Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Rhetoric
Pennsylvania State University
Thomas
W. Benson, t3b@psu.edu
Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Rhetoric
Pennsylvania State University
Contents
Electronic journals are rapidly appearing on the Internet, but it is not yet clear in what form they will emerge in the medium-to-long term, nor is it clear how colleges and universities will evaluate faculty publication in electronic journals. This essay is an invited research editorial, and so I will commit myself to a position at the outset--faculty members should be appropriately rewarded for publishing in electronic journals. But even if we all agreed with this proposition, the matter is not settled, since so much depends on what is meant by "appropriate," what is meant by "electronic journals," what is meant by "rewards," and so on throughout the proposition. Since scholars who might publish in electronic journals come from many different types of colleges and universities and from many different disciplines, with a broad range of missions that affect how they might evaluate and reward published research of any sort, we cannot even be confident that we know what might be meant by "faculty member" or "scholar." For these and similar reasons, I hope to provide some detailed reflections on the status and prospect of electronic journals as they relate to the faculty reward system, rather than simply to act as an advocate for the legitimacy of electronic journals.
- Introduction
- Electronic Journals
- Electronic Journals in Communication
- What Do Universities Want?
- What Do Scholars Want?
- Notes
- Bibliography
This year's Directory includes over 3,400 serial titles, twice as many as were included last year. Summary analysis of the entries in this year's Directory indicate that, out of 1,465 titles categorized as electronic journals, 1,002 are peer-reviewed and 708 charge in some manner for access. In the 1996 edition, 47 journals were peer-reviewed and 168 were only available on a fee basis. Increasingly, traditional print publishers are making their titles available electronically. These exist both as e-versions of their paper products and as new electronic products that supplement or replace the print journal. Scientific journals constitute the greatest number of entries in the journals section, with 29%. Fourteen percent of the journal titles are categorized as arts and humanities journals, while 28% are social science titles. [1]The rapid growth of electronic journals is testament to the interest of both individual scholars and the institutions involved in the production and distribution of scholarly publication. The ARL figures do not indicate the extent to which the newly created electronic journals rely primarily on the analogue of printed journals, the models for which are now well developed, nor do the ARL figures indicate the growth and attrition of printed journals. In his comprehensive book on The History and Power of Writing, Henri-Jean Martin summarizes the growth of scholarly journals:
According to studies in the United States and elsewhere, the number of reviews and scientific and technical journals has grown enormously: in 1750 ten such periodicals were published; in 1800 the number rose to 100; in 1850 there were 1,000; in 1900 10,000; in 1950, 100,000. There were nearly 500,000 in the late 1980s. [2]This enormous growth in scientific and scholarly publication is an indicator of the spread of information and literacy, and perhaps of the descreasing marginal effect of the introduction of any single new journal. At the same time that scholarly journals are proliferating, the means of access to such materials are increasingly under stress. Library budgets are stagnating or actually shrinking; subscription prices for journals in science, engineering, medicine, business, and law are rising rapidly, causing cancellation of subscriptions and increasing the gap between the information rich and the information poor. Internationally, at the same time that there has been an opening of borders to the flow of information, there has been a worldwide recession in the sciences and higher education, making it especially difficult, for example, for scholars in the former Soviet world to obtain access to scholarly information that they are in principle now free to possess.
At just this moment of economic and political crisis, the rapid development and diffusion of computer mediated communication seems to offer a way out. In the past fifteen years, scholarly communication has been altered profoundly by the successive introduction of electronic word processing, desktop publishing, electronic mail, computer bulletin board systems, Listserv discussion groups, remote electronic databases, the Internet, the World Wide Web, and on-line electronic publications.
In making printed journals available in electronic form, academic publishers are acknowledging that electronic distribution creates potential economic advantages for both publishers and consumers without threatening the intellectual integrity of their journals--which constitute a scholarly asset they would not lightly put at risk. And so, for example, when the Johns Hopkins University Press placed its array of scholarly journals on the world wide web as part of its Project Muse, the press seems to have gained rather than lost in reputation. And yet, the journals still appear in printed form. Those presses with ongoing print journals do not yet seem eager, on the whole, to abandon paper for electronic distribution. Why? At the present moment, maintenance of paper publication carries, on the whole, greater prestige than electronic-only publication, and paper publication still retains some advantages in access for readers, though not in all areas.
