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Friday, January 06, 2006
On the Future of Academic Publishing, Peer Review, and Tenure Requirements
This is a guest post by Kathleen “Planned Obsolescence“ Fitzpatrick. - the Management
Inside Higher Ed reported a few days back on the work thus far done by an MLA task force on the evaluation of scholarship for tenure and promotion, and on the multiple recommendations thus far made by the panel, whose members include current MLA president Domna C. Stanton, Donald E. Hall, Sean Latham, Leonard Cassuto, and our blogging friend Michael Bérubé.
What follows is a lengthy consideration and extension of one of the recommendations made by this panel, as well as a sketch of one possible future, presented in the hopes of opening up a larger conversation about where academic publishing ought to go, and how we might best take it there.
Many of the recommendations put forward by the MLA task force have been long in coming, and many stand to change tenure processes for the better; these recommendations include calls for departments:
-- to clarify the communication of tenure standards to new hires via “memorandums of understanding”;
-- to give serious consideration to articles published by tenure candidates, thus decentering the book as the gold standard of scholarly production, and to communicate that expanded range of acceptable venues for publication to their administrations;
-- to set an absolute maximum of six letters from outside evaluators that can be required to substantiate a tenure candidate’s scholarly credentials, to draw those evaluators from comparable institutions rather than more prestigious ones, and to refrain from asking evaluators to make inappropriate judgments about the tenure-worthiness of candidates based on the limited portrait that a dossier presents.
These are, as I say, extremely important recommendations, and ones to which I hope the tenured among us will begin to hold our departments and our institutions. For my purposes, however, there’s one further recommendation that demands emphasis, one that stands a significant chance of effecting great change not simply in how the academy tenures its faculty but in how those faculty do their work, how they communicate that work, and how that work is read both inside and outside the academy. This recommendation is hinted at in the IHE article, but needs to be taken much further:
Sean Latham, associate professor of English and director of the Modernist Journals Project at the University of Tulsa, said that departments need to recognize that scholarship—good, bad and everything in between—is being produced online and needs to be evaluated without any media-based bias. “This process has begun without us,” he said.
Latham—to knowing nods in the audience—joked about how some professors who favor print journals somehow ignore the fact that most of the print journals’ readers these days are online, through various consortiums that make the journals available electronically. “If we read something through Project Muse, are we supposed to feel better because somewhere there is a print copy?” he asked.
If you’re reading this, you’re no doubt already on board with Latham’s point. He’s precisely right that the vast majority of scholarly articles are being distributed and consumed in electronic format (as is evident in the citations of many of my students, who seem at moments entirely unaware that many journals actually have print existences!). He’s also dead-on in attempting to nudge our senior (and many of our not-so-senior) colleagues out of their continuing and unreasoning biases toward the primacy of print publication. But, at least as reported in IHE, Latham’s interests largely focus on the online journal as a reputable venue for publication. My own interests, which I’ve gone on about at great length on other occasions, revolve around the future of the monograph, and ways that it might be made sustainable in a new electronic venue. But the issues raised by the MLA panel call our collective attention to two overarching questions: What exactly do we want the future of scholarship to look like, and what do we have to do in order to persuade our senior colleagues, our departments, and our institutions—all of which tend, if unconsciously, toward an obstinate luddism—that such a future is not only acceptable but necessary?
It’s worth beginning with a somewhat prior question about the future of the academic book, however: whether the fetishization of the monograph as the gold standard of publishing in the humanities is misguided in and of itself, not simply in the ways that such an obsessive focus obscures other worthy forms of scholarship (most notably the article), but also in its failure to recognize that the book might simply not be the best form for scholarly communication in the first place. Not long ago, I overheard a colleague tell a student that scholarly books are not meant to be read but rather consulted. If this is how we consume research in the humanities—read the book’s introduction for the overall argument; read the chapter that most clearly applies to our own questions for the detailed analysis—then is the production of the book itself no more than a vanity?
I would argue that the kind of work that has in recent years been done by the scholarly monograph remains necessary to the humanities, regardless of how that monograph is actually read. While the individual chapters of many monographs might have been—and in many cases were—published as free-standing articles, by and large, those books’ introductions could not have been published in any other form. The synthetic work that those introductions do—stepping back from local instances of the phenomenon under consideration to construct a broader landscape against which a large-scale argument can be made—remains crucial to the advancement of certain kinds of knowledge; such synthesis, moreover, requires the weight of the extended analysis only made feasible to this point by the expansive and yet subdividable nature of the book. This is not to say that the only arguments worthy of valorization in the humanities are those that come in large packages; in fact, much of the most important work in literary studies in recent years has been done in articles. I am simply arguing that the monograph remains valuable (and, indeed, necessary) as a venue for a certain form of intellectual work.
