Guerrillas in the Mist

"What of this online publication?" Having had the opportunity to observe from the beginning when the American Communication Association's Board of Directors embraced the project and placed its full confidence in Professor Tyrone L. Adams to make it happen, I knew that the American Communication Journal was intended to seriously rethink and radically reshape our basic assumptions about the practice of communication scholarship on the cusp of the twenty-first century. Born under the Jolly Roger flying in Charleston harbor, amid free-flowing Black Jack and the dark haze of maduro Cohibas, it was to be a scholarly journal for the everyday reader. It has become that and much more -- but not without a certain amount of skepticism and resistance from those who are more comfortable with the previous structure of the academic discipline.

Academic journals began to appear in the late nineteenth century. And even then, as Professor Carolyn Marvin has shown us, there was a considerable amount of concern about the social and cultural changes that might be wrought by electronic communication technologies. The oldest professional journal in communication (nee speech) dates back to 1914, quite another time, far different from the electronic realm in which our students and most of our faculty function today. Nonetheless, journal publication still serves important academic interests -- the (I) certification, (II) dissemination, (III) indexing, and (IV) archiving of research and scholarship. The American Communication Journal, I will argue here, accomplishes each of those critical objectives, and it sometimes does so in innovative ways that traditional paper publications cannot.

A frequently expressed reservation about online information is that anyone can publish anything, and, consequently, one can never be certain about accuracy. Underlying that position is the assumption that print publication is more trustworthy, partly because it is a more familiar format for information and partly because of deference to the judgment of those with the ascribed authority, financial resources, or market motivation to play in that arena. However, such reservations can have beneficial effects if readers of electronic texts develop the habit of critically questioning the accuracy of the claims and facts in all messages, regardless of the medium through which they are conveyed.

In the academy, we also rely on the gatekeeping authority of editorial boards and a blind peer-reviewed system for determining the quality and significance of research. Certainly that system is not without fault and has not been without criticism. Legitimate questions can be raised about the selection of editorial boards, about the dominance of the network of certain programs and institutions, about the editorial preference for or discounting of certain methods of data collection and critical interpretation, and about other implicit or explicit biases that determine what gets published. In addition, there are also concerns about who gets published. Nonetheless, peer review has generally served us well in vetting articles, as has the practice of inviting essays on particular topics and applying the same standards of editorial judgment with regard to quality. The American Communication Journal and most other online academic journals have adopted and followed these practices, and both the strength of the ACJ Editorial Board and the value of the essays alone would suggest that the scheme works equally well for both print and online journals.

Yet, there is another aspect of certification that is more problematic. Publication in academic journals has also become one of the principal standards by which we evaluate scholars during annual reviews and for decisions about hiring and promotion. The concept of an online journal is terra incognito for many of the full professors who dominate tenure and evaluation committees. For scholars of my generation and older, who took hand-scribbled notes on index cards before photocopy machines were found in libraries, and who labored to produce and grudgingly revise dissertations on typewriters, HyperText Markup Language is somewhat akin to Sanskrit. Rather than confront and seek to understand this brave new world of electronic texts -- which would require accessing and actually reading the articles -- they find it easier to count the entries in the Matlon Index and rely upon inherited notions of a traditional outlet's prestige during the epoch when they were in graduate school.

Lest I be charged with ageism, let me add that this default position exists among some younger faculty as well, as I was recently surprised to discover when a colleague appealed a promotion decision by offering comparative numerical evidence drawn from the Matlon Index, a useful but limited source about which I will have more to say below. Even more disconcerting for me was the response I received not too long ago when I encouraged another colleague, an exceptionally gifted but untenured assistant professor, to consider submitting his work to an online journal in his area of specialization. He politely declined, explaining that his institution would not give "credit" toward tenure and promotion for research published in an electronic format. This chronic institutional malignancy is one easy to diagnose but quite resistant to cure, notwithstanding that it distorts the academic reward system, ignoring the essence of why we conduct and publish research and enforcing a dysfunctional code regarding how we publish.

It would seem that an obvious axiom of academic research is that the dissemination of results is a crucial goal of the process. Keeping one's findings secret or hoarding manuscripts, whether in the library of an isolated monastery or in a file cabinet in a disorganized office, has little value beyond that of personal possession. If what we discover is important, it must be made known to have any effect. Professional academic associations historically have created, authorized, endorsed, or otherwise sponsored scholarly journals as a vehicle for the timely distribution of research reports. Distribution of knowledge was seen as essential for furthering the work of others in the discipline, and individual scholars contributed to the mutual pursuit without seeking royalties or other direct payment for their work. This gift-economy, at least in theory, appeared well suited to the academic knowledge industry.

