RE: Modern Language Association CFP

["Michael Zeoli" <mzeoli@ybp.com>]

Mr. Thatcher,

I've been appreciated being able to read your very intelligent 
posts here for years now and have a great deal of respect for 
your learning, contributions to scholarly publishing, and 
experience, but I find that more often than not I disagree with 
your posts because they almost always arrive at the conclusion 
that 'there's nothing to be done.'

With all respect, if you sat where we, the vendors do, and bore 
witness to dramatically shifting sales figures of print across a 
broad number of publishers and, more importantly, to the new 
experiments libraries are demanding that we join them in (and we 
are very pleased at these invitations), your views might change, 
if even just subtly.  This revolution - and it is a revolution - 
is being driven by the masses. Peer review is critical, but the 
model will be shifted despite our inability to see how - and even 
just 'despite us.'

Should we be "still waiting"?  Can we afford to?  Participate or 
perish (and we're likely to perish in any case).

What raises my curiosity is in how far removed university presses 
in particular have become from their academic libraries.  There 
is a great deal of frustration in libraries at the presses' 
slowness to change and lack of interest in collaborative 
experiments with vendors and libraries.

I know that the 'many still waiting' have a different 
understanding from mine, but taking aim at worthwhile discussion, 
while restating the same old argument that 'little has in fact 
changed,' does not advance anyone, and in fact ensures that those 
who adhere to such a narrow view will be left behind.  Change is 
generational and the new generation is just arriving in academe.

Michael Zeoli, Lo Scorbutico

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Sandy Thatcher
Sent: Sunday, January 31, 2010 10:36 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Modern Language Association CFP

What on earth is the subtitle of this session supposed to mean?
The premise of the session seems flawed to begin with: despite
all the technological innovation we have witnessed, the actual
forms of the journal and the monograph have changed very little.
Most journals still package articles into issues and number
groups of issues by an annual volume; the vast majority of
monographs produced, whether in electronic format or print, still
resemble the books we all grew up with. The experiments to try
out different forms of publication, like Gutenberg-e, have
largely failed, in part because promotion and tenure practices
have not changed at all.  E-textbooks have yet to catch on in the
college market, despite the efforts of CourseSmart and other
publishing enterprises. Where is this "revolution" in scholarly
communication?  Many of us are still waiting for it to happen....

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press


>The Paradigm Shift in Scholarly Communication: Will Publications
>Perish?
>
>A Collaborative Session Proposed by the CELJ (Council of Editors
>of Learned Journals)  and the American Library Association Los
>Angeles - MLA Convention- Jan. 6-9, 2011.
>
>The scholarly essay, once the coin of the realm in academia, is
>being transformed by digital technologies, which have enabled
>instant and open access through electronic publishing.  This
>revolution has changed the landscape of every aspect of scholarly
>publishing.  The transformation has been so rapid and so
>dramatic, that there has been very little opportunity to assess,
>adjust, and respond to the impact on scholarly communication.
>The very question about the future viability of learned journals,
>to say nothing of practices such as peer review, confronts us all
>as professionals who rely on the integrity of discourse.  This
>session is an effort to deal with those questions directly and
>initiate a dialogue about how various branches of the scholarly
>community (editors, authors, publishers, and librarians) can
>respond to ongoing and inevitable challenges.
>
>Submit - 1 page proposal for a roundtable exchange to Alan Rauch
>(arauch@uncc.edu) by March 15, 2010.
>
>(Participants MUST be members of the MLA.)
>
>ALAN RAUCH
>President - Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts
>Department of English
>The University of North Carolina at Charlotte
>9201 University City Boulevard
>Charlotte, NC 28223
>
>arauch@uncc.edu
>http://alanrauch.com