Having said that, it seems apparent to me, as no doubt to many of you, that for the monograph to maintain any viability into the future, it must move online. Like the kinds of journal distribution mechanisms that Latham mentions, this could most easily be slotted into existing academic structures through electronic distribution via PDFs or print-on-demand technologies. As Bob Stein suggests, however, on the Institute for the Future of the Book (if:book) blog, scholarship that is allowed to exceed the bounds of print, that takes full advantage of the technologies available to documents that are “born digital,” promises to have the greatest effect on shaping what the future of scholarship might be. We’ve seen the leading edge of this future-shaping in academic blogging, which has enabled connections and conversations of the sort that formerly developed only at conferences or among colleagues to flourish across greater distances, for longer durations, and among more scholars than ever before.
What I want to argue, as one stroke in a sketch of the electronic publishing scheme of the future—the “what do we want” question—is that blogging might have much to share with the born-digital monograph. Among the technologies that these digital texts can take advantage of are of course the apparent ones, such as the inexpensive inclusion of illustrations, among them still images, of course, but also audio and video clips, or the use of linking to create both webbed internal structures for texts and to bring external sources within the text’s frame. There are other technologies, however, whose scholarly uses might not be so immediately apparent but that might produce the most radical change. Among these I’d argue (and have argued in the past) that trackbacks, as a means parallel to bibliographies of tracing scholarly discussions not simply backward in time but also forward, might reshape the nature of doing research; that versioning, as a means of allowing a text to continue changing even after it’s been published, might reshape the processes of academic publishing; and that comments, as a means of including conversation about a text within the text, might reshape the nature of peer-review.
Let me take each of these on in turn. It remains somewhat shocking to me that an academic indexing system such as the MLA Bibliography has not yet found a way to incorporate a technology like trackbacks to researchers’ advantage. While the implementation requires programming skills far greater than mine, the principle is simple: when your most recent article appears, wherever it appears, and is indexed by the appropriate bibliographic services, it should be mined not only for its title, author, publication data, keywords, and so on, but also for its bibliography. That bibliography currently allows us to trace conversations backward in time, but if the bibliographic information mined by the indexing software triggered a ping that was picked up by the records of those cited texts, each of those texts would thereafter carry, in its indexed entry, evidence that the text was cited by you, among x number of other future scholars, each of whom responded to the text’s argument in slightly different ways, thus enabling researchers to track conversations forward in time. (The sciences have of course been all over this for years via citation indexes. Of course the institutional reliance upon such citation indexes as a metric of any given article’s “importance” in the field might be something worth subjecting to a bit of critical scrutiny.) All of this is made comparatively simple within an online publishing environment, however, in which trackbacks would have the added advantage of creating directly followable links among texts, materializing the ongoing nature of scholarly conversations, allowing any given text, via its descendants, to continue growing beyond its conclusion.
Versioning, as employed in most wiki software, would have a similar effect to that last, though within the individual text. It makes no sense for electronic texts to mimic print by becoming fixed; electronic texts should be free to continue to grow and develop over time, but that change should somehow be marked within the text, made visible to readers. In this fashion, by enabling an author to continue working on a text even after its publication, but by making the history of changes to that text available, the process of an argument’s growth and change could become part of the text itself. This would enable, in conjunction with commenting technologies, the processes of academic publishing to be radically changed, allowing authors to get new material into circulation much sooner. Scholars would no longer be at the mercy of the often appalling time-lags between a text’s submission and acceptance, and between acceptance and publication. Instead, articles and monographs could be posted relatively early in their life-spans, as pre-prints or even submissions—perhaps with some indication of that status—and then the debate and discussion that they produce, and the shifts in the author’s thinking that result, could take place in the open, as part of the process of the work itself.
This suggests the most massive potential change that a move of the monograph into a truly electronic mode of publishing might entail—a vast transformation in both the mechanisms and the purposes of peer-review. What if peer-review took place not prior to publication but on texts that have already been made public? What if that peer-review happened not anonymously, in back-channel communications with individuals other than a text’s author, but in the open, in direct communication between reader and author? Technologies ranging from commenting to, as John Holbo suggested in a recent post on The Valve, a more elaborated P2P system, could be made to serve many of the purposes that current peer-review systems serve (most importantly for institutional purposes, the separating of wheat and chaff), but would shift the process of peer-review from one that determines whether a manuscript should be published to one that determines how it should be received. Such a P2P system raises some potential pitfalls, of course—most notably how to make sure that the new system doesn’t simply remanifest the exclusionary manner in which the old sometimes functioned, through a Shirky-esque “power law"—but in conjunction with versioning, as described above, such a move of peer-review to a post-publication process would allow for the ongoing discussion and revision necessary to all scholarly thought.
