I’ve been following a project at the Institute for the Future of the Book (IF:Book), hosted by the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC. Kathleen Fitzpatrick has been guiding a project designed to address a number of problems in scholarly communication.

Working with a group of humanities scholars, IF:Book began identifying obvious problems: failing university presses, junior faculty having difficulties finding publishers, long delays between research/writing and publication, peer-review functioning as a gatekeeper rather than facilitating collaboration, and costliness of books/journals. Ultimately they began to feel that the current model for academic publishing does not promote the kind of scholarly communication and collaboration they desire. To quote from her recent announcement:

Our shift from thinking about an “electronic press” to thinking about a “scholarly network” came about gradually; the more we thought about the purposes behind electronic scholarly publishing, the more we became focused on the need not simply to provide better access to discrete scholarly texts but rather to reinvigorate intellectual discourse, and thus connections, amongst peers (and, not incidentally, discourse between the academy and the wider intellectual public). This need has grown for any number of systemic reasons, including the substantive and often debilitating time-lags between the completion of a piece of scholarly writing and its publication, as well as the subsequent delays between publication of the primary text and publication of any reviews or responses to that text. These time-lags have been worsened by the increasing economic difficulties threatening many university presses and libraries, which each year face new administrative and financial obstacles to producing, distributing, and making available the full range of publishable texts and ideas in development in any given field. The combination of such structural problems in academic publishing has resulted in an increasing disconnection among scholars, whose work requires a give-and-take with peers, and yet is produced in greater and greater isolation.

Yesterday, Fitzpatrick announced the beginning of what the IF:Book is calling the Media Commons. This initial effort to establish a “scholarly network” will focus on the field of media studies. I thought you might be interested not so much in the field, but in the efforts by others in the humanities to develop new models for scholarly communication designed foremost to serve scholarly dialogue. In the the announcement, Fitzpatrick describes a broad variety of scholarly writing sustained by and facilitating a network of scholarly engagement. You can read the full announcement at the link below:

http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2006/07/introducing_mediacommons_or_ti.html

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.

I really appreciate the leadership Kathleen Fitzpatrick is bringing to the issue of scholarly electronic publishing. In other contexts I’ve proposed that in the next decade, some libraries might take on the role of publishers. That’s hard to imagine unless the current models for scholarly communication change. I don’t think library staffs (and the budgets to support them) will suddenly grow to take on an active publishing agenda using the same model as the current commercial models of publishing. To expect that we can add publishing to the already full load that librarians carry is unrealistic. But if the model for publishing is based on a collective model such as the one that Kathleen Fitzpatrick suggests, might make it possible:

Here’s where the technophobia comes in, or perhaps it’s just a desire to have someone else do the production work masquerading as a kind of technophobia, because many of the responses to that last question seem to revolve around either not knowing how to do this kind of publishing work or not wanting to take on the burden of figuring it out. But I strongly suspect that there will come a day in the not too distant future when we look back on those of us who have handed our manuscripts over to presses for editing, typesetting, printing, and dissemination in much the same way that I currently look back on those emeriti who had their secretaries—or better still, their wives—type their manuscripts for them. For better or for worse, word processing has become part of the job; with the advent of the web and various easily learned authoring tools, editing and publishing are becoming part of the job as well. (Kathleen Fitzpatrick / “On the Importance of the Collective in Electronic Publishing“)

So what is the Library’s role? Certainly, some of us would want to publish. So, we would need to carry some of the load. But equally important, libraries might establish and maintain a publishing infrastructure that would facilitate the process. Technology would be a part of it, but perhaps coordination at some level as well.

Fitzpatrick points to the open source software movement as a model. It’s clear that many programmers devote significant portions of their “free time” to developing open source software. It’s also clear that scholars carve out times to write, review manuscripts, consult with colleagues, etc. with little regard for the 40 hour work week. At some level, it seems that scholarly electronic publishing needs to be driven by passion rather than the pay check that comes with the 40 hour work week.

I’ve just finished a third major writing project in two weeks, thus the silence ….

I’ve suggested before that libraries should take on a more active publishing role. I made a link in my mind with what Katheen Fitzpatrick talked about over at The Valve. She advocates for radical change in scholarly communication, including a much more collaborative publishing model that would include “versioning.” Trying to sort out editions drives some catalogers crazy. (What’s a new edition and what’s simply a reprint with a new introduction?) In an article I finished today, I suggested that libraries (particularly university libraries) take on the publishing role.

If libraries established and maintained publishing systems that provided feedback (comment) and version control, they could easily (well maybe not easily) control the metadata. This could be done in collaboration with (or in lieu of) University Presses.

Fitzpatrick’s isn’t the first voice I’ve heard urging change in scholarly communication. Carlos J. Alonso, Cathy N. Davidson, John M. Unsworth, and Lynne Withey suggest a number of changes in Crises and Opportunities: The Futures of Scholarly Publishing . I don’t see an imminent revolution in scholarly communication, but I think in the next decade we’ll see significant changes. Libraries ought to play a big role…