Jeremy Hunsinger wrote:
I think this is dependent upon the journal. I know our editorial board serves as the reviewers who ensure quality content, and not as generators of submissions (we do sometimes publish works produced by our editorial board of course, and in that case they do generate quality content). But for relatively visible journals, there is no lack of submissions (although the quality does vary).
the board of editor's role varies, but i don't see them as first line reviewers, but yes everyone can do their own thing. I tend to think that they pull in submissions and they set the field. they don't necessarily submit things, they get their friends and colleagues to submit things. it is a social network function.
I agree that there *is* a social network function, but the editorial boards in the humanities journals that I'm familiar with do more of the reviewing and mentoring work than the "setting the field" and "pulling in submissions" work -- I suspect the difference in our views is basically disciplinary though.
My understand of it is from the basis of paid labor and volunteer labor. I have to say paid labor is much preferred.
Okay I lied -- I want to comment on this part too. Yes, paid labor is preferred, but the economics of production (particularly in academia) would need to significantly change to make this work on a large scale. Most of the knowledge produced by scholars is certainly labor but it is often unpaid (in direct monetary form)
what is the solution to this then? is it to have yet one more journal, or perhaps it is to close many journals?
I would prefer to see more (online) journals and I would like to see institutional investment in them (such as AoIR starting an online journal). I don't think it's necessary to close any journals because if they are sustainable ventures -- whether engaging material capital or social/academic capital -- there's no freeing of resources that could be used elsewhere. Now, if your argument is that no journals should use unpaid labor at all, then a good number of journals wouldn't exist (no one at Kairos gets paid (monetarily) for the work of putting the journal together -- and it's a heck of a lot of work, from submission, review, revision, copy and code editing and making it all work within the journal's framework, then publicizing...it's intensive enough work that we only publish two issues per year).
. However, particularly in academia, social capital can be accrued through volunteer labor, and sometimes that is a better incentive than money by itself (this is not to say that money isn't an incentive of course -- I do work-for-hire stuff for publishers when I can, but I also do a lot of my work for Kairos--unpaid/volunteer work--because it leads to greater value for me as a member of a particular field).
I agree.... but this varies also. I actually tend to think of kairos only as a blog, though there is a journal, but the labor here is really what you construct.
Hmmm...KairosNews (http://www.kairosnews.org) is a kind of collaborative blog -- we started that venture because publishing "news" in a bi-annual publication didn't seem to fit with our goal of engaging the medium as fully as possible for scholarly work. Kairos: Rhetoric, Technology, Pedagogy, on the other hand, is a fully peer-reviewed online journal that publishes scholarship, interviews, and reviews. And this is an important distinction for T&P of course -- if tenure review committees can't tell the difference between Kairos and KairosNews (which is separate from but related to the journal), then we'll need to think about how to make the distinctions clearer...
It is likely true that if aoir starts a virtual journal, it will gain slightly less respect than first monday, but should it start a print journal, it would likely garner more respect than that esteemed publication. The thing is though that only print journals get into isi, and while scopus and other second tier ranking systems exist, they don't command the same respect. paper is king, why? This is an excellent question. At an educational technology conference where the journal editors were concerned with figuring out how to get their journals in to ISI so they'd have an impact factor, I suggested that they come up with alternate forms of judging impact and work to make those accepted in their fields, rather than trying to buy into a system that is already stacked against them (these were mostly print journals).
The task at hand, then, becomes, how do we get *institutions* to understand value in this broader sense?
You do and you don't, this varies across institutions and disciplines. in 10 years you'll see some shift perhaps, maybe more shift in 15. You can try to make policies, but we know how that works, you make a policy today and you get a new dept head tomorrow, or new committee next year. there tends to be a back and forth and in my mind it is less about inclusion than exclusion when the arguments are made. to me then 'institutions' don't understand, individuals and occasionally disciplines might have an understanding, but we have to be careful about saying that x institution understands the value in any sense, because frequently they do not.
I think that we can push that shift you mention -- we've got a working group in the field of computers and writing that is trying to develop methods that can highlight the value of electronic publication and new media scholarship for the institutions that judge us (in terms of tenure and promotion, primarily). In this case, it's a field that is working to influence how institutions understand our work, and I think that this has some transformative potential that work at individual departments can take advantage of (in other words, the work of explicating value should certainly be done at both local and global levels, but both arenas really need to be engaged).
I think Ted is right in saying that journals matter for one primary issue, and that is tenure, but really, in the case of tenure is content king? or is reputation king? and to what extent are they related. there are bibliometrics already, i'm not sure they show that quality matters, but it depends on your definitions.
I think that journals also matter for getting a job in the first place or getting a new one, and also, as Barry noted, as carriers of work in which scholars have invested their intellectual energy and curiousity. I like Elijah's take on journals as part of the larger activity of a discipline, so I think focusing only on tenure and promotion misses some of the other reasons that journals work for a field and the ways in which this work should not necessarily be evaluated and equated with traditional capitalist labor economics. I do agree that bibliometrics don't directly reference quality and that we need better assessment methods (and of course, even employing bibliometrics becomes more difficult if online journals aren't in the citation databases...)
if we start from the assumption of a 'good' journal, i think we start falsely. i think we should start thinking about where you would not recommend a junior faculty publish their work, discourage that first, then get them to aim higher. i mean publish whatever you can, but there has to be some care, no? isn't there judgement in relation to quality that faculty need to consider?
Well, sure -- but I'm hoping that our work on Kairos has made it one of the recommended places to publish (even though it is an online journal) rather than one the junior faculty are discouraged from submitting to. But isn't that judgment and advice based on a general consensus of whether a journal is 'good' or not? Doug