There are a couple of implications of this shift that bear some immediate consideration, as we begin to think about how to bring such change about: first, these new technologies introduce what is to some scholars an unnerving sense of collaboration in intellectual work. Such collaboration, however, is only unnerving to those of us in the humanities; work in both the sciences and the social sciences is heavily (and in some fields, entirely) reliant upon the multi-author text. What this new system of publishing and review implies, however, is less a move away from individual authorship than a recognition that no author is an island, so to speak, that we’re all always working in dialogue with others. Even in a radically collective and collaborative electronic publishing system, the individual author would still exist (and would still maintain some form of “ownership” over her ideas, via some means of Creative Commons licensing), but would do her work in material relation to the work of others, in a process of discussion and revision that now takes place behind the scenes, but that I’d argue is important enough to be moved out in front of the curtain. More importantly, however, such changes in the processes of academic publishing would return scholarly communication to the gift-economy mode within which, as I have argued elsewhere, it was always intended to operate, a mode in which all gains in knowledge produced by individual research are made not for the advancement of that individual, but for the collective benefit of the whole.
A second problem in bringing about such a radical change in peer-review, however, is the need to promote a new understanding of peer-review within our institutions, such that texts published within such a system would be taken seriously by college and university review and promotion committees. Such a new understanding is already desperately needed; one of the problems in academic publishing right now—what makes the economic hardships of the current university publishing system not merely a change but a crisis—is that, as Stephen Greenblatt pointed out some years back in his letter to the membership of the MLA, too many academic institutions rely on presses to make their tenure decisions for them. The granting of tenure should not be reliant on whether the vagaries of any publishing system did or did not allow a text to come into circulation, but rather on the value of that text, and on the importance it bears for its field. Peer-review thus demands to be transformed from a system of gatekeeping to a mode of manifesting the responses to and discussion of a multiplicity of ideas in circulation.
In order for this change to take root, however, with as little potential for damage to the careers of junior scholars as possible, tenured scholars are going to have to take the first plunge. Latham is absolutely right in the poking that I quoted earlier: until the biases held by many senior faculty about the relative value of electronic and print publication are changed—but moreover, until our institutions come to understand peer-review as part of an ongoing conversation among scholars rather than a convenient means of determining “value” without all that inconvenient reading and discussion—the processes of evaluation for tenure and promotion are doomed to become a monster that eats its young, trapped in an early twentieth century model of scholarly production that simply no longer works.
These are the ideas I’ve been tinkering with for a while now at my own blog and at the ElectraPress site, but now I put the question to you: what do you want the future of scholarly publishing to look like, and what do we need to do not simply to make it happen but to make it flourish? Imagine the ideal publishing process of the future, one that doesn’t simply move old processes and textual forms online but that makes genuine use of new technologies to transform the ways that scholarship is done, and communicated, and consumed. How does it work, and what makes it possible?
Comments
Welcome to the Valve, and thank you so much for this detailed argument! There are lots of interesting ideas to play with.
Here’s a first thought:
At MLA, I heard a good objection to making digital scholarship public prior to ‘final’ review (i.e., in something along the lines of the bloggy model you describe above: pre-print versions of an article available, along with peer comments, as well as revised/final versions). The senior scholar I talked to about it point out that so many journal articles go through one or more “revise and resubmit” phases, and that the absolute acceptance/rejection barrier is in fact a productive and important one. Having strong pressure to rework something before it gets published makes a scholar more likely to worry over fine points, phrasing, style, and so on.
This conversation got me thinking about the nature of literary criticism. To a greater extent than in the social sciences, conventional literary critical writing is itself a kind of creative effort, where the quality of the writing (its literary polish, if you will) is as important as the new knowledge the article produces.
So what this scholar seemed to be saying is this: there is some danger that the turn towards instanteneity (is that a word? it should be) and full transparency of the review process will result in a more worksmanlike approach to prose writing in literary criticism.
In a sense her objection could also apply to the entire digital publishing turn: there’ll be less emphasis on style and polish, more emphasis on content and accessibility. The question might be whether that is really a problem for us.
