Di Leo, Jeffrey R. "Against Rank." INSIDER HIGHER ED June 21, 2010.

The practice of ranking scholarly journals is widespread in the United States for just about every discipline except those in the humanities. It is one sign of the good health of the humanities that they have not caught rank and brand fever like many of the other disciplines in the American academy. Whereas one can readily find rankings of science or business journals, there is silence when it comes to rankings of humanities journals. Why?

For one thing, unlike in business and the sciences, where accreditation and funding are directly linked to publication in highly-ranked journals, in the humanities there is little accreditation and even less funding. If a business professor in an AACSB accredited program does not publish in highly-ranked journals, she does nothing to help her program stay recognized. However, if comparative literature professors publish in a little-known journal, they are neither putting their program’s accreditation at risk (even though some believe that they are putting their program’s reputation at risk) nor jeopardizing its funding (which is meager to begin with). The only real danger of the comparative literature professor publishing in a lesser-known journal is that it has a lower chance of being read.

Compared to other disciplines, where funding and accreditation are linked to journal rank, publishing work in the journal Comparative Literature (one of the more well-known journals in the field) as opposed to say the South Texas Journal of Comparative Literature (an imaginary little-known journal) is more a matter of preference than of professional necessity. I’ve been a journal editor now for almost 20 years, and in that time, I have only come across one person who refused to publish because he viewed the journal I was editing as not befitting his “stature.”

Another reason for the roaring silence regarding the ranking of humanities journals regards the high level of sub-disciplinary specialization. . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2010/06/21/dileo.

Bartlett, Tom. "Michael Bellesiles Takes Another Shot." CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION August 2, 2010.

Let's say you spend a dozen years researching a book. It's the first in a planned trilogy, the historical opus you consider your life's work. The book is published to gushing reviews ("stunning," "brilliant," a "tour de force") and becomes a national best seller. You win a big prize. You are living every scholar's dream.

Then it starts to crumble. Troubling flaws are found in your acclaimed work. At first you dismiss your critics as cranks, but as the evidence piles up, you struggle to defend yourself. Your admirers desert you. Your publisher drops you. Your big prize is withdrawn, and you're pressured to leave the faculty job you love. For a moment, you had everything, and then—just like that—it all goes away, plus some.

It's a sad story, yet the man who lived it, Michael A. Bellesiles, doesn't get a lot of sympathy. The book he wrote, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (Knopf, 2000), claimed to show that until the Civil War, guns were relatively rare in the United States, an argument that incensed gun-rights advocates. They were giddy over his downfall. Once it became impossible to deny that the work contained serious errors, former supporters felt betrayed and rapidly disassociated themselves from the book and its disgraced author. It was hard to tell who hated him more.

Now, nearly eight years later, Mr. Bellesiles is back. His new book, 1877: America's Year of Living Violently (New Press), isn't a contrarian showstopper; instead, it's an anecdotal history of a famously eventful and profoundly bloody year in American history. It's one of several books Mr. Bellesiles has been working on. After years spent figuring out how to recover and move on, the history professor has returned to writing and is feeling more productive than ever.

But will anyone give Mr. Bellesiles a second chance? And, more to the point, does he even deserve one?

Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/article/Michael-Bellesiles-Takes-An/123751/.

Bauerlein, Mark, et al. "We Must Stop the Avalanche of Low-Quality Research." CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION June 13, 2010.

Everybody agrees that scientific research is indispensable to the nation's health, prosperity, and security. In the many discussions of the value of research, however, one rarely hears any mention of how much publication of the results is best. Indeed, for all the regrets one hears in these hard times of research suffering from financing problems, we shouldn't forget the fact that the last few decades have seen astounding growth in the sheer output of research findings and conclusions. Just consider the raw increase in the number of journals. Using Ulrich's Periodicals Directory, Michael Mabe shows that the number of "refereed academic/scholarly" publications grows at a rate of 3.26 percent per year (i.e., doubles about every 20 years). The main cause: the growth in the number of researchers.

