2. Acknowledgement
I do not own the copyright of any of the images in this
presentation. I therefore acknowledge the original copyright
and licensing regime of every image used.
This presentation (excluding the images) is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
License.
5. “I beg you, to have patience with
everything unresolved in your heart and to
try to love the questions themselves as if
they were locked rooms or books written
in a very foreign language. Don’t search
for the answers, which could not be given
to you now, because you would not be
able to live them. And the point is to live
everything. Live the questions now.
Perhaps then, someday far in the future,
you will gradually, without even noticing
it, live your way into the answer.”
6. “In the deepest hour of the night,
confess to yourself that you would
die if you were forbidden to write.
And look deep into your heart
where it spreads its roots, the
answer, and ask yourself, must I
write?”
7. • Why do we do/want to do research/publish?
• What changes/will change as a result of our
research/publishing?
• Who do we answer to when we do our research/publish?
Who will hold us to account for our questions, our processes
and our findings?
• What will happen if we don’t do research/publish?
Before we consider alternatives to
conventional publishing, let us consider the
following:
8. What are the alternatives to conventional
academic publishing? What should we
consider when going ‘alternative’?
• Where does this question come from?
• What are the rules in going ‘alternative’?
• What are the costs – financial, reputation, and
risk?
• What are the benefits?
• What are the links (if any) between conventional
forms of publication and alternative forms?
• How do I choose? How do I find my voice?
9. Why should we even think about
alternatives in sharing our thinking,
research and praxis?
• Being a scholar in a networked world – abundance, risk
and networks
• The beauty (and danger) of the immediacy of living
“onlife”
• Brutal abuse by traditional systems of academic publishing
• Alternative forms of publishing may support the more
conventional forms of sharing/peer review
• The nature of scholarship and the sharing of
research/thinking/praxis has changed
• Being a scholar has changed
10. “Hypatia[a] (born c. 350–370; died 415 AD) was a
Hellenistic Neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer, and
mathematician, who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, then
part of the Eastern Roman Empire. She was a
prominent thinker of the Neoplatonic school in
Alexandria, where she taught philosophy and
astronomy. She is the first female mathematician
whose life is reasonably well recorded”
Source credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia
Central to the question of academic
publishing, is the issue of scholarship…
When is someone a scholar?
How do we know?
11. On being a scholar
• Having academic expertise in a particular field or
fields/disciplines
• Recognition of the expertise by institutions (e.g.
awarding of degrees/appointment)
• Acknowledgement by the gatekeepers in the
discipline/field of inquiry
• Recognition by peers
• Maintaining and expanding expertise
• Dissemination of thinking/research/praxis
• Being a gatekeeper/peer
• Developing and recognising expertise of others
13. On being a scholar and the rationale
for publishing
• Having academic expertise in a particular field or
fields/disciplines
• Recognition of the expertise by institutions (awarding of
degrees)
• Recognition by the gatekeepers in the discipline/field of
inquiry
• Recognition by peers
• Maintaining and expanding expertise
• Dissemination of thinking/praxis
• Being a gatekeeper/peer
• Developing and recognising expertise
15. “Conventional”
publishing in higher
education
• Monographs
• Edited volumes
• Peer-reviewed articles in
journals on IBSS, ISI,
Norwegian, Scopus
“Unconventional”
publishing in higher
education
• Blogs
• Tweets
• Opinion pieces
• Letters to the editor
• Articles in magazines
16. Soccer Rugby
Baseball Hockey
What are the rules?
Image credit – https://pixabay.com/en/soccer-field-
diagram-green-307046/
Image credit –
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rugby_field.png
Image credit –
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Baseball_diamond.
svg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Field_hockey
_offside_1987_rule.png
17. ‘What’ needs to be shared?
How urgent is the findings/message?
‘What’ are the
reputational
benefits and
risks?
How accessible will/should it
be?
Who will be the peer
reviewers and how will peer
review happen/impact?
Who are the gatekeepers?
Who is the intended audience
and why?
‘Where’/’how’
does it fit into
my career –
short-term/
longer term?
What are the rules?
Going conventional,
alternative or somewhere
in-between?
18. Making these choices require that
we understand the ‘field’
Image credit: http://www.basicknowledge101.com/subjects/reality.html
29. Academic disciplines in our time have
been subjected to the principle that more
productivity is better, and a lot more is
better than better, giving rise to a kind of
productivity syndrome.
Quantity is so much easier to evaluate.
Professor X has 18 articles, 12 book
reviews, 21 conference presentations, two
monographs, and an edited volume. The
university’s T&P committee is going to be
impressed. End of story.
Source credit: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Higher-Ed-s-Real/243867
30. “Academic culture — like American culture
more broadly — has become
monomaniacally infatuated with
productivity as the marker of a successful
life, and quantitative measures have
become central to determining what
counts as success. Although academics can
be found resisting (mildly) the metrics of
productivity foisted on them by
administrators, they also enthusiastically
measure themselves.”
Source credit: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Higher-Ed-s-Real/243867
32. “Academic labor and performance anxiety”: where the “shame
[of not performing] becomes a central tenet of everyday
academic life” (Richard Hall, 2014a, par. 2)
Academics “overwork because the current culture in
universities is brutally and deliberately invested in shaming
those who don’t compete effectively…” in stark contrast with
the heroic few who do, somehow, meet the shifting goalposts
(Kate Bowles, 2014, par. 7-8)
Image credits: http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Karloff
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Superman_S_symbol.svg
You are
either /or
35. Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/urban-urbex-lostplace-abandoned-628269/
When numbers are used alone, “when the world is
reduced to numbers, a measure, to what is calculable
and laid before us; when humans are summed,
aggregated and accounted for; then much remains
forgotten, unsaid, concealed”
(Elden, 2006, in Beer, 2016, pp. 59-60).
38. Networks do not only include but
also exclude
While not everyone is
included/connected,
everyone is affected
See Castells, M. (2009) Communication power .Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press
Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/photos/locked/
39. Don’t underestimate the tribe
Image credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ontario_Historical_Society,_Ottawa,_1914.jpg
40. Scholarship in traditional networks
• Old (white) boys networks, glass ceilings
• Disciplinary connections/gatekeeping/journals
• Institutional reputation and networks
• Legacy privileges/drawbacks – race, gender, class,
country of birth
• The role of individual reputation (as result of the
previous three)
• Social gatherings (by invitation only), conferences
(depending on funding and gatekeeping)
• Water fountain meetings, cafeteria discussions, bus and
train conversations
42. Connect to the “Connectors”:
The “Connectors” have the
ability to span different
worlds which is a
combination of their
personality, curiosity, self-
confidence, sociability and
energy. These people not only
have feet in different worlds,
but the ability to bring these
worlds together (Gladwell
2000, pp. 49-51).
74. THANK YOU
Paul Prinsloo (Prof)
Research Professor in Open Distance Learning (ODL)
College of Economic and Management Sciences,
Samuel Pauw Building, Office 5-21, P.O. Box 392
Unisa, 0003, Republic of South Africa
T: +27 (0) 12 433 4719 (office)
prinsp@unisa.ac.za
Skype: paul.prinsloo59
Personal blog:
http://opendistanceteachingandlearning.wordpress.com
Twitter profile: @14prinsp