This sounds great. I have objected before to the idea of putting monographs in an online format, simply because of the pragmatic issue of reading things on a screen or having overwhelming print jobs to deal with, but it actually does make sense given the “perusal” model of the use of scholarly monographs.
Such a model would also have the added benefit of rendering the redundant “vanity” essay collection by “name” scholars (i.e., “Here are the articles I’ve written in the past year, with minimal editing to eliminate repetition; hell, I’ll throw in an encyclopedia article, too, to increase page count...") obselete.
Yes, Kathleen, welcome, and thanks for this post.
Amardeep, I don’t know if your worry here is completely justified. Probably there would be some less polished, less thoughtful writing out there, but frankly, sometimes one sees that on the printed page, no? I think a lot would depend upon what sort of publication we are talking about: blogs are of course informal. But if someone spends all the time needed to craft a longer piece for online publication — possibly with illustrations as Kathleen suggests, nicely designed — I am thinking here of a post by Kieran Healy some time back on Crooked Timber (in response, in part, to one of mine here, full disclosure) in which he mentions the joys of typesetting his own work — then surely we can apply the same standards, in all respects, as we would to printed materials.
I suppose I’m just not that worried. Good writers are good writers even when they dash off a blog post, and bad writers can iron out some of the kinks, with work, but that is really all that can be said.
I would hate to see all academic writing become informal. A journal article is by definition something someone has laboured over, and it has had other eyes on it. We mustn’t give up that, but there is no reason that we should.
This may be a case of losing something — polished prose and an unsustainable publishing system — to gain something: more conversation, more immediacy, more opportunity to make our own judgements rather than handing responsibility over to a group of gatekeepers.
But then, making our own judgements is time-consuming. Reading on-line is time-consuming. I can understand people who feel overwhelmed, who want to have material vetted before it comes to them. A question: do we want to build in the same sorts of controls online as we see in print publishing? Or is the ability to deal with the onslaught part of the new literacy we need to — want to, must — develop?
This may be a case of losing something — polished prose and an unsustainable publishing system — to gain something: more conversation, more immediacy, more opportunity to make our own judgements rather than handing responsibility over to a group of gatekeepers.
Yes, I see what you’re saying. And I think the possibilities are interesting; perhaps in time we might evolve a kind of academic writing designed to distill (in a polished way) the fast-moving kinds of arguments that happen on blogs and bloggy journals described above.
Polish might, in other words, take on a new role: not as the definitive word on something, but as a considered rendition of a debate involving multiple voices.
We might also see more multiple-author essays in this world. A reader or readers of an essay at a given digital journal might have done work that is similar enough to an essay being (publicly?) reviewed that two or more writers might decide to concatenate their work.
I suppose I’m just not that worried. Good writers are good writers even when they dash off a blog post, and bad writers can iron out some of the kinks, with work, but that is really all that can be said.
On this I think I disagree with you. I think many of us have the skills to write well, but not all of us apply the time and energy needed to get there. And often (at present, in academic publishing) there isn’t the motivation to do so: who’s going to really read this thing anyway?
One of the advantages of digital publishing is (and this is something that many other people have said), one can be assured that greater accessibility is likely to lead to a greater number of readers. That itself increases the pressure (or, positively, the motivation) to write as well as possible; it might even displace the old model of the editor-as-gatekeeper.
Still, I don’t think many of our colleagues are ready to accept a model of scholarship that doesn’t involve gatekeepers. Even if everything happens exactly right with quality control at digital journals, the question will inevitably still be asked: who chose these editors anyway? What is their affiliation and rank? Who funds them? Why should I respect them?
So the biggest hurdle in this might not be our colleagues’ Luddite tendencies or the fear of the Internets, but the hyper-hierarchical and prestige-driven nature of the North American academy, which has strong, quasi-feudal safeguards against anything that smacks of democratization.
But the best way to fight that is just to go ahead and do it, which, I note, is happening all over the place. (There are lots of digital journals cropping up out there. (In my own field, Jouvert has been around for a while, and a new journal called Postcolonial Text has recently made an impressive debut… and there are others...)
I am particularly intrigued by KF’s imagining of how “versioning” might be used in the development of scholarly work. Think, for instance, of a technology like Writeboard (http://www.writeboard.com), by 37Signals, which I and a colleague are currently using to co-author an article. Writeboards have two features that might be especially useful to the development of scholarly knowledge. First, they allow authors to record revision history, so that any author or reader can look at the final version or compare multiple versions. Second, they allow comments. Now Writeboards do not currently enable any scholarly form of text citation (though you could do MLA as long as you didn’t have footnotes), so the technology is limited—but it could easily be extended. And even as the technology now stands, one could imagine an online scholarly journal using something like it. I love the idea of a scholar publishing an article online, receiving multiple comments, and then, on the basis of those comments and his or her own further reflection, producing one or more additional versions that expand or contract or revise the original argument. That would even leave open the possibility of some later commenter preferring an earlier version of the argument—and that earlier version would remain accessible to readers.