Print journals, for the time being, carry greater prestige partly because of tradition, and partly because the best of these journals have rigorous ratios of rejections versus acceptances, high standards of editing and production, and a proven staying power. Despite tremendous potential, a given electronic journal may or may not be ephemeral--either in terms of the significance of its contents or in terms of its actual availability. The 1915 issues of The Quarterly Journal of Speech--published 83 years ago--are available to me at the Penn State library. Some material published in electronic journals that were freely available on publication are now accessible only to those who are willing to pay dues, or who are members of dues-paying institutions. Archived articles from The Electronic Journal of Communication and Postmodern Culture are restricted in this manner. Will this issue of the American Communication Journal be available to a scholar 83 years from now, in the year 2081? Perhaps, but as this essay contains hyperlinks to active web sites, it is virtually a certainty that at least some of the contents on those sites will have changed within the next month and that some of the sites will have disappeared altogether in a year or two. In any case, we can hardly suppose that the Internet will be configured in five or ten years--to say nothing of 83 years--as it is today. Of course, not every article in every electronic journal needs to use features most likely to become technologically obsolete; straight text will most easily survive technological change. Further, some electronic journal articles may properly have their greatest effect in a one- to five-year period after publication, after which they would have, at best, only archival value. I continue to believe that we should experiment with electronic journals and with electronic publication of our current printed journals, but it would be wrong to accuse those with doubts of being merely diehard technophobes. At the same time, confidence in electronic journals will increase where publishers make adequate provision to carry forward archived materials into the next generations of technology.
In theory, at least, electronic publication should eventually provide more widespread and more convenient access for readers of journals--though in the present transitional period, moving to an electronic-only system may actually decrease access for some potential readers. Some scholars lack adequate technical or financial resources to read on-line journals; others, even if they have the requisite computer equipment, may find that if their own universities do not subscribe to the appropriate (and very expensive) on-line databases, they do not have access to important journals. Some electronic journals, such as the American Communication Journal, are free of subscription fees, though there are genuine overhead costs borne by institutions at both the production and the distribution ends.
The problem of reader access to scholarly journals is a complex one. For readers who are equipped with fast internet connections and who are affiliated with major research universities, on-line access may be a desirable solution, since these readers have virtually instant access to a wide range of materials from their desktops. But readers who are not connected to major research institutions may not have access, for example, to Project Muse and other similar enterprises. For the time being, such readers can find such journals either by visiting a major research library or by using their own libraries' interlibrary loan systems, but even interlibrary loan as a system is likely to undergo some changes, since the major provider institutions in the system shift their own collections from print to electronic media--and find that their contracts forbid sharing electronic data with users at smaller, non-subscribing institutions.
In any case, there now appear to be enough electronic journals sponsored by reputable universities, presses, and associations that general prejudices against electronic publication in the promotion and tenure system are surely unwarranted. This does not mean that every electronic journal should carry the presumptive weight of the best print journal in a discipline. Such decisions will always and inevitably have to be made on a case by case basis.
Although it may have been largely an illusion, the system of scholarly publication and the institutional reward system seemed before the coming of electronic publication to have achieved a sort of balance, in which there were sufficient but still quite scarce outlets for scholarly publication. A peer review system did not necessarily assure that the best work always got published, but it did assure that what was published was of reasonable quality as determined by disciplinary standards. The system of scarce resources appeared to be sustained by the invisible hand of the market, which meant that any discipline could publish a ratio of scholarly material limited by the ability of scholars, editors, and publishers to produce it, and of libraries and other scholars to buy it. The pattern could be distorted by various social interventions, such as massive government investments in science, medicine, and engineering, but this, too, could be understood as a response of the system to the needs and desires of the society.
With a system in a balance of scarcity--that is, with limited access to publication guaranteed by the material conditions--universities could assume at least in part that publication by one of their faculty members in a select group of journals was itself evidence of the quality of the work. Of course, the mere fact of publication was also supplemented by the frequency with which a scholar's work was cited by other scholars, and by occasional reviews at major career points by scholars from other institutions. For institutions, the system seemed to assure that if they tenured and promoted scholars whose work was frequently published in selective journals, they were both investing in quality and advancing in academic reputation.
But electronic publication will not magically erase all considerations of material scarcity. The primary costs of paper journals are not limited to paper, postage, and storage. Any really excellent journal will exact an overhead in administrative costs; the maintenance of hardware and software for access; the time of editors, referees, copy editors, designers, clerical assistants, and so on. Electronic journals are evolving so rapidly, based on technologies that are essentially out of the control of academic end users, that ephemerality is a real problem. Already, vast amounts of data stored by electronic means are essentially inaccessible because the equipment required to access them are no longer available.
