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Re: local/distributed vs global/unified archives



Presumably, universities that set up their own IRs think they are going to gain some kind of additional prestige or score additional credit with the public by posting their faculty's work as soon as it is written, or at least as soon as it is peer reviewed. But consider what it is that is actually being posted: work that has not been copyedited.

No one seems to place much importance on copyediting these days, but in my experience as a copyeditor early in my publishing career and as witness to plenty of poor writing as an acquiring editor over a nearly forty-year period, I am baffled by the eagerness of universities, like Harvard most recently, to show off such poor writing.

Let me refer this list to an article titled "Sinners Well Edited" in the latest issue of the Journal of Scholarly Publishing, vol. 39, no. 2 (January 2008), pp. 168-173. The author, Adam A.J. Deville, is an academic himself, but has spent much of his career editing "monograph, anthologies of articles, and thousands of pages of articles" for a journal in the humanities. Here is his verdict based on this experience: "Too much academic prose is...barbaric."

He elaborates: "Senior academics, long tenured at major universities, regularly submit papers that I would never have dared to submit in an undergraduate course, much less a graduate course, and still less to a juried journal of my peers. Too many papers--including, most egregiously those from authors educated or teaching at Oxbridge or Ivy League schools--are rambling, repetitive, insufficiently researched, and badly argued. They ignore basic stylistic guidelines with an impunity that can only be regarded as arrogant. Basic punctuation can be used or withheld at will and whim. Footnotes can be subject to gross abuses--left insouciantly incomplete, used ostentatiously to demonstrate how much reading one has done on irrelevant topics, rendered according to no known style sheet (or a mishmash of several), or containing sources conjured out of thin air. Vast swaths of blatantly relevant literature...are regularly overlooked. Precious jargon and abstruse theory are preferred to clear and straightforward exposition....Sentences of Germanic length give rise to conglomerate paragraphs spasmodically swallowing several topics and running breathlessly on for two or more entire pages. Extraneous tangents destroy any sense of a paper's direction. Scholarly passion can be abruptly set aside for vengeful bouts of puerile point scoring and polemics, then just as abruptly resumed again."

I can vouch for the accuracy of this description from my own copyediting experience, which included massively correcting the footnotes of at least one Harvard senior scholar. I can also testify that a Pulitzer Prize was won by one book through the heroic efforts of another copyeditor on the staff, who did so much as to deserve credit as co-author.

So, why does a Harvard, or any university for that matter, want to expose such poor prose to the world at large, including the public? Among the latter might be, for example, state legislators asked to provide funding for the university, potential donors to capital campaigns, and high school seniors thinking about where to apply to college. Surely, revealing this dirty laundry is not going to help raise the university's esteem in anyone's eyes. Is the imperative to spread knowledge quickly so overwhelming, especially in the humanities, as to outweigh the potential damage--nay, even ridicule--that such exposure could bring? I could see Congress awarding a new "Golden Fleece" prize to the worst of such writing posted in IRs, and it would be subject to endless jibes from our late night show hosts and other satirists like Jon Stewart.

To avoid this consequence, universities like Harvard will need to consider investing substantial money to have the work of its faculty edited before posting. Are they prepared to step up to the plate in that way? Have they even thought about this? I doubt it.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn Stte University Press

Atanu Garai poses an interesting question.  Essentially, I
believe he is asking why the industry is pursuing institutional
repositories when subject-matter repositories and consortial
repositories may have greater upside.  Discipline-based
approaches should resonate with the researchers, as their first
loyalty is to the field.  Consortial-approaches should resonate
with the sponsoring bodies, as they distribute costs.

Why, then, have institutional repositories initiatives have
gotten the lion's share of attention/money/effort/publicity?

Primarily because they are far easier to get up and running.
Repository advocates within a single school should have a good
sense of their institution's idiosyncratic bureaucracy and
decision-making structure.  They are also likely to have a basic
understanding of how to secure the resources (funds, staffing,
hardware, etc.) to get an IR launched.  Extrapolating that
knowledge beyond the school's boundaries is a challenge.  Who
does what work to support a discipline-based repository?  How are
expenses fairly distributed among the partners of a consortial
approach?  In either instance, how is the free-rider problem
minimized?

This is but a quick observation on the subject.  There are
obvious examples of both subject-matter (obligatory arXiv
reference here) and consortial (CDL) successes.  The bottom line,
however, is that launching an IR is a more straightforward and
capturable task for most institutions.

--
Greg Tananbaum
Consulting Services at the Intersection of Technology, Content, & Academia
(510) 295-7504
gtananbaum@gmail.com
http://www.scholarnext.com