[Air-l] print and online journals

[Jonathan Sterne]

Hi All,

I've been reading this discussion with interest as it is a topic about which
I am passionate.  And because I am avoiding a pile of final exams.  I've
been involved with Bad Subjects (we were "open access" before "open access"
http://bad.eserver.org) since 1994 and recently had a nasty runin with Sage
after publishing a piece in New Media and Society (you can read about it at
http://superbon.net/?p=461). There are a few issues to disentangle here, I
think.

1.  The "actual" quality of a journal is not the same thing as its
prestige/standing in a field.  The latter matters for people's tenure
dossiers at many (though not all) institutions; the former matters for all
of us when we are actually doing out work.  The two may or may not be
related.  

2.  Journals require labor.  Not just the reviewing and writing kind, but
also the publishing kind, which is the traditional function of publishers.
If you remove the publisher, you need some kind of funding stream to pay for
the additional resources and labor that a journal uses.  Or you need people
who are willing to work for free.  This is one of the greatest obstacles to
the open-access movement and will doom those many new online journals.
People think that the main costs are eliminated when you eliminate paper.
But almost all those print journals come with some paid staff (often
graduate students) who manage the submission and review process.  Others are
paid for formatting, proofreading and keeping the journal looking good.
Those functions are still important.

3.  In theory, professors aren't working for free.  We draw salaries to do a
combination of research, teaching and service.  When we write for journals
or review for them, we are working on salary.  However, one trick of the
neoliberal university is to redefine the job: reduce the number of
administrative staff in departments or reduce the number of departments and
increase their size; move funding obligations to individual faculty who must
apply for grants to support their students and sometimes even to support
their office supply budgets; increase class size and reduce the number of
TAs; and on and on.  Eliminating paid positions for journals, while linked
to the increased "freeness" of open access, is also linked to the increasing
time crunch in the professor job.  (This also trickles down to students, who
are expected to publish and travel much more, which cuts into the one
activity that is most important in graduate education prior to the
dissertation: reading).  I feel very Capital I, Part I: it's about surplus
labor.

4.  That said, open access is generally a good thing if your goal is to
disseminate what you write.  When the Canadian Journal of Communication went
open access (it survives through dues and -- I think -- also through grants)
their readership shot up.  http://www.cjc-online.ca/  The new International
Journal of Communication (http://ijoc.org) also has funding behind it, and
they've managed to attract some big names in the field, which should
probably offset the online prestige issue, at least over time.

5.  But dissemination is only one goal.  Many journal publishers, like Sage,
are more interested in protecting their profits than facilitating the
circulation of scholars' ideas.  And like it or not, many junior faculty at
least feel they have to be concerned about where they publish and not just
how many people read or use their material.  Which is why we can't just junk
the current journal system without also reworking the tenure system.

6.  For what it's worth, anything long, I prefer to read on paper.

So the answer, to me, is some kind of incrementalism, with a simple, final
goal: open access journals with both online and print components that are
funded well enough not to extract additional free labor from students and
faculty, and which are useful to people -- like assistant professors -- who
will still need to partake of the academic prestige economy for the
forseeable future.

Best,
--J, and now back to grading