Academic publishing is changing
from David Ruccio
Academic publishing is changing quickly and involves many different forms of production, from backroom cottage-industries to multinational capitalist corporations. And no one knows exactly where it’s all headed. Publishers themselves (at least in my experience) are as much at a loss as the rest of us.
One of the latest changes is online collaborative reviewing as an alternative to old-style peer reviewing. According to the New York Times,
some humanities scholars have begun to challenge the monopoly that peer review has on admission to career-making journals and, as a consequence, to the charmed circle of tenured academe. They argue that in an era of digital media there is a better way to assess the quality of work. Instead of relying on a few experts selected by leading publications, they advocate using the Internet to expose scholarly thinking to the swift collective judgment of a much broader interested audience.
But there’s still one obstacle: while the broader public—both academic and nonacademic—can participate in online reviewing, the publications themselves are still commodities, often available only to institutional subscribers (since individual subscriptions, to single article or whole journals, are very expensive).
The question for the public is, when will the publications themselves become part of the digital commons? And the question for academics is, will publications in the digital commons count for tenure?
to me the biggest question is how much academic publishing is needed, as well as the fairly large ‘civic culture’ (eg C-SPAN in the usa, or comments sections on NYT blogs) devoted to often (eg tea party type) criticisms of economic policy. evidently, ancient theorists (marx and others, or mutualists and amll is beatiful types) argued much of the current finance/market system is unnecesary (supposedly now 8% of work according to krugman, when it used to be 4%). how many academic journal articles are redundant, simpkly publish or perish excercizes (though from my view no worse than excercize which often has no clear value beyond maintainibng personal health)? perhaps academia is bloated (like the libraries—-one MIT department (engin) I hear recently junked every journal and book that hadnt been read in 5 years—get it on online or not at all).
also, the assumption is, despite the bubble, the genius Greenspan, and hi9s ivy cronies, is that the experts with all their formal modeling are not actually solving and real problems—for them its just a (tax supported game). they could be funded as starving artists, and the general public could learn what they need to know, even if it includes some user friendly version of DSGE or cobbs-douglas (which i think are implicit (ir formalized) heuristics anyway. perhaps eveyrone should have an intuitive grasp or calculus and linear programming, as opposed to the dynamics of Oprah Winfrey, Rush Limbaugh, and Reality TV.
course, that would infringe on the preserves of the ivory tower denizens (and possibly force them to do something more demanding than simply rewrite ancient econ textbooks for the college franchise system). imagine, if people thought they could be comptenetly involved in econ policy analyses (rather than forecasting only sports winners or lottery winners) or they had as good a grasp on foreign policy as G W Bush. oh, the horrer.
For those for whom publishing is merely one of the imperatives to avoid perishing in terms of what is considered “upward mobility” in academia, just about any kind of notch on the ol CV will do and it does not much matter the subject, relevance to anything or anybody or even the response once published (the CV and promotion committes do not get a post mortum saying someone’s article was denounced as a pile of worthless and pretentious crap and any credit for it on a CV should be removed). But there are some, perhaps inspired by the inscription on the grave of Marx in London, from his 11th Thesis on Feuerbach (“the Philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it”), who have this quaint notion that all theory is or must be answerable to facts and praxis, and further, it is through praxis and close proximity to the “subjects” (e.g. like what some call “the masses”) of theory, that the best, most relevant, most effective, most scientifically sound theory gets developed and applied.
You see all these radical journals purporting to develop theory to help to liberate the masses from the vicissitudes of capitalism; how many of those “masses” will ever see those journals, and, if they could, how many could read all the gratuitous verbage, grandiose math and narcissistic word smithing so common in so many of them? How many of the subjects of the articles matter in any significant way to any real struggles of real people in real crises? How many of these new journals practice their own forms of backroom tyrrany of censorship and how many of them were created just to provide venues for publishing and academic CV notching by those who could not get published in “the mainstream”? How many of those in academia have “not sold out” only because no one was buying?
I just saw a nice even though rather caustic summary of the pains, troubles and sins of publishing in economics. Many observations are quite close to yours. Worth taking a look I think:
http://www.labspaces.net/view_thread.php?parentID=2385&subcatID=16&catID=3&groupID=0