Many people regard this upsurge as a sign of health. They emphasize the remarkable discoveries and breakthroughs of scientific research over the years; they note that in the Times Higher Education's ranking of research universities around the world, campuses in the United States fill six of the top 10 spots. More published output means more discovery, more knowledge, ever-improving enterprise.

If only that were true.

While brilliant and progressive research continues apace here and there, the amount of redundant, inconsequential, and outright poor research has swelled in recent decades, filling countless pages in journals and monographs. Consider this tally from Science two decades ago: Only 45 percent of the articles published in the 4,500 top scientific journals were cited within the first five years after publication. In recent years, the figure seems to have dropped further. In a 2009 article in Online Information Review, Péter Jacsó found that 40.6 percent of the articles published in the top science and social-science journals (the figures do not include the humanities) were cited in the period 2002 to 2006.

As a result, instead of contributing to knowledge in various disciplines, the increasing number of low-cited publications only adds to the bulk of words and numbers to be reviewed. Even if read, many articles that are not cited by anyone would seem to contain little useful information. The avalanche of ignored research has a profoundly damaging effect on the enterprise as a whole. Not only does the uncited work itself require years of field and library or laboratory research. It also requires colleagues to read it and provide feedback, as well as reviewers to evaluate it formally for publication. Then, once it is published, it joins the multitudes of other, related publications that researchers must read and evaluate for relevance to their own work. Reviewer time and energy requirements multiply by the year. The impact strikes at the heart of academe. . . .

Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/article/We-Must-Stop-the-Avalanche-of/65890/.

Harley, Diane, et al. ASSESSING THE FUTURE LANDSCAPE OF SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION. UC, Berkeley: Center for Studies in Higher Education, 2010.

The authors argue that the continued dominance of traditional modes of publication, such as the peer-reviewed journal article and the university press monograph, may force scholars to ignore the "'opportunities' afforded by new technologies, including those falling into the Web 2.0 category." Read the rest by downloading the whole document here: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/0kr8s78v.

Open Access Book Series in Critical and Cultural Theory.

Open Humanities Press (OHP), in collaboration with the University of Michigan Library’s Scholarly Publishing Office (SPO), is launching five new open access book series, edited by senior members of the OHP Editorial Board. The series are:

• Critical Climate Change edited by Tom Cohen and Claire Colebrook
• Global Conversations edited by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
• Liquid Books edited by Gary Hall and Clare Birchall
• New Metaphysics edited by Graham Harman and Bruno Latour
• Unidentified Theoretical Objects edited by Wlad Godzich

Further information is here: http://openhumanitiespress.org/.

Dougherty, Peter J. "A Manifesto for Scholarly Publishing." CHRONICLE June 12, 2009.

While university presses grapple with the economic and technological challenges now affecting how we publish our books — the subject of a thousand and one AAUP conference sessions, e-mail-list debates, and news articles — discussion of what we publish seems to have taken a back seat. And understandably so. Why obsess about content if books as we know them are about to become obsolete in favor of some yet-to-evolve form? Has creative destruction spelled the end of books? I believe quite the opposite. Books — specifically scholarly titles published by university presses and other professional publishers — retain two distinct comparative advantages over other forms of communication in the idea bazaar: First, books remain the most effective technology for organizing and presenting sustained arguments at a relatively general level of discourse and in familiar rhetorical forms — narrative, thematic, philosophical, and polemical — thereby helping to enrich and unify otherwise disparate intellectual conversations. Second, university presses specialize in publishing books containing hard ideas. Hard ideas — whether cliometrics, hermeneutics, deconstruction, or symbolic interactionism — when they are also good ideas, carry powerful residual value in their originality and authority. Think of the University of Illinois Press and its Mathematical Theory of Communication, still in print today. Commercial publishers, except for those who produce scientific and technical books, generally don't traffic in hard ideas. They're too difficult to sell in scalable numbers and quickly. More free-form modes of communication (blogs, wikis, etc.) cannot do justice to hard ideas in their fullness. But we university presses luxuriate in hard ideas. We work the Hegel-Heidegger-Heisenberg circuit. As the Harvard University Press editor Lindsay Waters notes, even when university presses succeed in publishing so-called trade books (as in Charles Taylor's recent hit, A Secular Age), we do so because of the intellectual rigor contained in such books, not in spite of it. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i39/39b01001.htm.

