolated voices speaking at a distance but of an ongoing, developing conversation, what kinds of work would be fostered? How far can we go in embracing new forms of writing?

We'd like to start with these questions, and any other big questions that you can imagine, to open our discussion here, and to help us focus the issues that we might consider together when we're face-to-face. We look forward to hearing from you all.

Originally published on The Valve -- Friday, January 06, 2006

Inside Higher Ed reported a few days back on the work thus far done by an MLA task force on the evaluation of scholarship for tenure and promotion, and on the multiple recommendations thus far made by the panel, whose members include current MLA president Domna C. Stanton, Donald E. Hall, Sean Latham, Leonard Cassuto, and our blogging friend Michael Bérubé.

What follows is a lengthy consideration and extension of one of the recommendations made by this panel, as well as a sketch of one possible future, presented in the hopes of opening up a larger conversation about where academic publishing ought to go, and how we might best take it there.

-- to clarify the communication of tenure standards to new hires via "memorandums of understanding";

-- to give serious consideration to articles published by tenure candidates, thus decentering the book as the gold standard of scholarly production, and to communicate that expanded range of acceptable venues for publication to their administrations;

-- to set an absolute maximum of six letters from outside evaluators that can be required to substantiate a tenure candidate's scholarly credentials, to draw those evaluators from comparable institutions rather than more prestigious ones, and to refrain from asking evaluators to make inappropriate judgments about the tenure-worthiness of candidates based on the limited portrait that a dossier presents.

These are, as I say, extremely important recommendations, and ones to which I hope the tenured among us will begin to hold our departments and our institutions. For my purposes, however, there's one further recommendation that demands emphasis, one that stands a significant chance of effecting great change not simply in how the academy tenures its faculty but in how those faculty do their work, how they communicate that work, and how that work is read both inside and outside the academy. This recommendation is hinted at in the IHE article, but needs to be taken much further:

Sean Latham, associate professor of English and director of the Modernist Journals Project at the University of Tulsa, said that departments need to recognize that scholarship--good, bad and everything in between--is being produced online and needs to be evaluated without any media-based bias. "This process has begun without us," he said.

Latham--to knowing nods in the audience--joked about how some professors who favor print journals somehow ignore the fact that most of the print journals' readers these days are online, through various consortiums that make the journals available electronically. "If we read something through Project Muse, are we supposed to feel better because somewhere there is a print copy?" he asked.

If you're reading this, you're no doubt already on board with Latham's point. He's precisely right that the vast majority of scholarly articles are being distributed and consumed in electronic format (as is evident in the citations of many of my students, who seem at moments entirely unaware that many journals actually have print existences!). He's also dead-on in attempting to nudge our senior (and many of our not-so-senior) colleagues out of their continuing and unreasoning biases toward the primacy of print publication. But, at least as reported in IHE, Latham's interests largely focus on the online journal as a reputable venue for publication. My own interests, which I've gone on about at great length on other occasions, revolve around the future of the monograph, and ways that it might be made sustainable in a new electronic venue. But the issues raised by the MLA panel call our collective attention to two overarching questions: What exactly do we want the future of scholarship to look like, and what do we have to do in order to persuade our senior colleagues, our departments, and our institutions--all of which tend, if unconsciously, toward an obstinate luddism--that such a future is not only acceptable but necessary?

It's worth beginning with a somewhat prior question about the future of the academic book, however: whether the fetishization of the monograph as the gold standard of publishing in the humanities is misguided in and of itself, not simply in the ways that such an obsessive focus obscures other worthy forms of scholarship (most notably the article), but also in its failure to recognize that the book might simply not be the best form for scholarly communication in the first place. Not long ago, I overheard a colleague tell a student that scholarly books are not meant to be read but rather consulted. If this is how we consume research in the humanities--read the book's introduction for the overall argument; read the chapter that most clearly applies to our own questions for the detailed analysis--then is the production of the book itself no more than a vanity?