There were and are, however, at least two problems with such a scheme. First, even when scholars offer their intellectual property for free and editorial duties are seen as an obligation of professional service, there are significant direct costs involved with the physical production and distribution of printed journals. Various solutions have been adopted, ranging from subsidies through association dues, to page charges to authors, to arrangements with commercial publishers interested in profits from a captive audience. Whatever the case, the costs are paid by scholars and their academic institutions, an arrangement that is not inherently unfair while those costs are reasonable.

Unfortunately, the practice in recent years has seen a dramatic divergence between the sociology of research certification in universities and the economics of journal publishing. Whether driven by commercial publishers seeking greater profits or professional associations using journals to fund other activities, one recent report revealed that journal costs were rising at three times the rate of inflation (148% from 1986-1996), twice the rise in the cost of books (62%), and almost twice the rate of health care costs (84%). Today, a single copy of any journal published by the National Communication Association costs a library $30.00, a subscription to all six journals costs $660.00 a year, and even a subscription to the newsletter Spectra is $45.00 a year. Scholars who choose to publish in those journals assign all rights, including the right to republish their own work without securing permission.

The second problem with dissemination of knowledge by publication in traditional academic journals is that very few people actually read them. Have you ever seen anyone, outside the insular academic community, reading an article in one of our professional journals on an airplane or in a park? That is partly a function of the distribution system that is targeted to association members and their campus libraries, and partly a consequence of the inaccessibility of our writing, which seems to be published only for those who can navigate the jargon and for those who need to count for credit when making tenure decisions. The reality of the total readership of our professional work was illustrated by Professor David A. Sutton's essay, "The Professor and the Goldfish," published online in CRTNET:

Well, when I was Ph.D. student, a senior faculty member held aloft a copy of QJS and said in a reverential tone, "The main goal in our professional life is to publish our research in a journal that less than 1,000 people read. That is what we do. That is what we are all about." Ever since then I have asked myself, if we are analyzing public discourse, why should our analyses not be accessible to the public? If we huddle together and speak in a language unto ourselves, do we not risk being labeled "too academic" and thus ignored?

When measured by the criteria of dissemination, the American Communication Journal reaches a far larger audience, both in terms of who has access to the articles and who has access to the ideas. Other online journals share the distributional advantage, and some seem to share the ACJ's commitment to writing for the generally educated reader instead of those possessing secret academic decoder rings. Moreover, online texts can be quickly and easily translated to and from English and other widely-used languages in scholarly publications, making them even more accessible. I concede no advantage whatsoever to traditional print publications on this account.

The third function of academic publication is to increase access to knowledge by providing a useful index to what has been discovered by previous research. We grow by building on what has been done before, standing on the shoulders of our colleagues if not necessarily on those, like Newton, of giants. In our discipline, the most useful index was that compiled by Professor Ron Matlon et al. When it first appeared in print format as the Index to Journals in Communication Studies, it was a wonderful leap forward. It has since evolved to include a number of communication-related journals, other than those published by NCA and the affiliated regional associations, and it is available, for a price, on CD-ROM.

In my particular area of interest -- freedom of speech -- the NCA's Matlon Index is of only limited value. While the NCA sponsors the publication of Free Speech Yearbook to disseminate knowledge in traditional journal format, repeated requests to the Publication Board to include it in the Matlon Index were ignored or rejected. The basis for that decision, as I now understand it, was that the FSY was an annual and not a journal; therefore, this distinction of taxonomy trumped the indexing and accessibility of publications addressing freedom of expression.

The limitations of the Matlon Index notwithstanding, scholarly investigation would be enhanced considerably if the NCA, rather than selling the CD-ROM for a handsome price, were to make the Index available on it's website for free. Digital format makes this an easy task, but other considerations appear more central than facilitation of access.

While the American Communication Journal would seem to meet all the criteria for inclusion in the Matlon Index along with other communication journals, it does not appear to be scheduled for the next revision. That, however, does not constitute a knockdown argument that traditional paper journals in the field of communication have an advantage with regard to indexing. Online journals allow full text searching with most commonly available search engines. The future of indexing will be full-text searching, along the lines of the proprietary databases for law reviews, although there is reason to hope that communication journals will follow the lead of the American Communication Journal and make those resources available without cost. Traditional academic journals published only on paper cannot offer that level of indexing, access, or usefulness.

The fourth characteristic of scholarly publishing is the archiving of research results, making them permanently available for scholars. Here, it might seem, bound copies of traditional paper journals, stored in numerous libraries at different geographical locations, would have an advantage over online journals, and that existing system does serve the archiving function quite well.

