[Air-l] Trouble with journals

[Douglas Eyman]

Jeremy Hunsinger wrote:
>> \
>> 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

It does seem to be the case that many online journals don't last all 
that long -- so we end up with a few strong ones but not very many. The 
task at hand though (at least for me), is to create more strong ones.

>> 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?

In the sense that we've been publishing 2-3 issues per year for over a 
decade; we have a low acceptance rate; we have a significant 
(international) readership; and it has become far easier to argue that 
an article in Kairos should count the same as an article in a top-tier 
print journal in our field. Also in the sense that it isn't the project 
of just one person -- we have a distributed editorial team that is 
invested in the success of the journal ... so if I decide not to be an 
editor at some point, the journal won't go away because of that decision 
(although that was almost what happened in 1999, which is one of the 
reasons we've worked hard to develop the journal as a sustainable venture).

>
> 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.

In the past this has been true, but at least in my field I've been 
hearing more reports of tenure committees accepting the work published 
in Kairos as equivalent to print works in the top tier journals in our 
field. Over the past ten years, I've written many letters explaining the 
value of the journal (and its readership, peer-review process, and 
acceptance rate) for authors who were going up for T&P, and to my 
knowledge those were all successful missives.


>> 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.

Yeah, I've seen this too -- there's a push to publish more and more 
quickly, but I think that many of us do have an investment in the 
arguments and claims we are forwarding even in the, shall we say, less 
well-developed work that we might be forced to do.


> 
> 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.

That sounds excessive to me, but I'm in a humanities field, so that 
might make a difference. Generally, I think one good peer-reviewed 
article and a few book reviews, as well as evidence of strong teaching 
and the ability work through sustained research projects are more than 
sufficient for my field (rhetoric and writing studies). Given that in my 
experience for both print and online venues, peer-reviewed works take 
about a year to end up getting in print, six articles to enter the 
market would mean that the student should be producing as many as 
possible as quickly as possible, which seems to put production too far 
ahead of learning.


> 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.

I certainly agree with you here! (Although in the humanities at least, 
the number of publishing venues is decreasing, which is even more 
problematic).

Doug