Re: Modern Language Association CFP

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

The day that happens will indeed be a revolution worth 
celebrating. However, my skepticism is only reinforced by the new 
report on faculty attitudes and values that the Center for 
Studies of Higher Education at UC-Berkeley just released, among 
the findings of which was this:

We found no evidence to suggest that "tech-savvy" young graduate 
students, postdoctoral scholars, or assistant professors are 
bucking traditional publishing practices. In fact, as arguably 
the most vulnerable populations in the scholarly community, one 
would expect them to hew to the norms of their chosen discipline, 
and they do.

And this:

Mechanisms for judging non-text and non-traditional scholarship 
(e.g., databases, cell lines, curated collections, websites, 
etc.) exist in all of the academic institutions we surveyed. 
Additionally, the codification of discipline-specific practices, 
such as performances or architectural designs, is prevalent in 
the arts and some professional schools. In most fields, however, 
a stellar publication record in prestigious peer-reviewed outlets 
usually counts significantly more in advancement decisions.

At some institutions, scholarly contributions such as data 
curation or multimedia websites are considered to be forms of 
"service" or "teaching" in a scholar's academic portfolio, or 
they may receive credit when presented in a peer-reviewed 
publication that "discusses" the resource or data set. Concerns 
about the limitations of the current publication system have led 
to growing interest in the potential of electronic publication to 
extend the usefulness and depth of final publications (e.g., 
multimedia books, CDs, linked data, footnotes, embedded media, 
software, etc.).

The lack of easy-to-use authoring tools, the perceived difficulty 
of evaluating such publications, and the prohibitive financial 
and opportunity costs to produce truly multimedia monographs all 
suggest that experiments with these genres will likely be rare in 
the near term. In fact, tenure and promotion committees generally 
have not seen alternative genres presented in dossiers to date.

Sandy Thatcher


>Sandy:
>
>Like many on this list, I have great respect for your leadership at
>PSU and among university presses, and for your accomplishments in
>innovation.
>
>To address your comment about the subtitle of the session, I think
>it's entirely possible that in the near future some faculty will be
>granted tenure on the basis of work other than formal scholarly
>publications: e.g., data sets, blog posts, multimedia presentations,
>virtual conference presentations, original software programs,
>databases, or algorithms, that are subject to informal peer review
>after their release on the free Web.  I think the first to obtain
>tenure on the basis of such a record will be younger scholars who
>are extremely smart, are extremely skilled at applying technology to
>research questions in their fields, and are excellent and popular
>teachers, and who will refuse to write traditional, formal articles
>and monographs.  I think that the intense competition among colleges
>and universities will result in strong demand for these scholars
>(note that they are likely to be great teachers as well as
>innovative thinkers), and that the tenure system will have to yield
>to them.  I bet there will be a quite small number of these scholars
>at first, but the changes they compel in the tenure standards will
>eventually affect most junior faculty.  I think this vision is
>consistent with the current trend in scholarly communication toward
>shorter, more informal documents and review processes.
>
>Robert C. Richards, Jr., J.D., M.S.L.I.S., M.A.
>
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Sandy Thatcher" <sgt3@psu.edu>
>To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
>Sent: Sunday, January 31, 2010 10:36:07 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
>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