This makes sense if the book does indeed have so many errors. However, the petition doesn’t mention what the errors are; nor does it link to a blog post or similar where the errors are detailed.

Update: Here is an errata PDF  produced by the APA. And here is the APA Style Blog, which I never knew existed. An Inside Higher Ed article has more details on the situation.

I share Jason’s view that such choices by a fairly large number of academics have already changed the academic publishing landscape and stand to change it further moving forward. However, the vast majority of academics continue to use the “traditional” venues for scholarly communication, and appear to be tacitly resistant to the suggestions, and it seems to me that a truly radical change looks unlikely at the present time. And to be honest I suppose I would have to include myself within “the vast majority of academics”. Jason’s suggestions are just that: suggestions to individuals, who will make their own decisions about whether to follow them. I’d like to explore some of the reasons why most of us choose not to, and also some ways in which that situation might change.

The overriding reason is a fairly obvious one: Though our long-term interests may well be served by “getting out of the business”, tenure or promotion may well depend on getting published in the most prestigious venues, and on serving as editors or peer-reviewers for them. If and when a radical shift does take place, not-for-profit venues may well become the most prestigious venues, but, until that happens, most individuals are better served by taking the traditional route, submitting to a publication that in all likelihood is earning profits for Reed Elsevier, Springer, Wiley, or similar—a fact that of course makes such a shift, still less a shift to “born digital scholarly forms” less likely.

However, I think there are a few reasons for optimism and list them below.

1. NOTHING TO LOSE. The first possibility for change lies in faculty who are already at the top of their game, with tenure and full professorships. Once failure to publish in whatever venues are most prestigious ceases to have financial implications, the possibility of professors making the same choices as Jason increases. And as renowned scholars’ work is seen in alternative venues, those venues may start taking on an air of greater respectability, starting a snowball effect. Unfortunately, there are a number of reasons why this doesn’t seem to happen as often as we might like.

An individual senior scholar retiring from “the business” usually just means that someone up-and-coming gets the opportunity to take her place. Academia is full of people whose chief weakness (and charm) is that they don’t really calculate the value of time; we’re willing to spend countless hours on tasks that we think will further our career, or contribute to our own prestige, or simply lead to progress in our field, or even that just seem cool or interesting. Further, the senior scholar, who we are saying has nothing tangible to lose, still has a lot of intangibles at stake. What if people start saying that she is “past it”, assuming that the bright young thing editing the best journal is there simply because he’s better.

The large profits of companies like Reed Elsevier also mean that, if they feel they really need a specific scholar to edit their journal, they can afford to make an exception to their policy and pay the scholar whatever is necessary—which is likely to be nothing like what the work is worth in any commercial sense.

The whole situation is exacerbated by the prevailing ideology that business is good and institutions that don’t operate on mainly commercial lines are naive or misguided and need to import business practices—highly ironic when you consider that the subject of Jason’s essay was unpaid labor. At least until recently, most universities would rather pay vast sums of money to a company like Blackboard to provide a virtual learning environment to students than to pay a much smaller sum to a smaller company to administer and service the installation of an open source system such as Moodle. A pedagogical innovation introduced at no cost or funded from an individual professor’s research budget may receive no credit at institutional level, yet a similar innovation with inflated cost accompanied by external funding wins lots of brownie points. This again is ironic when you consider that many of these external grants have very little long-term benefit to the institution as a whole, generally having to be used for the specific project for which they were won, and thus having a mainly derivative value (showing that you are able to attract external funding).

2. NOTHING TO GAIN. The second possibility for change I would like to mention is the fact that it can be very difficult to get published in the most prestigious journals. The large for-profit publishers may well offer other relevant titles (depending on your field), but if you miss out on the big ones, you may as well go for something not for-profit. I think Japan also offers a version of the nothing-to-gain scenario, as many full-time academic positions still have quasi-tenure, and promotions still depend to a large extent on age, while the salaries of full professors are only marginally higher than those of assistant professors; thus, a scholar spending his time and energy on things that are valued officially may end up gaining very little over the scholar doing things he considers truly valuable to the academy as a whole. Another factor that I guess belongs in the “Nothing to Gain” category is the “hidden costs of publishing in a closed way“: beyond the long turnaround time is the fact that many people are unable to read prestigious journals because of the prohibitive cost.

3. THE ALLURE OF COOL. Another possibility for change lies in one of the very qualities that make academics easy to exploit: the attraction to things that are perceived as interesting or cool. As initiatives like Firefox and Wikipedia continue to enjoy success, and as we hear of more open access journals and similar ventures in our own or other fields, the climate may pass a threshold where the coolness of publishing in alternative venues outweighs the tangible benefits of sticking with the traditional ways. Perhaps even those of us with a lot to lose may just decide without detailed calculation of costs and benefits that open access or non-profit is where it’s at.

As I review these reasons for optimism before posting, they all look a little tenuous, but I think it’s a flurry of little things that causes big changes to take effect. I’d like to close with a concrete suggestion for those exploring alternative publishing venues: Get someone to proofread your articles!

