I’ve mentioned before Katleen Fitzpatrick’s collaboration with the Future of the Book to create an electronic scholarly press. Her May 3 summary of a meeting that took place is remarkable several reasons. The fact that a group of scholars was willing to seriously discuss and support the concept is remarkable. The group developed a set of principles that suggest their 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.
Fitzpatrick goes on to say:
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.
What’s clear from her statements is that the group is drawing a distinction between scholarly publishing and scholarly discourse. She is not willing to allow the ineffectiveness of the first to interfere with the second.
A similar dissatisfaction prompted the development of digital repositories to reduce cost and time for dissemination of findings in scientific research. From that has developed the Open Archives Initiative and protocols for harvesting metadata. It will be interesting to see how the efforts of Fitzpatrick and her colleagues shape the future of publishing.
Tags: academic life