[Air-l] Trouble with journals

[Jeremy Hunsinger]

> \
> 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 used to think this would be the way to go.  Now, I don't.  There  
are tons of online journals that cover the material aoir would offer,  
and there seems to be a new one every week.   Some are good, some I  
can't judge.   One more online journal, even association related, is  
just online journal and well, I don't think many online journals are  
'flourishing', but then neither
> 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.

I think many online journals and even a few print journals only  
'appear' to be sustainable ventures, but their bottom line is that  
they provide a venue in the tiers of venue and cost significant labor  
to run.

> 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).

In what sense is that sustainable?
>
> 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...
>
Well clearly, kairos the journal goes on the vita, whereas the news  
does not.   but I have to imagine that arguments are made for many  
promotion and tenure committees still about this issue.
>
>
>
> 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).

Yes, I was working on that at the cddc now the future of the book  
institute is working on it too with kathleen and the mediacommons  
project.    when we institutionalize the push toward change outside  
of the system that needs changed, i think it causes reactionary  
effects in the long run.  I've heard some great ideas about the  
possibility of change in journal publishing recently though, and  
perhaps if I take a job somewhere soon, I'll post some more of those  
issues and ideas
>
>
>> 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 think this is 'true', but also becoming rapidly not true in the age  
of 'grinding it out'.  Many factors seem to be coming together that  
encourage faculty to just publish and I am not sure that in the  
masses of information that is being published that we can make the  
claim toward investment in a strong way unless we account for the  
reasons for the investment as intervening variables.

> I
> like Elijah's take on journals as part of the larger activity of a
> discipline,

I think that is a different perspective and a valued one to take, but  
first you need a discipline.  AoIR doesn't have one, and won't likely  
become one I'm guessing.  There is a larger activity in journal  
publishing, I agree, I'm just currently thinking about what I think  
might be thought of as 'journal cruft'


> 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.

Yes, I think the journal publishing for hiring is getting out of  
hand.  I just talked to a student who said that they thought they  
needed 6 published peer reviewed articles to enter the market.  I'm  
still convinced you need one really good one.

The ever increasing requirements for hiring and promotion/tenure are  
to me partially related to the ballooning of publishing venues and  
the equivalence in far too many fields between publishing and  
research performance.  Publishing performance is not research  
performance to me, but I think we have some real issues to deal with  
in order to rebuild the metrics to represent the difference.

Jeremy Hunsinger
Information Ethics Fellow, Center for Information Policy Research,  
School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee  
(www.cipr.uwm.edu)

Words are things; and a small drop of ink, falling like dew upon a  
thought, produces that which makes thousands, perhaps millions,  
think. --Byron