Why is this important? To be honest, it may not be for many people, but the big publishers like to justify their use of free academic labor by pointing to the other costs of publishing, such as printing and proofreading and so on. When scholarship takes place on blogs or other alternative venues, publishers can point to a lack of “quality”, most clearly manifested in superficial problems such as spelling mistakes or grammatical errors such as garden path sentences, mismatched singulars and plurals, and so on. By taking greater care, we can start to create the impression that scholars do care about rigor, not just in the quality of the ideas expressed, but in the precision with which we express them, and that we don’t need the big publishing companies to do the work for us. The companies’ position is further weakened when we notice that quality control is becoming an outmoded concept in large sections of the publishing industry, including some academic journals published by the major companies.

The author of this essay is Richard S. Lavin

(1) Jason Baird Jackson, Getting Yourself Out of the Business in Five Easy Steps (With Updates). October 12, 2009. http://jasonbairdjackson.com/2009/10/12/getting-yourself-out-of-the-business-in-five-easy-steps/


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License

• Commonwealth of Learning – Education for a Digital World

  tags: educational, technology, edutech, education

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here. And here is my (still very short) list of edutech-related books.

I notice that I wrote about Open Access repositories before.

Stephen Downes links to a list of Australian Open Access repositories and asks for a similar thing for Canada, which leads to a comment pointing to a list of such repositories from all over the world. I’m sure there must be some very useful stuff hidden away in some of the repositories listed.

I tried out the Wordle service today, having come across a recommendation in the Edublogger. It gives a graphic display of the most frequently occurring words in any feed or chunk of text. I fed it our WinK student blogs mega-feed.I suspect that it might only be handling recent posts, as words like summer, swim, and beach figure quite prominently. That’s an argument for doing this on a monthly basis.

I recently obtained Dialogue with Bakhtin on Second and Foreign Language Learning, edited by Hall, Vitanova, and Marchenkova. One of the chapters*, written by Karen Braxley, has some interesting things to say about appropriation of genres, and its relationship to plagiarism. The students whose experiences and views form the main subject of the study generally felt that the literature review was the most difficult part of a research paper to write, and one stated that she felt the expectations of the genre caused her to feel as if she were “stealing” others’ ideas:

“Put all the quotes together but not quote, just put in my own words. I feel like I’m creating something I’m not supposed to. I feel like I’m stealing. You know, people say, you have to use your own words, but I have to use someone else’s academic writing pattern anyway, so it’s not really my own words—I’m just copying people anyway.” (p.26)

*Mastering Academic English: International Graduate Students’ Use of Dialogue and Speech Genres to Meet the Writing Demands of Graduate School, pp. 11-32

There are several aspects to saving and using academic references, and the tools that excel at one thing tend not be so good at another. The stages I identify initially are:

1. capture: If you just happen across an interesting reference online, you may not want to spend much time making notes on what you found and where. So the ideal tool has to have bookmarklets or some equally convenient tool to capture the data from the page you’re on and transfer it to your reference store, while linking back to the referring page, with one click.
2. sorting: You need to be able to look through your references and identify a subset useful for a particular purpose. Usually, this will be by tags or keywords, or perhaps by groups or folders.
3. citing/listing: When you’re writing, you need to be able to refer conveniently and unambiguously to your sources, using in-text citations and reference lists.

If I had to choose one of those steps as key, I would go for the first one, as I remember on several occasions reading something and not getting round to recording what it was. CiteULike excels in this respect, having a bookmarklet that can read metadata from Amazon, ScienceDirect, Springer, Oxford Journals, Blackwell Synergy, and others. (With all the mergers and joint ventures going on in publishing, the list keeps changing, as the services often change their URL formats; I’ll probably do a post just on the topic of coverage another day.) When you add data using this bookmarklet, you’re given the opportunity to add tags to aid with later retrieval and sorting; if time is really of the essence, you can skip that step and go back to it later. That leads us to the second stage, sorting references, at which CiteULike is pretty good, allowing you to look at all and only the references with a specific tag, and offering you suggestions when you enter the tags. However, it doesn’t yet have more advanced tag management, allowing you for example to merge two similar tags. When it comes to citing and listing, CiteULike is not so useful by itself; most people would probably want to use a desktop tool such as Bookends, Sente, or Endnote.

Judged by the 3 aspects listed above, it’s difficult to argue that CiteULike is superior to Zotero, an add-in for Firefox. But CiteULike’s extra dimension is sharing, which is something of a killer feature for research groups. CiteULike allows you to create a new group and make it private or public. Once you are a member of a group, you’re asked whenever you add a new reference whether you want to add it to your own collection, your group, or both, so maintaining a group doesn’t really entail any overhead. You can use different tags for the same works in groups and in your own collection. Personal collections and groups alike have RSS feeds, so you can keep track of new additions without visiting the site. And both have blogs, so you can make CiteULike your communications hub if you wish.

I’ll talk about other bibliographic/reference tools in future posts, but I would venture that CiteULike is a good place to start if you don’t yet use any tools, or if so far you’ve only used conventional desktop software.