Universities are likely to have conflicting motivations when it comes to on-line journals. On the one hand, universities are motivated to reduce the costs their libraries are paying for subscriptions to printed journals--costs that have been growing rapidly in recent years. On the other hand, the promotion and tenure system is a fairly conservative institution, and is typically cautious about how to assign value for computer-mediated scholarship of various sorts. I have corresponded with scholars from a number of institutions, some of whom report that their schools are either entirely dismissive of on-line publication or are simply confused about how to evaluate it.
A committee at Rutgers University recently developed a proposal for evaluation of on-line scholarship that strikes a sensible balance between conservation of traditional scholarly merit and adaptation to technical innovation. The Rutgers committee recommended that
1. Electronic publication should be considered to be an appropriate means of scholarly, artistic and professional communication, as are other means of presentation such as print and performance.The report of the Rutgers Committee on Electronic Publishing and Tenure was adopted as university policy in November 1997. It appears to have considerable promise as a model for other universities. A comprehensive web site is currently being maintained by Mick Doherty of RPI. His site, "Professional Recognition: Technologies in the Humanities," maintains links to policy statements and discussions of the Modern Language Association, the National Council of Teachers of English, CCCC, and other organizations. Various committees and task forces of the National Communication Association have begun to discuss not only a program of electronic publications but the desirability of an NCA recommendation about faculty rewards for development of electronic scholarship. In 1997, Orlando Taylor of Howard University, who will succeed to the presidency of the National Communication Association in 1998, appointed a Task Force on Technology in the Discipline to study these matters and develop recommendations and resources for the discipline. The Task Force will report to the association at its 1998 convention in New York and will, it is hoped, convene a summer conference in 1999.2. The content of electronic publication should be evaluated within the traditions and habits of each discipline as publication traditionally has been in other media.
3. For purposes of appointment and promotion, the annual Academic Reappointment / Promotion Instructions should be modified to reflect recommendations 1 and 2, and the forms and instructions describing candidates' work should allow for electronic categories to be included.
4. In due course the permanent availability of a scholarly work in substantively unchanged content should be a consideration in its evaluation, but this can not yet be insisted on.
5. The use of electronic technologies and publication for teaching and service is also appropriate.
6. These recommendations should be periodically reviewed to assess their usefulness and the changed technological environment. [3]
What
Do Scholars Want?
Scholars need an academic publication
regime that provides another system of balances. Scholars need there to
be enough presses and journals to give them access to publication, they
need to be rewarded for publishing, and they have appeared to need the
system of scarcity to help maintain the real and apparent quality of their
own disciplines, so long as they are above the threshhold of publishable
authors. Every scholar is placed in the paradoxical position of deploring
the commodification of intellectual work while at the same time demanding
appropriate rewards for that work.
It would seem that the explosion of electronic publication would be a benefit especially to the most idealistic motivations of scholars and their institutions. Electronic journals promise to lower the barriers to publication, which should give individual scholars more publication opportunities and produce for society a richer base of scholarly resources.
But if it is easy to get published, who maintains quality, who evaluates quality, and how is personal and institutional reputation to be sustained? In my view, electronic publication will and should result in an on-line world with great variations in "quality" and control. There will be journals with the prestige, polish, and rigor of The Quarterly Journal of Speech and Communication Monographs, but there will also be, I hope, a variety of excellent journals in which it is much easier to publish, and in which--and this is even more important--it is possible to evade the canonical gatekeeping of our most prestigious journals.
The system of scarce resources characteristic of the era of printed scholarship in communication studies has had genuine benefits in imposing high standards and a fairly coherent intellectual structure. But precisely these features of the publication system have also introduced into the gatekeeping process an ability for scholars to impose their own ideological, methodological, or theoretical views on rival positions. It has been my own observation over many years of editing journals and serving on editorial boards that too often manuscripts are rejected as incompetent if they fail to meet a reviewer's ideas of where the discipline should be going. The result is that some matters that should be debated in print, or that should be acknowledged as matters of taste, and should therefore result in a peaceful coexistence of conflicting paradigms, are settled in the gatekeeping process by the suppression of alternate research programs. In rhetorical studies, for example, the gatekeeping process has been used to exclude work that was considered "too historical" or "not sufficiently theoretical," leading to occasional discussion in print that hardly begins to reveal the chilling effects of gatekeeping on the whole conduct of scholarship from initial conception to publication to the results of promotion and tenure deliberations. [4] Such narratives can be constructed in several areas of our field.
