Slidecast

Scholarly Publishing & the InternetNew Media & Society

Theme Issue, May 2013 (vol. 15, no. 4)

Slidecast of introductory statementsfrom authors & editors to theme issue;

entire podcast available on NM&S website

SAGE Website: http://nms.sagepub.com/ NM&S Website: http://www.newmediaandsociety.com/

NM&S Podcast: Scholarly Publishing 2

Welcome & IntroductionSteve Jones, editor New Media & Society (NM&S)

• Articles in NM&S issue (May 2013, 16:3)

– The big one: The epistemic system break in scholarly monograph publishing (Phil Pochoda)

– Credit, time, and personality: The human challenges to sharing scholarly work using Web 2.0 (Sophia Krzys Acord &Diane Harley)

– The intellectual and institutional properties of learning: Historical reflections on patronage, autonomy, and transaction (John Willinsky & Johanne Provençal)

– The role of academic publishers in shaping the development of Web 2.0 services for scholarly communication (James Stewart, Rob Procter, Robin Williams, & Meik Poschen)

A Conversation on Scholarly Publishing

Sophia Acord

Associate Director of the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Criminology & Law, University of Florida

Phil Pochoda

Retired director University of Michigan Press; former associate director University Press of New England, editorial director of Anchor Books and Dial Press at Doubleday, publisher and editor-in-chief of Prentice-Hall Press

John Willinsky

Professor of Education at Stanford University and of Publishing Studies at Simon Fraser University; director of the Public Knowledge Project

Nick Jankowski

Associate Researcher at e-Humanities Group of the Royal Netherlands Academy for Arts and Sciences, former co-editor of New Media & Society

Steve Jones

Professor of Communication at UIC, Research Associate atUIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory

Opening statement: Sophia AcordNM&S articleCredit, time, and personality: The human challenges to sharing scholarly work using Web 2.0 by Sophia Krzys Acord & Diane Harley

Abstract Funding bodies, the economics of publishing, and the affordances of Web 2.0 platforms have spurred learned societies, publishers, and scholars to experiment with new media venues for scholarly communication. Why, then, have we seen few widespread changes in how scholars disseminate research in most disciplines? Drawing on qualitative interview data from the Mellon-funded Future of Scholarly Communication Project (2005–2011), we describe how scholars share their work-in-progress and the disciplinary values driving these practices. We then discuss credit, time, and personality as significant barriers to change across disciplines, and we explore these obstacles through an examination of two new paradigms for sharing: open peer review and data sharing. By situating larger discussions about the future of scholarly communication in the everyday lives of scholars, we argue that integration with disciplinary cultures will be key to the success of new media initiatives.

Opening statement: Phil PochodaNM&S articleThe big one: The epistemic system break in scholarly monograph publishing

AbstractA system of scholarly monograph publishing, primarily under the auspices of university presses, coalesced only 50 years ago as part of the final stage of the professionalization of US institutions of higher education. The resulting analogue publishing system supplied the authorized print monographs that academic institutions newly required for faculty tenure and promotion. That publishing system – as each of its components – was founded, stable, identifiable, well ordered, and well policed. As successive financial shocks battered both the country in general and scholarly publishing in particular, just a decade after its final formation, the analogue system went into extended decline.

Finally, it is now giving way to a digital scholarly publishing system whose configuration and components are still obscure and in flux, but whose epistemological bases differ from the analogue system in almost all important respects: it will be relatively unbounded and stochastic, composed of units that are inherently amorphous and shape shifting, and marked by contested authorization of diverse content. This digitally driven, epistemic system shift in scholarly publishing may well be an extended work in progress, since the doomed analogue system is still fiscally dominant with respect to monographs, and the nascent digital system has not yet coalesced around a multitude of emerging digital affordances.

Opening statement: John WillinskyNM&S articleThe intellectual and institutional properties of learning: Historical reflections on patronage, autonomy, and transaction by John Willinsky & Johanne Provencal

Abstract This paper attempts to cast a little historical light on current debate among scholars and publishers that appears to be over whether the academic journal is an endlessly exploitable commercial property or a public good to which all have right. It identifies key patterns in the patronage of medieval monasticism that helped to establish learning as an economically distinct form of labor, and is part of a larger historical project on the intellectual and institutional properties of learning in the West. Through the beneficence shown toward monasteries by the nobility and others, learned nuns and monks were able to operate with a degree of autonomy and trust in their scholarly work. The resulting manuscripts were directed toward the learning of others and, as such, were copied and circulated widely within the admittedly narrow confines of the monastic community. These scholarly labors became part of what attracted the continuing gifts of benefactors, who were prepared to direct a portion of their wealth to this expressionof piety and discipline.

This paper reflects, then, on institutional conditions that proved vital to the advancement of learning in the centuries leading up to the emergence of the university system in the Late Middle Ages. As such, it forms a point of historical reflection for the academic community today, as it reconsiders the principles by which research and scholarship should circulate within the new possibilities posed by the digital era.

NM&S Podcast: Scholarly Publishing 7

Opening Statement: Nick Jankowski

NM&S Podcast: Scholarly Publishing 8

Opening Statement: Steve Jones

• Digital transformation: evident across academic endeavour

• Changing place of labour in scholarly publishing & in making decisions on where we concentrate our efforts

• Interest in understanding trends in participation in scholarly conversation: from occasional informal exchange at annual conference to a conversation taking place on daily / hourly basis

• Concerns: What has happened to the things we used to do between those conversations? How has concept of scholarly labour been transformed?

NM&S Theme Issue Podcast

The entire podcast of this conversation can be accessed and listened to at the website of New Media & Society: http://www.newmediaandsociety.com/

Articles of theme issue, Scholarly publishing and the internet, is available at: http://nms.sagepub.com/content/15/3.toc