RE: Modern Language Association CFP

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

Just so you know where I'm coming from, our Press at Penn State 
was one of the first to engage in serious collaboration with our 
library, and our joint Office of Digital Scholarly Publishing 
was, along with Michigan's, among the very first to experiment 
with "open access" publishing of monographs. The Ithaka Report 
devotes a paragraph to our collaboration as one model to emulate. 
I also drafted the AAUP's Statement on Open Access back in 2007, 
which was intended to be forwarding-looking and to encourage the 
inclusion of monographs in the discussion of open access.

So I think you misunderstand what I mean by questioning whether 
any revolution has occurred yet. I specifically focused on the 
form of the journal article and monograph as largely unchanged 
from the days when print publishing predominated.  While 
experiments have been, and are being undertaken, with other forms 
of scholarly communication, including social media, they have 
hardly yet revolutionized the way scholarly communication is 
mainly conducted, though they have the potential to do so. And 
the dream of people like Robert Darnton for a truly new kind of 
online "book" has yet to be realized in any major, sustainable 
way, though I am very glad the ACLS Humantiies and Gutenberg-e 
projects were undertaken as efforts in that direction. The role 
of digital data in scholarly communication has great potential to 
revolutionize scholarly communication also, but it is still in 
its infancy.

I am hardly opposed to change. I simply get frustrated that, for 
various reasons (including entrenched P&T procedures), it takes 
so long to implement. I am sure there are others on this list who 
feel similar frustration.


>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
>