I would argue that the kind of work that has in recent years been done by the scholarly monograph remains necessary to the humanities, regardless of how that monograph is actually read. While the individual chapters of many monographs might have been--and in many cases were--published as free-standing articles, by and large, those books' introductions could not have been published in any other form. The synthetic work that those introductions do--stepping back from local instances of the phenomenon under consideration to construct a broader landscape against which a large-scale argument can be made--remains crucial to the advancement of certain kinds of knowledge; such synthesis, moreover, requires the weight of the extended analysis only made feasible to this point by the expansive and yet subdividable nature of the book. This is not to say that the only arguments worthy of valorization in the humanities are those that come in large packages; in fact, much of the most important work in literary studies in recent years has been done in articles. I am simply arguing that the monograph remains valuable (and, indeed, necessary) as a venue for a certain form of intellectual work.

Having said that, it seems apparent to me, as no doubt to many of you, that for the monograph to maintain any viability into the future, it must move online. Like the kinds of journal distribution mechanisms that Latham mentions, this could most easily be slotted into existing academic structures through electronic distribution via PDFs or print-on-demand technologies. As Bob Stein suggests, however, on the Institute for the Future of the Book (if:book) blog, scholarship that is allowed to exceed the bounds of print, that takes full advantage of the technologies available to documents that are "born digital," promises to have the greatest effect on shaping what the future of scholarship might be. We've seen the leading edge of this future-shaping in academic blogging, which has enabled connections and conversations of the sort that formerly developed only at conferences or among colleagues to flourish across greater distances, for longer durations, and among more scholars than ever before.

What I want to argue, as one stroke in a sketch of the electronic publishing scheme of the future--the "what do we want" question--is that blogging might have much to share with the born-digital monograph. Among the technologies that these digital texts can take advantage of are of course the apparent ones, such as the inexpensive inclusion of illustrations, among them still images, of course, but also audio and video clips, or the use of linking to create both webbed internal structures for texts and to bring external sources within the text's frame. There are other technologies, however, whose scholarly uses might not be so immediately apparent but that might produce the most radical change. Among these I'd argue (and have argued in the past) that trackbacks, as a means parallel to bibliographies of tracing scholarly discussions not simply backward in time but also forward, might reshape the nature of doing research; that versioning, as a means of allowing a text to continue changing even after it's been published, might reshape the processes of academic publishing; and that comments, as a means of including conversation about a text within the text, might reshape the nature of peer-review.

Let me take each of these on in turn. It remains somewhat shocking to me that an academic indexing system such as the MLA Bibliography has not yet found a way to incorporate a technology like trackbacks to researchers' advantage. While the implementation requires programming skills far greater than mine, the principle is simple: when your most recent article appears, wherever it appears, and is indexed by the appropriate bibliographic services, it should be mined not only for its title, author, publication data, keywords, and so on, but also for its bibliography. That bibliography currently allows us to trace conversations backward in time, but if the bibliographic information mined by the indexing software triggered a ping that was picked up by the records of those cited texts, each of those texts would thereafter carry, in its indexed entry, evidence that the text was cited by you, among x number of other future scholars, each of whom responded to the text's argument in slightly different ways, thus enabling researchers to track conversations forward in time. (The sciences have of course been all over this for years via citation indexes. Of course the institutional reliance upon such citation indexes as a metric of any given article's "importance" in the field might be something worth subjecting to a bit of critical scrutiny.) All of this is made comparatively simple within an online publishing environment, however, in which trackbacks would have the added advantage of creating directly followable links among texts, materializing the ongoing nature of scholarly conversations, allowing any given text, via its descendants, to continue growing beyond its conclusion.

Versioning, as employed in most wiki software, would have a similar effect to that last, though within the individual text. It makes no sense for electronic texts to mimic print by becoming fixed; electronic texts should be free to continue to grow and develop over time, but that change should somehow be marked within the text, made visible to readers. In this fashion, by enabling an author to continue working on a text even after its publication, but by making the history of changes to that text available, the process of an argument's growth and change could become part of the text itself. This would enable, in conjunction with commenting technologies, the processes of academic publishing to be radically changed, allowing authors to get new material into circulation much sooner. Scholars would no longer be at the mercy of the often appalling time-lags between a text's submission and acceptance, and between acceptance and publication. Instead, articles and monographs could be posted relatively early in their life-spans, as pre-prints or even submissions--perhaps with some indication of that status--and then the debate and discussion that they produce, and the shifts in the author's thinking that result, could take place in the open, as part of the process of the work itself.