Online publications can meet the requirement for archiving in several ways. Establishing mirror sites and downloading to CD-ROM are two relatively inexpensive and currently available means to assure protection and, thus, permanence in media with longer life than paper. Duplication of a volume of an online journal by either process -- using file transfer protocol for a mirror site or burning a CD-ROM -- is far less expensive than investing in traditional journals at $30.00 per issue or $110.00 per volume. An additional advantage of online digital archives over the traditional print journal is that the archived information can be accessed 24/7, independent of the hours that libraries housing paper journal archives might be open or the time it takes to fetch older issues from remote storage.

The electronic publication of communication research did not begin with the inaugural issue of the American Communication Journal in 1997. Professor Tom Benson's innovative conception and execution of CRTNET had blazed a rough trail and created an online community of bitnet scholars in the late 1980s, and the Electronic Journal of Communication and other projects of the Communication Institute for Online Scholarship demonstrated the creative possibilities of Gopher and FTP access to textual materials and research reports, especially in the early days before CIOS began charging for access. These were both bold and successful efforts that encouraged the conception and founding of the American Communication Journal, though what it could or would become was not fully imagined by those who could only guess at the possibilities in 1996.

Even those brave souls who ignored the existing reward regime of traditional scholarly journal publication and ventured into the electronic environment were not fully cognizant of the possibilities and consequences, though they were certainly aware that writing and publishing in hypertext was somehow different. Some would argue that it was or could be oppressive, while others argued that it could be liberating or even subversive. All who gave it much thought realized that it held the potential to bring a text to life, even in such traditional research areas as Public Address, where an author could share with the reader the experience of examining virtual copies of historic documents or handwritten speech drafts, the voices of famous orators giving speeches in digital audio, or viewing moving pictures of political figures long dead but now alive on the pages of an electronic journal.

Despite these obvious advantages, those organizations and individuals who benefit from the existing structure of academic culture have not been willing to venture forth and embrace the electronic future. Why, they might honestly ask, tinker with a system of academic control and rewards that has served them well? Why did the American Psychological Association move to discipline scholars who post early drafts on their personal webpage for pre-publication comment and critique by adopting a policy denying any consideration of publication for final drafts? And, more perplexing, what arguments can be made for choosing a year's lag from submission to traditional publication in paper journals over the more expedited process available in an online venue?

Change always comes in waves, with innovators and laggards, and realizing the potential of online scholarly publishing is no exception. Like the invasion of the beaches of Normandy, the generals and career employees will watch from a distance, moving in to claim credit after the area has been secured by those who had the courage to take risks and forge ahead.

Whatever the future of electronic journal publication holds for the future of communication research, it owes much to the template established and enacted by Founder Tyrone L. Adams, Co-Editor Jim A. Kuypers, and the talented editorial board they assembled to launch a dream of what could be. Not concerned about how to profit financially from sharing research reports or charging rather steep rates for institutions to advertise position vacancies, the goal was to explore the possibilities and push the frontiers of sharing the excitement of communication research, to provide a vehicle for bringing knowlede to scholars and to the interested public with access to the Internet. Likewise, the commitment and support of the University of Arkansas in providing the server space gratis is equally farsighted. In the future, universities facing limited funds for acquiring and maintaining print journals might well see the wisdom of forming a consortium of institutions that provide webspace to non-profit groups that seek to expand the availablity of knowledge rather than exploit the existing arrangements for journal production and distribution.

"The times," as Bob Dylan moaned, "they are a-changin'." To paraphrase Joseph A. Gattuso, Professor Adams, a twenty-something untenured assistant professor, understood better than the full-bulls both the wisdom of Sun Tzu and the theory of what a communication journal should be in a new age of exploding technologies, allowing him to break free from the constraining bonds of petrified instruction, obsolete doctrine, and slavish adherence to what we had always done and what has always been. Such a grasp of the intellectual process let him shape the developing environment -- to lead and to act -- not react. In contrast with others who have not studied as well, he was able to master the elements and rewrite the rules for everyone involved.

What of this online journal? The first three volumes of the American Communication Journal are merely a beginning for online publication of this caliber. The future of all that is possible with this new global communications medium for innovative scholarship is yet to be imagined, explored, and developed. With that said, everyone associated with this journal -- from the Editorial Staff, to the Editorial Board, to the daring authors who linked their brilliance across the emerging new digitalscapre -- must undoubtedly recognize that this is a disciplinary legacy to span our ages. We are witnessing the paradigm shift from paper to pixels occur right before our very eyes, and it is exciting and encouraging, indeed.

Still, like "Neo" in the major motion picture, The Matrix, I am certain that the architect behind the ACJ vision, Professor Tyrone L. Adams, must be smiling at his monitor as he reads this, the final issue of his founding tenure, thinking to himself:

"I know you're out there. I can feel you, now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change. I don't know the future. I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it's going to begin. I'm going to hang up this phone, and then I'm going to show these people what you don't want them to see. I'm going to show them a world ... without you. A world without rules and controls. Without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible. Where we go from there, is a choice I leave to you."