(I realize that such a model of scholarship would raise all kinds of tenure/promotion issues—e.g., would a thorough revision of an existing article count as much as a brand new one?—but I am not dealing with those here. I’m just thinking of the implications for the development of scholarship in itself.)
To take up a relatively minor point, I’d say that cited reference searching is becoming less and less rooted in the natural sciences, and more and more available for other disciplines. MLA may not have it, but EBSCO’s Academic Search Premier (to give just an example of a multi-disciplinary index) includes a link to “Cited References” for many articles in the database (going “back in time"), and can, in turn, identify articles in the database that cite the given article (going “forward in time").
Article databases from journal publishers love to do this, at least within their own journals to promote discovery of other articles published by the same company. For example, Blackwell’s “Synergy” online journal site will display “Forward Links to Citing Articles.”
None of this is as elegant or easy to use and understand as the trackback, and it suffers from the same problems of compartmentalization and proprietary content that are vexing many online library projects these days.
What a terrific summary! Thanks from me, too, Kathleen. (Before commenting further, I should mention that I’m not a professional scholar and that I make my living as a software engineer.)
“... what do you want the future of scholarly publishing to look like...?”
You’ve touched on most of the dreams I usually bring out, and then some. One addition: that it become standard (and rewarded) procedure for scholars to publish online editions of their primary source material if it’s otherwise unavailable.
Amardeep’s concerns about premature acceptance/refusal and lack of polish assume, I think, an unrealistically uniform digital world. The internet can support many different types of workflow and schedule. One approach to document management keeps a submission accessible only to reviewers, editor, and author until (and if) it’s agreed to be ready. (I can testify that the deadline pressure still feels real enough!) Working on a piece locally for a long while before publishing it may be the only option available with paper, but the option doesn’t disappear online.
As for polish, one of the reasons I moved to online publishing is that I (and my poor editors) always found the process of revision on paper so painfully inefficient and expensive. (I was one of those awful writers who blacken proof-sheets with “last minute” changes. Embarrassingly, I’ve even made compulsive insertions in some of my author’s copies.) On the web, though, I can trim (or add) solecisms to my heart’s content.
Adam K., one of the reasons I want everyone else to move to online publishing is just how few writers are allowed those “vanity” collections. Eclectic essayists, like short story writers, are virtually impossible to sell in book form, and brilliant careers vanish like snowflakes. (Assuming you live in a place where snowflakes actually do vanish.)
Considered as a technical problem, “scholarly trackback” seems eminently solvable. As Steve says, the worst obstacles are political in nature.
I’m strongly in favor of online publication and I’m not worried about the problems that have been brought up here. Problems, sure there are problems. There are always problems. But I think the potential is worth it.
I’ve done a bit of publishing in online journals - a half dozen or so major reviews or review articles and three major articles. The articles have been published in PsyArt:
http://www.clas.ufl.edu/ipsa/journal/index.shtml
The journal is refereed. What’s equally important, the review process is relatively quick (3 months or so) and you can publish long articles with lots of diagrams. My three articles are roughly 25K words each, more or less. That’s too short for a monograph and way too long for an article. Further, each has a number of diagrams, which are expensive for print publication, but trivial online (I prepare the diagrams myself).
Those three article are all but unpublishable in ordinary print journals, not because of their intellectual content (though that’s a bit daring too), but because of their length and diagrams. For better or worse, I gravitate toward pieces that are too long for article publication and too short for monographs (not to mention the cumbersome process of publishing a monograph). I can’t help but think that the practical constraints of hard-copy publication have affected the nature of the pieces we write. Those constraints disappear with online publication.
Now, if only PsyArt were connected to a blog so people could comment on articles and authors could respond . . . .
This cogent and timely piece raises very important issues. As Kathleen Fitzpatrick notes, academic authorship has never been an individualistic enterprise. Since the Renaissance, scholars have submitted their work to colleagues for scrutiny and correction before publishing it--a practice that began in some circles even before the invention of printing. There is every reason to acknowledge this fact openly and revise our publication and assessment procedures to take it into account, especially as new technologies transform the possibilities of authorship.