I fervently hope that with the coming of electronic journals, competing paradigms will be able to invent their own journals and prove their worth in print, rather than finding themselves silenced by a gatekeeping practice that justifies exclusion of some modes of research on the grounds of scarcity of resources.
One advantage of electronic journals, of course, is that they can make use of graphics, sound, video, and hypertext in ways that are denied to printed journals. Further, it is much more convenient to append a thread of discussion to an electronic journal article than to an article printed in a quarterly paper journal. The various affordances of electronic design may be in some cases genuinely provocative ways of discovering and disseminating new knowledge. On the other hand, it seems to me that electronic publication also has genuine advantages for the publication of straightforward plain text that might otherwise not find its way into a printed journal--though some argue that the nature of the on-screen reading experience itself discourages the traditional print format of page after page of plain text. Though I see no reason for (some) electronic journals not to pursue the high end of technological sophistication in the design and presentation of scholarly materials, it does seem to me that electronic journals will have matured when they can also compete with printed journals for more or less plain-text manuscripts from all areas of the discipline.
Easy access to publication will probably result in the publication of plenty of mediocre work, as people dump into electronic journals the convention papers they wrote at 35,000 feet on their way to a convention. But easy access to publication could also produce genuine intellectual benefits by providing outlets for innovative scholarship and by providing the assurance that highly specialized, ongoing programs of research will not lead to a dead end in a gatekeeping process that has turned its favor elsewhere.
Would I, as a member of a university promotion and tenure committee, argue for giving appropriate credit to publication by a colleague in an electronic journal? Yes. As in every such case, one would ask about the quality of the work itself, the appropriateness of the journal, the quality, reputation, accessibility, and probable permanence of the journal. Would I advise a junior, untenured colleague to publish a manuscript in an electronic journal rather than in, say, the Quarterly Journal of Speech if they had a choice? No--if only out of prudence. But I would not advise against publishing in an electronic journal if it were the most appropriate forum, and I would certainly be willing to publish my own work in an electronic journal. But these questions are obviously rigged, since both the questions and the answers depend not only on technological or scholarly judgments but also on the culture of academic prestige. Even the need to ask these questions will wither away, as technology and the political economy of academic publication take us to new and perhaps unexpected places.
For now, it is important for us, as a scholarly community, to experiment not only with the technological but also with the intellectual and cultural possibilities of electronic publication. The technology will continue to change in response to economic forces largely outside our control, but our own practices as teachers and scholars can adapt more or less well to those changes. Electronic publication of scholarly journals is here, and is going to grow. In fact, before long it is going to seem odd that there was once a transitional period in which there had to be explicit distinctions made between "electronic" and "paper" journals; for example, we already have technologies to permit journals to be stored and distributed electronically and printed, in fixed formats, on demand. We cannot know what forms the future will take, but it is clear that faculty who are leading the development of new modes of scholarly publication merit appropriate institutional rewards.
Electronic publication will surely place new burdens on the promotion and tenure system, which already imposes a huge overhead of reviewing time on senior faculty in every discipline. The ease of access to publication may weaken the confidence that the review process now often places on a scholar's ability to publish in a restricted group of journals, and this will mean that more detailed review will be needed to assess to appropriateness, quality, and influence of a scholar's work. Such an effect, though burdensome, and subject to abuses of its own, may be beneficial if the scholarly community can renew its shared commitment to excellence, innovation, and diversity.
[1] ARL press release, "ARL Announces Seventh Edition of the Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters, and Academic Discussion Lists" (January 16, 1998) found at http://arl.cni.org/scomm/edir/pr97.html. As recently as 1994, the ARL listed only 440 electronic journals; see Okerson, 1994.
[2] Henri-Jean Martin, The History and Power of Writing, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 495.
[3] Report of the Committee on Electronic Publication and Tenure, Rutgers University (April 11, 1997).
[4] For discussion of these gatekeeping issues and their relation to the development of the discipline, see Baskerville; Benson, "History, Criticism, and Theory"; Blair, Brown, and Baxter; Darsey; Hart (1976, 1986, 1994); Lucas; Medhurst, "Academic Study."
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