Improving the Academic Publishing Process

Mike Munger has an interesting post on academic publishing. We use an archaic system that doesn't work well, so change seems inevitable. That change, he thinks, will be an online and transparent process with reviews and citations, with academic prestige given to those who (pseudonymously) provide high-quality reviews. Go read the whole thing.

I hope things move in this direction. I've worked with large publishing corporations both as a textbook author and as a journal editor, then learned more from our university library how their journal budget works, and this is mindbogglingly and depressingly expensive. Not only that, but authors--especially untenured, who have a short window of publication to keep their jobs--are unhappy with how slow the traditional process is. I would love to see the kind of system that Mike suggests.

I've published in all kinds of ways, which has taught me something. There are the standards: the academic monograph with a university press, edited volume, textbook, peer-review journal article, and the book review. But I've dabbled in many non-peer reviewed avenues, from this blog, my podcast, posts and op-eds elsewhere, tweets, and even an Open Access textbook.

The standards are great in their own way and convey expertise, but increasingly I find them limiting. My hope is that the traditional and the modern can merge more. In the book I am writing (at a glacially slow pace because of my administrative work) I've put chapters up electronically as I finish drafts. I have the privilege to do so, in the sense that I do not "need" the publication do I don't fear intellectual theft and if people don't like what I am writing, it doesn't affect my employment. I wish the publication process could be more innovative, more creative, and integrate podcasts, posts, and the like.

Make it an interactive intellectual process. I find that so much more satisfying. Writing a book, for example, is a lonely enterprise. You sit alone, thinking, staring at the screen, looking things up, and typing. You write some number of words a day and then reread them the next day to see what should be cut or revised. Maybe you have a writing group, but I think that's the exception. We should think of controlled, constructive ways to get your drafts reviewed online, a formal ways of posting bits (even in audio form) online. This is what we do in writing intensive courses at UNC Charlotte--it's an iterative process, with feedback all along the way.