Bacher, Thomas. "Books Aren't Everything." INSIDE HIGHER ED June 30, 2009.

Publishing -- especially university press publishing -- is a tough business. Recently, many presses have come under greater financial pressure or the threat of being closed completely. Much of this is due to the downturn in the economy, which strains state budgets and makes so-called ancillary operations like scholarly publishing expendable. Some in university presses view this as a time to rally around the book as the focal point of scholarship and academic publishing. Part of the argument revolves around university presses as purveyors of hard ideas — ideas that push culture forward. Intellectual rigor, the hallmark of any good university or college, is also the driving force in university press publishing. This rigor is best reflected in full-length discussion of particular subjects. Whatever the merits of books, this argument neglects to address fully the current financial and technological challenges. Disruptive technologies -- the Internet and digital information networks -- have made the printed book less important. Information gatherers have found an abundance of material on their desktops. More important, the psychology of getting information is driven by quick searching and the generation of instantaneous results. Trying to change users’ actions under continual technology improvements is futile. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/06/30/bacher.

Young, Jeffrey R. "Six Lessons One Campus Learned About E-Textbooks." CHRONICLE June 12, 2009.

Northwest Missouri State University nearly became the first public university to deliver all of its textbooks electronically. Last year the institution's tech-happy president, Dean L. Hubbard, bought a Kindle, Amazon's e-book reading device, and liked it so much that he wanted to give every incoming student one. The university already runs an unusual textbook-rental program that buys thousands of printed books for students who pay a flat, per-credit fee. Mr. Hubbard saw in the gadget a way to drastically cut the rental program's annual $800,000 price tag, since e-books generally cost half the price of printed textbooks. Then the university ran a pilot study with the Sony Reader, a device much like the Kindle (Sony was more responsive to the university's calls than Amazon was). University officials learned some sobering lessons about electronic books. Students who got the machines quickly asked for their printed books back because it was so awkward to navigate inside the e-books (though a newer version of the device works more gracefully). Mr. Hubbard still dreams of lighter bookbags and lower costs, but the university is now moving more slowly — and running tests involving several different types of e-books. Publishers are clamoring to be part of the experiment. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i39/39a01801.htm.

Dougherty, Peter. "A Manifesto for Scholarly Publishing." CHRONICLE June 12, 2009.

While university presses grapple with the economic and technological challenges now affecting how we publish our books — the subject of a thousand and one AAUP conference sessions, e-mail-list debates, and news articles — discussion of what we publish seems to have taken a back seat. And understandably so. Why obsess about content if books as we know them are about to become obsolete in favor of some yet-to-evolve form? Has creative destruction spelled the end of books? I believe quite the opposite. Books — specifically scholarly titles published by university presses and other professional publishers — retain two distinct comparative advantages over other forms of communication in the idea bazaar. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i39/39b01001.htm.

"Publisher Appears to Have Accepted Fake Paper From Bogus Center." INSIDE HIGHER EDUCATION June 10, 2009.