On the other hand, after serving for a year on my university’s committee on appointments and promotions, let me offer one cautionary note: don’t assume that natural and social scientists have a flawless or nearly flawless system of collaborative authorship in place. It’s often not clear even to experts from the evidence included with an article in those fields whether the first or last author is fully responsible or whether a mentor or lab chief or official grant recipient played a substantive role in research or composition. These problems of signalling the components for which an individual was responsible can have a real impact on careers, for ill as well as for good. For want of other information, you sometimes end up relying on confidential letters that state “X was the one who really came up with this insight"--not exactly a model of openness in assessment.
Not a reason to stop thinking and moving in the directions suggested here: just a small caution from a burned child.
Versioning is a powerful feature that computer scientists and software engineers use on a daily basis, but that most other fields don’t seem to have discovered. Versioning systems like CVS, Subversion, or Perforce offer the ability to version any type of document, so I do much of my collaborative work using ordinary documents exchanged through my Subversion server.
In some of my classes, I’ve required that students submit their assignments via Subversion. It’s as easy as using e-mail for them and offers them a great collaborative tool for group projects, doesn’t require me to sort and file my e-mail, and lets me read a complete revision history of their submissions.
Version Control with Subversion is available as a free online book at http://svnbook.red-bean.com/ and you can download Subversion for free at http://subversion.tigris.org/.
Check out <a href="http://mith2.umd.edu/products/ver-mach/description.html">The Versioning Machine</a>.
Great article! This is just what I’m trying to do in the Slavic department at the University of Chicago. I recently got a small grant to digitize a number of important but out-of-print books on Russian linguistics, using xml-based files for Thout OR, an open source program with lots of useful features like searching some/all texts, bookmarking, and public notes.
I’ve also been given a dissertation and some articles by faculty (a number of them unpublished, but better than many things I’ve seen in print) to convert to this format as well. The goal is to create enough material for Thout OR that scholars in the field start using it, and converting their own materials for others to use. There’s even a DRM option, so journals reluctant to just give their content away could still make it available in this format.
Hi, all. I’m sorry for having posted and disappeared; I’ve been traveling, and my ability to process your helpful and thought-provoking comments has been pretty compromised. And brain is alas still pretty scrambled, so I can’t quite manufacture a cogent response now. But I’d like to encourage all of your with any interest in this area to pop by ElectraPress and create an account there, if you’d like to continue the conversation. And many thanks…
I realize that I am joining this conversation very late (the most recent posting is from January and it’s now July), but I just became aware of this site and discussion via the Chronicle of Higher Education.
I want to address two points not covered above:
1) If the collaborative commentary on a scholarly work produced online has to be cited by an author within the work in progress or in another work, then APA et al need to come up with a standard format for such citation.
2) Higher education seems to be gravitating toward a teaching/learning model that is more heavily oriented toward student-student and student-instructor “collaboration” rather than instructor-teaching-students-about-stuff-they-don’t-know-yet. I see a potential problem in failing to distinguish the collaborative learning environment and its virtual locations and publications from the collaborative research environment being discussed here.
Credibility is an issue, even without taking on the “ivory tower” isolationism that others have posited already. I think even the most liberal minded champion of free and open scholarly collaboration would have to recognize that student work in any discipline is of a different order from faculty research. Other students, scholars, and the general audience must be provided with some guidance as to the weight to be given various projects and/or various inputs to works in progress.
I’ve also been given a dissertation and some articles by faculty (a number of them unpublished, but better than many things I’ve seen in print) to convert to this format as well. The goal is to create enough material for Thout OR that scholars in the field start using it, and converting their own materials for others to use. There’s even a DRM option, so journals reluctant to just give their content away could still make it available in this format.
I think, an unrealistically uniform digital world. The internet can support many different types of workflow and schedule. One approach to document management keeps a submission accessible only to reviewers, editor, and author until it’s agreed to be ready. Working on a piece locally for a long while before publishing it may be the only option available with paper, but the option doesn’t disappear online.
Thanks for the article and the comments. My queries, on a different line (true - it may be too early to seek a firm answer)are:
1, Do you sense that many of the academicians, more so who are working in practicing field (management, medical science, etc.) would contribute more in mainstream media in future, and slowly the differentiating line would get thinner?
2. Do you sense a consolidation within different search stream (I mean within Google Scholar, Google Books, etc.) leading to one single search; or do we sense those specializations gaining more prominence as web gets cluttered by too much staff?
3. Finally, an academician would be judged more by his papers (specialized research) or by his various articles (I acknowledge both important, but what’s the medium-term to long term trend you foresee)?
