The document summarizes a podcast from the journal New Media & Society on scholarly publishing. It includes introductions from the editor and five authors/experts. The authors discuss their recent articles in the issue on challenges to open sharing of scholarly work online, the transition from analog to digital scholarly publishing, the historical role of patronage in supporting scholarship, and how digital tools are transforming scholarly labor and communication. The full podcast is available on the New Media & Society website.
1. Slidecast
Scholarly Publishing & the Internet
New Media & Society
Theme Issue, May 2013 (vol. 15, no. 4)
Slidecast of introductory statements
from authors & editors to theme issue;
entire podcast available on NM&S website
SAGE Website: http://nms.sagepub.com/
NM&S Website: http://www.newmediaandsociety.com/
2. Welcome & Introduction
Steve Jones, editor New Media & Society (NM&S)
• Articles in NM&S issue (May 2013, 16:3)
– The big one: The epistemic system break in scholarly monograph
publishing (Phil Pochoda)
– Credit, time, and personality: The human challenges to sharing scholarly
work using Web 2.0 (Sophia Krzys Acord &Diane Harley)
– The intellectual and institutional properties of learning: Historical
reflections on patronage, autonomy, and transaction (John Willinsky &
Johanne Provençal)
– The role of academic publishers in shaping the development of Web 2.0
services for scholarly communication (James Stewart, Rob Procter, Robin
Williams, & Meik Poschen)
NM&S Podcast: Scholarly Publishing 2
3. A Conversation on Scholarly Publishing
Sophia Acord
Associate Director of the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, lecturer in the Department of
Sociology and Criminology & Law, University of Florida
Phil Pochoda
Retired director University of Michigan Press; former associate director University Press of
New England, editorial director of Anchor Books and Dial Press at Doubleday, publisher and editor-in-chief of Prentice-Hall Press
John Willinsky
Professor of Education at Stanford University and of Publishing Studies at Simon Fraser University; director of
the Public Knowledge Project
Nick Jankowski
Associate Researcher at e-Humanities Group of the Royal Netherlands Academy for Arts and Sciences, former co-editor of New Media
& Society
Steve Jones
Professor of Communication at UIC, Research Associate atUIC Electronic Visualization Laboratory
4. Opening statement: Sophia Acord
NM&S article
Credit, time, and personality: The human challenges to sharing scholarly work
using Web 2.0
by Sophia Krzys Acord & Diane Harley
Abstract
Funding bodies, the economics of publishing, and the affordances of Web 2.0 platforms have spurred learned
societies, publishers, and scholars to experiment with new media venues for scholarly communication. Why,
then, have we seen few widespread changes in how scholars disseminate research in most disciplines? Drawing
on qualitative interview data from the Mellon-funded Future of Scholarly Communication Project (2005–2011),
we describe how scholars share their work-in-progress and the disciplinary values driving these practices. We
then discuss credit, time, and personality as significant barriers to change across disciplines, and we explore
these obstacles through an examination of two new paradigms for sharing: open peer review and data sharing.
By situating larger discussions about the future of scholarly communication in the everyday lives of scholars, we
argue that integration with disciplinary cultures will be key to the success of new media initiatives.
5. Opening statement: Phil Pochoda
NM&S article
The big one: The epistemic system break in scholarly monograph publishing
Abstract
A system of scholarly monograph publishing, primarily under the auspices of university presses, coalesced only
50 years ago as part of the final stage of the professionalization of US institutions of higher education. The
resulting analogue publishing system supplied the authorized print monographs that academic institutions
newly required for faculty tenure and promotion. That publishing system – as each of its components – was
founded, stable, identifiable, well ordered, and well policed. As successive financial shocks battered both the
country in general and scholarly publishing in particular, just a decade after its final formation, the analogue
system went into extended decline.
Finally, it is now giving way to a digital scholarly publishing system whose configuration and components are
still obscure and in flux, but whose epistemological bases differ from the analogue system in almost all
important respects: it will be relatively unbounded and stochastic, composed of units that are inherently
amorphous and shape shifting, and marked by contested authorization of diverse content. This digitally driven,
epistemic system shift in scholarly publishing may well be an extended work in progress, since the doomed
analogue system is still fiscally dominant with respect to monographs, and the nascent digital system has not
yet coalesced around a multitude of emerging digital affordances.
6. Opening statement: John Willinsky
NM&S article
The intellectual and institutional properties of learning: Historical reflections on patronage, autonomy,
and transaction
by John Willinsky & Johanne Provencal
Abstract
This paper attempts to cast a little historical light on current debate among scholars and publishers that appears to be
over whether the academic journal is an endlessly exploitable commercial property or a public good to which all have
right. It identifies key patterns in the patronage of medieval monasticism that helped to establish learning as an
economically distinct form of labor, and is part of a larger historical project on the intellectual and institutional
properties of learning in the West. Through the beneficence shown toward monasteries by the nobility and others,
learned nuns and monks were able to operate with a degree of autonomy and trust in their scholarly work. The resulting
manuscripts were directed toward the learning of others and, as such, were copied and circulated widely within the
admittedly narrow confines of the monastic community. These scholarly labors became part of what attracted the
continuing gifts of benefactors, who were prepared to direct a portion of their wealth to this expression
of piety and discipline.
This paper reflects, then, on institutional conditions that proved vital to the advancement of learning in the centuries
leading up to the emergence of the university system in the Late Middle Ages. As such, it forms a point of historical
reflection for the academic community today, as it reconsiders the principles by which research and scholarship should
circulate within the new possibilities posed by the digital era.
8. Opening Statement: Steve Jones
• Digital transformation: evident across academic endeavour
• Changing place of labour in scholarly publishing & in making decisions on
where we concentrate our efforts
• Interest in understanding trends in participation in scholarly conversation:
from occasional informal exchange at annual conference to a conversation
taking place on daily / hourly basis
• Concerns: What has happened to the things we used to do between those
conversations? How has concept of scholarly labour been transformed?
NM&S Podcast: Scholarly Publishing 8
9. NM&S Theme Issue Podcast
The entire podcast of this conversation can be accessed and
listened to at the website of New Media & Society:
http://www.newmediaandsociety.com/
Articles of theme issue, Scholarly publishing and the internet, is
available at: http://nms.sagepub.com/content/15/3.toc