It’s an especially bad time for a medical journal to be duped by an author who, say, submits a fake computer-generated research paper from a fake institution he named the Center for Research in Applied Phrenology — or CRAP. And yet that’s exactly what appears to have happened. The deception was the work of Philip M. Davis, a doctoral student in communication at Cornell University who serves as executive editor of the Society for Scholarly Publishing’s Scholarly Kitchen blog. Mr. Davis said he had concocted the plan after receiving numerous “aggressive” unsolicited e-mail messages from Bentham Publishing, which finances its line of 200 open-access scientific journals by charging authors a publication fee. Mr. Davis and the blog’s editor in chief, Kent R. Anderson, submitted two research papers that were created by a computer program at MIT called SCIgen that describes itself as generating random text intended to “maximize amusement, rather than coherence.” One of the papers was rejected by Bentham, and the other — a nonsensical five-page report with footnotes and graphical charts that purported to describe an Internet process called the “Trifling Thamyn” — was accepted after the publisher said it had been peer-reviewed. Mr. Davis reported that an invoice for $800 had been issued by Bentham, without any evidence that the article was actually peer-reviewed. . . . [I thought this sort of thing only happened with so-called Postmodernists and in the Humanities (see the Sokal Hoax)?] Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/news/article/6613/open-source-publisher-is-found-to-have-accepted-fake-paper-from-bogus-center.

Some Interesting Recent Items on Research and Publishing in Academe.

Coates, Ken. "Knowledge Overload." Inside Higher Ed March 23, 2009:

There is a fundamental problem here that needs to be addressed. . . . A significant number of articles, including many published in small circulation periodicals, are never cited by anyone. Think, too, of the conferences papers that fail to attract meaningful audiences, the journals that have tiny circulations and very small readerships, and the fact that most academic books are published in press runs of under 1,000 copies, despite the growth in the number of academics and university and college libraries. Put bluntly, we are researching without having an impact, speaking without being heard and writing without being read. Furthermore, our tenure and promotion procedures reward publication more than they do awareness of the field, thus pushing up conference attendance, and journal and book submissions. New technologies certainly do find things faster and share them more broadly. Digitized materials are readily assembled and moved from producers to libraries to end-users. But there is a major impediment to improvement in this regard: the capacity to read. No one has yet found a system that will truly allow us to assimilate new research more effectively. And so, we read indexes rather than journals, abstracts rather than papers, review essays rather than books. Awash in a sea of academic discourse and analysis, we look desperately for an intellectual life-raft, all the while feverishly seeking to add to the accumulated scholarly wisdom ourselves. It is time to take a very deep breath and to step well back from our current approach to academic dissemination and publication. . . . (http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2009/03/23/coates)

"Farewell to the Printed Monograph." Inside Higher Ed March 23, 2009:

The University of Michigan Press is announcing today that it will shift its scholarly publishing from being primarily a traditional print operation to one that is primarily digital. Within two years, press officials expect well over 50 of the 60-plus monographs that the press publishes each year -- currently in book form -- to be released only in digital editions. Readers will still be able to use print-on-demand systems to produce versions that can be held in their hands, but the press will consider the digital monograph the norm. Many university presses are experimenting with digital publishing, but the Michigan announcement may be the most dramatic to date by a major university press. The shift by Michigan comes at a time that university presses are struggling. With libraries' budgets constrained, many presses have for years been struggling to sell significant numbers of monographs -- which many junior professors need to publish to earn tenure -- and those difficulties have only been exacerbated by the economic downturn. The University of Missouri Press and the State University of New York Press both have announced layoffs in recent months, while Utah State University Press is facing the possibility of a complete elimination of university support. Michigan officials say that their move reflects a belief that it's time to stop trying to make the old economics of scholarly publishing work. "I have been increasingly convinced that the business model based on printed monograph was not merely failing but broken," said Phil Pochoda, director of the Michigan press. "Why try to fight your way through this? Why try to remain in territory you know is doomed? Scholarly presses will be primarily digital in a decade. Why not seize the opportunity to do it now?". . . . (http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/03/23/michigan)

"Unread Monographs, Uninspired Undergrads." Inside Higher Ed March 18, 2009:

Scholarly output rises; undergraduates are disengaged. “This is the real calamity of the research mandate -- 10,000 harried professors forced to labor on disregarded print, and 100,000 unwitting students missing out on rigorous face-to-face learning,” Mark Bauerlein, a professor of English at Emory University, writes in a new paper on relieving research expectations in the humanities. “I think these two trends -- to do more and more research and less academic engagement on the freshman level -- are not unrelated,” Bauerlein said in an interview about “Professors on the Production Line, Students on their Own." The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research released the paper Tuesday. “The incentives are obvious. If you’re a professor whose future depends on the amount of pages you produce, then all those hours you spend talking to freshmen about their majors, about their ideas, about their summer reading … really paying attention to these wayward 18-year-olds who are fresh out of high school, you’re hurting yourself," says Bauerlein, author of The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Penguin, 2008). Bauerlein considers research on student engagement and data on trends in scholarly publishing -- and sales -- in arguing his case. He cites 2008 National Survey of Student Engagement figures showing that 38 percent of first-year students “never” discuss ideas from readings with their instructors outside of class, while 39 percent do "sometimes." Meanwhile, he writes that scholarly book output in literary studies has outpaced growth of the professoriate by a magnitude of three. Scholarly consumption has not kept up accordingly. Average sales for literature and language monographs are in the low to mid-hundreds, Bauerlein writes, and he cites Association of Research Libraries data finding that the number of monographs purchased by research libraries rose just 1 percent between 1986 and 2006. . . . (http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/03/18/production)

"Style: MLA, Updated." Inside Higher Ed March 11, 2009:

Even in citations, print is the default no more. The seventh edition of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, released Tuesday, states that the Modern Language Association no longer recognizes print as the default medium, and suggests that the medium of publication should be included in each works cited entry. Moreover, the MLA has ceased to recommend inclusion of URLs in citing Web-based works – unless the instructor requires it or a reader would likely be unable to locate the source otherwise. “Inclusion of URLs has proved to have limited value… for they often change, can be specific to a subscriber or a session of use, and can be so long and complex that typing them into a browser is cumbersome and prone to transcription errors. Readers are now more likely to find resources on the Web by searching for titles and authors' names than by typing URLs,” states the handbook. . . . (http://www.insidehighered.com/news/focus/teaching_and_learning/the_curriculum/mla)

"Universities Urged to Ensure 'Broadest Possible Access' to Scholarship." Chronicle of Higher Education February 12, 2009:

With digital technologies profoundly changing how researchers produce and share scholarship, universities must take a “much more active role” in disseminating that work. That is the central message of a “call to action” issued jointly today by the Association of Research Libraries, the Association of American Universities, the Coalition for Networked Information, and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges. . . . (http://chronicle.com/news/article/5966/universities-urged-to-ensure-broadest-possible-access-to-scholarship)

Cantor, Paul A. "Is there Intelligent Life on Television?" CLAREMONT REVIEW OF BOOKS (Fall 2008).

If you can tear yourself away from your favorite television shows long enough to wander down to your local bookstore, you will be amazed at all the books you'll find these days—about your favorite television shows. The medium that was supposed to be the archenemy of the book is now giving an unexpected—and welcome—boost to the publishing industry. It is well known that for the genre of literary criticism, publishers are extremely reluctant to bring out what are called monographs—books devoted to a single author or a single work (unless that single author is Shakespeare or the single work is Hamlet). Those works of literary criticism that are published often come out in print runs that number in the hundreds. By contrast, a book devoted to a single television show, The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D'oh! of Homer (2001, published by Open Court and edited by William Irwin, Mark T. Conard, and Aeon J. Skoble), has reached its 22nd printing and its sales number in the hundreds of thousands. Partly inspired by the success of The Simpsons volume, three serious publishing houses—Open Court, Blackwell, and University Press of Kentucky—currently have series on philosophy and popular culture, with volumes devoted to such TV shows as Seinfeld, The X-Files, The Sopranos, South Park, Battlestar Galactica, Family Guy, and 24. These volumes use moments in the shows to illustrate complicated issues in ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. Books from other serious publishers analyze the shows themselves, often using sophisticated critical methodologies originally developed in literary theory. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1568/article_detail.asp#2-2-2009.