Higher education seems to be gravitating toward a teaching/learning model that is more heavily oriented toward student-student and student-instructor “collaboration” rather than instructor-teaching-students-about-stuff-they-don’t-know-yet. I see a potential problem in failing to distinguish the collaborative learning environment and its virtual locations and publications from the collaborative research environment being discussed here.
25th Year Anniversary of National FORUM Journals
Founded in 1983
William Allan Kritsonis’ Contribution to Education
Arthur L. Petterway, PhD
Principal
Houston Independent School District
Houston, Texas
ABSTRACT
This year marks the 25th Year Anniversary of the founding of National FORUM Journals by Dr. William Allan Kritsonis. The following snapshot of the career of Dr. Kritsonis is a small tribute to his contribution to education.
__________________________________________________________________________
Founder of National FORUM Journals
Dr. Kritsonis is founder of NATIONAL FORUM JOURNALS (since 1983). These publications represent a group of highly respected scholarly academic periodicals. Over 4,000 writers have been published in these academic, scholarly, refereed, peer-reviewed journals.
Dr. Kritsonis Lectures at the University of Oxford, Oxford, England
In 2005, Dr. Kritsonis was an Invited Visiting Lecturer at the Oxford Round Table at Oriel College in the University of Oxford, Oxford, England. His lecture was entitled the Ways of Knowing Through the Realms of Meaning.
Dr. Kritsonis Recognized as Distinguished Alumnus
In 2004, Dr. William Allan Kritsonis was recognized as the Central Washington University Alumni Association Distinguished Alumnus for the College of Education and
Professional Studies. Dr. Kritsonis was nominated by alumni, former students, friends,
faculty, and staff. Final selection was made by the Alumni Association Board of Directors.
Recipients are CWU graduates of 20 years or more and are recognized for achievement in their professional field and have made a positive contribution to society. For
the second consecutive year, U.S. News and World Report placed Central Washington
University among the top elite public institutions in the west. CWU was 12th on the list in the 2006 On-Line Education of “America’s Best Colleges.”
Educational Background
Dr. William Allan Kritsonis earned his BA in 1969 from Central Washington University, Ellensburg, Washington. In 1971, he earned his M.Ed. from Seattle Pacific University. In 1976, he earned his PhD from the University of Iowa. In 1981, he was a Visiting Scholar at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, and in 1987 was a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California.
Professional Experience
Dr. Kritsonis began his career as a teacher. He has served education as a principal, superintendent of schools, director of student teaching and field experiences, invited guest professor, author, consultant, editor-in-chief, and publisher. Dr. Kritsonis has earned tenure as a professor at the highest academic rank at two major universities.
Books – Articles – Lectures - Workshops
Dr. Kritsonis lectures and conducts seminars and workshops on a variety of topics. He is author of more than 500 articles in professional journals and several books. His popular book SCHOOL DISCIPLINE: The Art of Survival is scheduled for its fourth edition. He is the author of the textbook William Kritsonis, PhD on Schooling that is used by many professors at colleges and universities throughout the nation and abroad.
In 2007, Dr. Kritsonis’ version of the book of Ways of Knowing Through the Realms of Meaning (858 pages) was published in the United States of America in cooperation with partial financial support of Visiting Lecturers, Oxford Round Table (2005). The book is the product of a collaborative twenty-four year effort started in 1978 with the late Dr. Philip H. Phenix. Dr. Kritsonis was in continuous communication with Dr. Phenix until his death in 2002.
In 2007, Dr. Kritsonis was the lead author of the textbook Practical Applications of Educational Research and Basic Statistics. The text provides practical content knowledge in research for graduate students at the doctoral and master’s levels.
In 2008, Dr. Kritsonis’ book Non-Renewal of Public School Personnel Contracts: Selected Supreme and District Court Decisions in Accordance with the Due Process of Law was published by The Edwin Mellen Press, Lewiston, New York.
Dr. Kritsonis’ seminar and workshop on Writing for Professional Publication has
been very popular with both professors and practitioners. Persons in attendance generate an
article to be published in a refereed journal at the national or international levels. Dr. Kritsonis has traveled and lectured throughout the United States and world-wide. Some recent international tours include Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, Turkey, Italy, Greece,
Monte Carlo, England, Holland, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Estonia, Poland,
Germany, and many more.