This suggests the most massive potential change that a move of the monograph into a truly electronic mode of publishing might entail--a vast transformation in both the mechanisms and the purposes of peer-review. What if peer-review took place not prior to publication but on texts that have already been made public? What if that peer-review happened not anonymously, in back-channel communications with individuals other than a text's author, but in the open, in direct communication between reader and author? Technologies ranging from commenting to, as John Holbo suggested in a recent post on The Valve, a more elaborated P2P system, could be made to serve many of the purposes that current peer-review systems serve (most importantly for institutional purposes, the separating of wheat and chaff), but would shift the process of peer-review from one that determines whether a manuscript should be published to one that determines how it should be received. Such a P2P system raises some potential pitfalls, of course--most notably how to make sure that the new system doesn't simply remanifest the exclusionary manner in which the old sometimes functioned, through a Shirky-esque "power law"--but in conjunction with versioning, as described above, such a move of peer-review to a post-publication process would allow for the ongoing discussion and revision necessary to all scholarly thought.

There are a couple of implications of this shift that bear some immediate consideration, as we begin to think about how to bring such change about: first, these new technologies introduce what is to some scholars an unnerving sense of collaboration in intellectual work. Such collaboration, however, is only unnerving to those of us in the humanities; work in both the sciences and the social sciences is heavily (and in some fields, entirely) reliant upon the multi-author text. What this new system of publishing and review implies, however, is less a move away from individual authorship than a recognition that no author is an island, so to speak, that we're all always working in dialogue with others. Even in a radically collective and collaborative electronic publishing system, the individual author would still exist (and would still maintain some form of "ownership" over her ideas, via some means of Creative Commons licensing), but would do her work in material relation to the work of others, in a process of discussion and revision that now takes place behind the scenes, but that I'd argue is important enough to be moved out in front of the curtain. More importantly, however, such changes in the processes of academic publishing would return scholarly communication to the gift-economy mode within which, as I have argued elsewhere, it was always intended to operate, a mode in which all gains in knowledge produced by individual research are made not for the advancement of that individual, but for the collective benefit of the whole.

A second problem in bringing about such a radical change in peer-review, however, is the need to promote a new understanding of peer-review within our institutions, such that texts published within such a system would be taken seriously by college and university review and promotion committees. Such a new understanding is already desperately needed; one of the problems in academic publishing right now--what makes the economic hardships of the current university publishing system not merely a change but a crisis--is that, as Stephen Greenblatt pointed out some years back in his letter to the membership of the MLA, too many academic institutions rely on presses to make their tenure decisions for them. The granting of tenure should not be reliant on whether the vagaries of any publishing system did or did not allow a text to come into circulation, but rather on the value of that text, and on the importance it bears for its field. Peer-review thus demands to be transformed from a system of gatekeeping to a mode of manifesting the responses to and discussion of a multiplicity of ideas in circulation.

In order for this change to take root, however, with as little potential for damage to the careers of junior scholars as possible, tenured scholars are going to have to take the first plunge. Latham is absolutely right in the poking that I quoted earlier: until the biases held by many senior faculty about the relative value of electronic and print publication are changed--but moreover, until our institutions come to understand peer-review as part of an ongoing conversation among scholars rather than a convenient means of determining "value" without all that inconvenient reading and discussion--the processes of evaluation for tenure and promotion are doomed to become a monster that eats its young, trapped in an early twentieth century model of scholarly production that simply no longer works.

These are the ideas I've been tinkering with for a while now at my own blog and at the ElectraPress site, but now I put the question to you: what do you want the future of scholarly publishing to look like, and what do we need to do not simply to make it happen but to make it flourish? Imagine the ideal publishing process of the future, one that doesn't simply move old processes and textual forms online but that makes genuine use of new technologies to transform the ways that scholarship is done, and communicated, and consumed. How does it work, and what makes it possible?