Some Interesting Recent Items on Publishing in Academe.

Worsham, Lynn. "What Editors Want." Chronicle of Higher Education September 8, 2008:

Familiarize yourself with the types of articles that a journal publishes and only submit work appropriate for that journal. Pay close attention to the tone and style of work published in the journal and try to duplicate it in your own work. Follow, religiously, the style guide used by the journal. No hybrid styles! Only submit work that you believe to be final, publishable copy. A poorly proofread manuscript wastes your time and mine. Placing your work in the context of articles previously published in the journal is good scholarly practice and helps make your article a better "fit" for the journal. Follow the journal's submission rules — exactly. Develop a healthy attitude toward rejection. You know from the outset that competition is fierce, so maintain a positive attitude. . . .
(Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2008/09/2008090801c.htm)

Brown, Kevin. "What Professors Want from Editors and Peer Reviewers." Inside Higher Ed October 2, 2008:

As professors we are not afraid of a healthy debate about ideas, and we seek honest feedback on our work. However, insults, whether directed at those ideas or at us personally, have no place in the critical debate. We would never allow our students to write essays using some of the responses I have seen from readers, nor would we write those comments on our students’ papers. Instead, we would tell them to focus on the ideas of the critics, as we focus on the ideas our students present in their essays. We put aside our personal feelings about the students and try to truly engage the ideas in and of themselves.
What professors truly want is constructive feedback that will make them better writers, thinkers and researchers. If, especially in our early days, we have somehow overlooked a seminal work (or a work that a reader at least believes is seminal), or have faulty logic, then, please, tell us so, but do so in an effort to make us and, therefore, the discipline, stronger. . . .
(Read the rest here: http://insidehighered.com/views/2008/10/02/brown)

Bauerlein, Mark. "The Future of Humanities Labor." Academe Online (September-October 2008):

“Publish or perish” has long been the formula of academic labor at research universities, but for many humanities professors that imperative has decayed into a simple rule of production. The publish-or-perish model assumed a peer-review process that maintained quality, but more and more it is the bare volume of printed words that counts. When humanities departments and committees and chairpersons examine a professor’s record, all too often they measure the output, not the excellence. And the other duties of mentoring and service slip into secondary requirements. Middling teaching does not much hurt, and great teaching does not help. Administrative work pleases colleagues, but it does not lead to promotions from within or offers from without. Research is all, or rather, research mass eclipses everything else. We have witnessed a steady slide into quantification, evaluation by lines of the vitae containing words in italics.
A friend who teaches at a large midwestern school says that salary increases correlate with book and article publication to the dollar, and he hopes that his next book comes out before year-end recommendations are due. “What if your book isn’t any good?” I ask with a half-smile. “Doesn’t matter,” he replies. When I returned to my own institution after two and a half years of government work and wondered how much credit I would get for pieces appearing during my time away, a dean skipped the quality question and replied, “Well, you have lots of titles, but how many pages do they amount to?” . . .
(Read the rest here: http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2008/SO/Feat/baue.htm)

Çakmak, E. Efe and Mark C. Taylor. "Forget Journals! An Interview." Eurozine December 30, 2008:

Books and journals as we have known them are a thing of the past. Unfortunately, the last to understand this fact are universities and academics. Having said that, the question of how to respond remains to be addressed. In the coming decades, computing will become increasingly distributed and embedded. The movement from the PC to the handheld radicalizes decentralization and changes the nature of communication. People often complain – at least, professors do – that young people do not read anymore. But that is not true. They read all the time but they do not read books or long texts. Mobile technologies scramble everything and make it necessary to recast the terms of analysis. I do not think "transnational" is a useful term here. Again, it smacks of the past and does not help us to understand the reconstitution of political space that has already occurred. Think of everything as a web with constantly shifting nodes, which might be personal, social, economic or biological. The question is where and how to plug into this network.For the most part, presses and journals as they now exist do not serve the interests of intellectual or cultural development. To the contrary, their proliferation is symptomatic of increasing hyper-specialization in which there is more and more about less and less. This is going in the opposite direction of history, in which there is increasing interconnectedness. So my advice is to forget journals – I no longer read any academic journals and I stopped publishing in them years ago. The only function presses and journals serve is to authorize those who write for them among a dwindling group of peers. If ideas are to matter – and I believe it is crucial that they do – we must completely change the way in which they are communicated. . . .
(Read the rest here: http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2008-12-30-mctaylor-en.html)

McLemee, Scott. "Here Comes the Flood." Inside Higher Ed January 21, 2009:

In the January issue of The Journal of Scholarly Publishing, Lindsay Waters, an executive editor at Harvard University Press, tries to imagine a world in which “the well-wrought, slowly gestated essay” has replaced the monograph as the gold standard for scholarship in the humanities. Some of his argument seems familiar. For one thing, Waters tried out an earlier version as a keynote address to the Council of Editors of Learned Journals when they met at MLA in 2007, where I heard it. For another thing, one idea in it came from me: the daydream of a world in which people would be penalized for publishing too much and too early in their careers. This is among the most cherished of my crackpot ideas. By now Waters has doubtless been subjected to some variation of it at lunch, probably more than once. Of course there would be occasions when some wunderkind had so many ideas that brisk and frequent publication became a matter of urgent necessity. But that would be rare. A strictly enforced set of proscriptions would add excitement to things. Picking up a book or journal, you would know that it had involved some risk. Scholars might begin to publish pseudonymously, if they felt it was absolutely urgent to get a piece of research out. The spirit of adventure would probably be good for people’s prose as well. Well, someone has to draw up the floor plans for utopia. I found the page proofs of Waters’s article while trying to clear my desktop before the start of the new administration. (Emphasis on “trying.") The title of the essay is “Slow Writing; or, Getting Off the Book Standard: What Can Journal Editors Do?” Another version ran as a Views piece here at Inside Higher Ed last year — and if you missed it, as I did at the time, I’d recommend a look. . . .
(Read the rest here: http://insidehighered.com/views/2009/01/21/mclemee)

Waters, Lindsay. "A Call for Slow Writing." Inside Higher Ed March 10, 2008:

What will it take to make essays the standard of achievement once again in the scholarly world? This is not where we are: Books are the gold standard for tenure in most of the humanities and some of the social sciences, so much so that journal articles almost don’t even count. As august a figure as Helen Vendler assured me recently that essays could never replace books as a basis for tenuring junior colleagues. So, in departments of English as on Wall Street, counting is all that counts. “It’s the bottom line, stupid.” Countability is the thing whereby you’ll catch the conscience of the dean, as a friend of Hamlet might advise the young Danish assistant professor or the young Shakespeare scholar. Articles don’t make a thumping sound when you drop them on a table the way a body might in Six Feet Under. I have claimed elsewhere (subscription required) that the book-for-tenure system is coming to an end, that it is unsustainable, that its growth has been an obscenity, because it was mindless, because it sought to make something automatic and machine-like play the role that should only be played by the soul. Please excuse my antiquated language: The “soul,” I remind you, is that faculty of the human body whose juices are made to flow by the exercise of judging myself whether something is of merit. In earlier publications I have charged that professors have been seeking to dodge the one activity that is most essential to their own development when they outsource tenure decisions to bureaucracies and counting replaces reading as the central job of tenure committees, because in that situation content goes by the by. Personally, for me as a publisher, the situation that has arisen is sad beyond endurance. I believe the contents of the books I publish matter. I am not selling milk, which does sustain life, but is homogenized by comparison to book. In fact, milk’s the very definition of homogenized. Each of the books I publish is different. . . .
(Read the rest here: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2008/03/10/waters)

Howard, Jennifer. "Google, Publishers, and Authors Settle Huge Lawsuit Over Book-Scanning Project." CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION October 28, 2008.

Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers announced today that they had settled their longstanding legal battle over Google’s mass scanning of books. Under the terms of the deal, Google will pay $125-million to establish a Book Rights Registry, to compensate authors and publishers whose copyrighted books have already been scanned, and to cover legal costs. . . . If approved by a judge, the accord would allow users of Google Book Search in the United States to see the full texts of books they can read only in snippets now. The deal would also have the potential to put millions more out-of-print or hard-to-find titles within the reach of readers and researchers. Institutions would be able to buy subscriptions so that their students and faculty members could have full access to complete texts. All public libraries in the United States would be given free portals for their patrons. (The settlement does not apply to the use of Google Book Search outside the United States.) Users without library or institutional access would pay a fee to preview the full text of a book. Google and the copyright holders—the publishers and authors—would share the proceeds from subscriptions and individual use. Authors and publishers could opt out of the program. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/wiredcampus/article/?id=3423.

Waters, Lindsay. "A Call for Slow Writing." INSIDE HIGHER ED March 10, 2008.

If we want change to happen so that essays become the norm of scholarly publication for tenure for junior people, then we will have to make it happen. It is in our power, but it will not happen unless we make a concerted effort. We need to make changes in our journals, as I described we did with boundary 2 and the Marcus/Sollors. We need to do what we might fear will be dumbing down our publications by insisting upon clearer language set forth in rhythmical sentence. The reason for the persistence of gobbledy-gook is that it’s a lot easier to hide mediocre thinking under the cloak of gobbledy-gook. If we insist upon clarity, we will miss those moments of professional “stuplimity” (to use my dear author Sianne Ngai’s word) caused by the deep unclarity of the sort we get from Zizek. But we’ll win back readers. We want to publish writings people will talk about. The real, dirty secret of academic publishing, as a daring author of a letter to the editor of Nature had the courage to say, is that it’s too easy to get published nowadays: “Let’s admit it. . . one can publish just about anything if one goes low enough down the list of impact factors,” wrote Vladimir Svetlov of the Department of Microbiogology at Ohio State University. There are procedures for refereeing and they make some difference in an international context (this is going to be a bigger and bigger issue in the years to come), but those procedures don’t in and of themselves guarantee anything. In fact, where I hear people talk the most about journals edited according to international standards for refereeing, it often attached to mediocre publications and is a reason for excluding from counting towards one’s record publication in essays it is almost impossible to get into because they have their own, very high standards, like Critical Inquiry. A good journal has a direction, a mission and scholarly goals. The for-profit publishers know how to set up a journal that gets credibility in the most facile way possible. It has become harder to make money from journals since September 11th. The old tricks won’t work, but the authorities in the universities have not adjusted to them and in some way they feed into them, feed into the undermining of scholarly standards. The profit motive undermines true credibility of many scholarly journals. I have been clipping the articles from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and other papers that document the assault on the authority of scholarly journals by a number of for-profit operations. It has become a lot more dangerous to edit a scholarly journal, especially in the medical sciences where there is big money to lose when the claims for a Big Pharma product are contested by a scientist. I have a big sheaf of such essays gathered over the last three years. All this would be bad enough were it not that papers like the Wall Street Journal also run essays by — what is the right word for it? — people like Professor Thomas P. Stossel of the Harvard Medical School saying that scholarly journals “are magazines,” no better than the magazines you find in the grocery store with no more authority than such publications. The pull-quote from the essay reads: “Why are scientific journals regarded with such reverence?” This shameful screed was meant to undermine scholarly journals. To say the least such talk is of no help in the effort I am encouraging to bring more authority back to the scholarly journal. . . . Read the rest here: http://insidehighered.com/views/2008/03/10/waters.