Founder of National FORUM Journals – Over 4,000 Professors Published
Dr. Kritsonis is founder of NATIONAL FORUM JOURNALS (since 1983). These publications represent a group of highly respected scholarly academic periodicals. Over 4,000 writers have been published in these refereed, peer-reviewed periodicals. In 1983, he founded the National FORUM of Educational Administration and Supervision – now acclaimed by many as the United States’ leading recognized scholarly academic refereed journal in educational administration, leadership, and supervision.
In 1987, Dr. Kritsonis founded the National FORUM of Applied Educational Research Journal whose aim is to conjoin the efforts of applied educational researchers world-wide with those of practitioners in education. He founded the National FORUM of Teacher Education Journal, National FORUM of Special Education Journal, National FORUM of Multicultural Issues Journal, International Journal of Scholarly Academic Intellectual Diversity, International Journal of Management, Business, and Administration, and the DOCTORAL FORUM – National Journal for Publishing and Mentoring Doctoral Student Research. The DOCTORAL FORUM is the only refereed journal in America committed to publishing doctoral students while they are enrolled in course work in their doctoral programs. In 1997, he established the Online Journal Division of National FORUM Journals that publishes academic scholarly refereed articles daily on the website: http://www.nationalforum.com. Over 600 professors have published online. In January 2007, Dr. Kritsonis established the National Journal: Focus On Colleges, Universities, and Schools.
Professorial Roles
Dr. Kritsonis has served in professorial roles at Central Washington University, Washington; Salisbury State University, Maryland; Northwestern State University, Louisiana; McNeese State University, Louisiana; and Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge in the Department of Administrative and Foundational Services.
In 2006, Dr. Kritsonis published two articles in the Two-Volume Set of the Encyclopedia of Educational Leadership and Administration published by SAGE Publications, Thousand Oaks, California. He is a National Reviewer for the Journal of Research on Leadership, University Council for Educational Administration (UCEA).
In 2007, Dr. Kritsonis was invited to write a history and philosophy of education for the ABC-CLIO Encyclopedia of World History.
Currently, Dr. Kritsonis is Professor of Educational Leadership at Prairie View A&M University – Member of the Texas A&M University System. He teaches in the newly established PhD Program in Educational Leadership. Dr. Kritsonis taught the Inaugural class session in the doctoral program at the start of the fall 2004 academic year. In October 2006, Dr. Kritsonis chaired the first doctoral student to earn a PhD in Educational Leadership at Prairie View A&M University. He lives in Houston, Texas.
Writing for Professional Publication in National Refereed Journals
A Session for Faculty and Doctoral Students
California State University, San Bernardino
April 3, 2008
William Allan Kritsonis, PhD
Professor
PhD Program in Educational Leadership
Prairie View A&M University/The Texas A&M University System
1. Professional reasons for writing for publication
2. Personal reasons for writing for publication
3. How real writers behave
4. Writer’s write for the following reasons
5. How to get started
6. What will “sell” the editor on your work?
7. Formula: Brilliant Ideas + Good Luck + Knowing the Right People = Publication
8. On scholarly work
9. Reasons to write and publish journal articles
10. Writing and publishing journal articles enables you to…
11. Three basic types of articles: practical – review or theoretical – research
12. Quantitative Studies
13. Qualitative Research
14. On writing books
15. Four phases of book publishing (Fun – Drudgery – Torture – Waiting)
16. Some reasons to write a book
17. Where does the dollar go after a book is published?
18. What do editors and reviewers really want?
19. Earning approval from editors and reviewers
20. What to remember about bad writing
21. How to get fired as a reviewer
22. Publish or perish or teach or impeach
23. I’ve been rejected many times – should I give up?
24. In writing, how you read is important
25. How teachable is writing?
26. “I can’t seem to tell how my writing is going while I am doing it. Can you help?
27. Remember your purpose in writing
28. What differentiates ordinary writing from writing with style
29. It must get somewhat easier to write, otherwise, how would some authors become so prolific?
30. If writing for publication does not prove to be lucrative, why bother?
31. Why creative work is worthwhile
32. Show respect for your writing. It is about what the readers should know. If this puts a strain on a professional relationship, then so be it.
33. “Why I Write” (Orwell) Sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose.
34. What really makes an academic write?
35. The Writer’s Essential Tools – words and the power to face unpleasant facts.
36. No human activity can sap the strength from body and life from spirit as much as writing in which one doesn’t believe.
37. “Because it was there.” Edmund Hillary. And with this comment he supplied generations with a ready-made and unanswerable defense for any new undertaking even writing.
38. Why we write.
39. Climbing Your Own Mountain
40. Be yourself. Have fun writing.
Please list any other topics you want Dr. Kritsonis to discuss.
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