[Air-l] Trouble with journals

[Douglas Eyman]

Jeremy Hunsinger wrote:
>>
>> I think this is dependent upon the journal. I know our editorial board
>> serves as the reviewers who ensure quality content, and not as
>> generators of submissions (we do sometimes publish works produced  
>> by our
>> editorial board of course, and in that case they do generate quality
>> content). But for relatively visible journals, there is no lack of
>> submissions (although the quality does vary).
> 
> the board of editor's role varies, but i don't see them as first line  
> reviewers, but yes everyone can do their own thing.  I tend to think  
> that they pull in submissions and they set the field.  they don't  
> necessarily submit things, they get their friends and colleagues to  
> submit things.   it is a social network function.

I agree that there *is* a social network function, but the editorial 
boards in the humanities journals that I'm familiar with do more of the 
reviewing and mentoring work than the "setting the field" and "pulling 
in submissions" work -- I suspect the difference in our views is 
basically disciplinary though.


>>> My understand of it is from the basis of paid labor and volunteer
>>> labor.  I have to say paid labor is much preferred.

>> Okay I lied -- I want to comment on this part too. Yes, paid labor is
>> preferred, but the economics of production (particularly in academia)
>> would need to significantly change to make this work on a large scale.
>> Most of the knowledge produced by scholars is certainly labor but  
>> it is
>> often unpaid (in direct monetary form)
> 
> what is the solution to this then?   is it to have yet one more  
> journal, or perhaps it is to close many journals?

I would prefer to see more (online) journals and I would like to see 
institutional investment in them (such as AoIR starting an online 
journal). I don't think it's necessary to close any journals because if 
they are sustainable ventures -- whether engaging material capital or 
social/academic capital -- there's no freeing of resources that could be 
used elsewhere. Now, if your argument is that no journals should use 
unpaid labor at all, then a good number of journals wouldn't exist (no 
one at Kairos gets paid (monetarily) for the work of putting the journal 
together -- and it's a heck of a lot of work, from submission, review, 
revision, copy and code editing and making it all work within the 
journal's framework, then publicizing...it's intensive enough work that 
we only publish two issues per year).

>> . However, particularly in
>> academia, social capital can be accrued through volunteer labor, and
>> sometimes that is a better incentive than money by itself (this is not
>> to say that money isn't an incentive of course -- I do work-for-hire
>> stuff for publishers when I can, but I also do a lot of my work for
>> Kairos--unpaid/volunteer work--because it leads to greater value  
>> for me
>> as a member of a particular field).
> 
> I agree.... but this varies also.  I actually tend to think of kairos  
> only as a blog, though there is a journal, but the labor here is  
> really what you construct.


Hmmm...KairosNews (http://www.kairosnews.org) is a kind of collaborative 
blog -- we started that venture because publishing "news" in a bi-annual 
publication didn't seem to fit with our goal of engaging the medium as 
fully as possible for scholarly work. Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, 
Pedagogy, on the other hand, is a fully peer-reviewed online journal 
that publishes scholarship, interviews, and reviews. And this is an 
important distinction for T&P of course -- if tenure review committees 
can't tell the difference between Kairos and KairosNews (which is 
separate from but related to the journal), then we'll need to think 
about how to make the distinctions clearer...



>>> It is likely true that if aoir starts a virtual journal, it will gain
>>> slightly less respect than first monday, but should it start a print
>>> journal, it would likely garner more respect than that esteemed
>>> publication.   The thing is though that only print journals get into
>>> isi, and while scopus and other second tier ranking systems exist,
>>> they don't command the same respect.  paper is king, why?
>> This is an excellent question. At an educational technology conference
>> where the journal editors were concerned with figuring out how to get
>> their journals in to ISI so they'd have an impact factor, I suggested
>> that they come up with alternate forms of judging impact and work to
>> make those accepted in their fields, rather than trying to buy into a
>> system that is already stacked against them (these were mostly print
>> journals).
> 
>> The task at hand, then, becomes, how do
>> we get *institutions* to understand value in this broader sense?
> 
> You do and you don't, this varies across institutions and  
> disciplines.  in 10 years you'll see some shift perhaps, maybe more  
> shift in 15.  You can try to make policies, but we know how that  
> works, you make a policy today and you get a new dept head tomorrow,  
> or new committee next year.  there tends to be a back and forth and  
> in my mind it is less about inclusion than exclusion when the  
> arguments are made.  to me then 'institutions' don't understand,  
> individuals and occasionally disciplines might have an understanding,  
> but we have to be careful about saying that x institution understands  
> the value in any sense, because frequently they do not.

I think that we can push that shift you mention -- we've got a working 
group in the field of computers and writing that is trying to develop 
methods that can highlight the value of electronic publication and new 
media scholarship for the institutions that judge us (in terms of tenure 
and promotion, primarily). In this case, it's a field that is working to 
influence how institutions understand our work, and I think that this 
has some transformative potential that work at individual departments 
can take advantage of (in other words, the work of explicating value 
should certainly be done at both local and global levels, but both 
arenas really need to be engaged).


> I think Ted is right in saying that journals matter for one primary  
> issue, and that is tenure, but really, in the case of tenure is  
> content king?  or is reputation king? and to what extent are they  
> related.  there are bibliometrics already, i'm not sure they show  
> that quality matters, but it depends on your definitions.

I think that journals also matter for getting a job in the first place 
or getting a new one, and also, as Barry noted, as carriers of work in 
which scholars have invested their intellectual energy and curiousity. I 
like Elijah's take on journals as part of the larger activity of a 
discipline, so I think focusing only on tenure and promotion misses some 
of the other reasons that journals work for a field and the ways in 
which this work should not necessarily be evaluated and equated with 
traditional capitalist labor economics.

I do agree that bibliometrics don't directly reference quality and that 
we need better assessment methods (and of course, even employing 
bibliometrics becomes more difficult if online journals aren't in the 
citation databases...)


> if we start from the assumption of a 'good' journal, i think we start  
> falsely.  i think we should start thinking about where you would not  
> recommend a junior faculty publish their work, discourage that first,  
> then get them to aim higher.  i mean publish whatever you can, but  
> there has to be some care, no?  isn't there judgement in relation to  
> quality that faculty need to consider?

Well, sure -- but I'm hoping that our work on Kairos has made it one of 
the recommended places to publish (even though it is an online journal) 
rather than one the junior faculty are discouraged from submitting to. 
But isn't that judgment and advice based on a general consensus of 
whether a journal is 'good' or not?

Doug