CompPile: Share and Comment

WPA 2008 Roundtable: Mike Palmquist

How can we better document, preserve, protect, and share our learning?

Mike Palmquist

Colorado State University

The short answer – or, more accurately, MY short answer – to this question is to modify our current approaches to scholarly publishing in a way that shifts the costs of production from publishers (both commercial and university presses) to the programs that generate scholarly work.

The presses that publish the majority of work in our field – NCTE, Utah State University Press, Southern Illinois University Press, Lawrence Erlabaum and Associates, and SAGE, to name only a few – are caught between their desire to produce leading scholarly work and their need to generate income sufficient to meet their operating and publishing expenses. It’s a difficult situation, one in which high quality manuscripts are often rejected based not on their scholarly merit but on reasonable estimates of the likelihood that enough readers will purchase a book to cover the costs of producing it.

Similarly, the print journals in our field routinely limit their page lengths to stay within their budget, even when it means rejecting articles that are worthy of publication. On top of this, the editors of many smaller print journals spend more time maintaining subscriber lists and working with printers than soliciting articles and working with authors to enhance the quality of their work.

My short answer is to take what’s best about our current scholarly publication system – peer review of proposals and manuscripts, editorial leadership from established scholars, and so on – and use it as the basis for an open access publication system that takes advantage of online distribution. This model is already proven, through scholarly ventures such as Kairos and the WAC Clearinghouse, but it will take time to expand it so that it encompasses the field as a whole.

I should note before I go on that I have no interest in putting our current scholarly presses or print journals out of business. Nor do I want to see leaders such as Michael Spooner, the director of Utah State University Press, fired in favor of cheap labor outsourced from the English department. To the contrary, I think a key element of the transformation of our scholarly publishing system is preserving the livelihoods of people who have long played a leading role in supporting and disseminating our scholarship.

But how do we do it if we can’t sell books? The core of my approach is what I’ve called a scholarly publishing collaborative. Those of us familiar with scholarly publishing know that much of the work that goes into publishing a book or article is already done by established scholars – the editors of journals and book series and the reviewers who provide them with their advice about whether a particular book or article should be published. The additional work that is currently added by the scholarly presses and print journals includes copy editing, design, production, distribution, and marketing. I am convinced that much of this work can be accomplished by people in our field as well. The key problem is finding the funding to pay for the work currently done by the scholarly presses and journals – or finding sufficient rewards for the people who do this work to reduce or eliminate the costs of paying them.

Imagine a situation in which copyediting is carried out by graduate students in our doctoral programs. Ideally, they’d be paid to do this and, if not, perhaps we could provide them with credit in the form of internships or practica. And, even more ideally, they’d be trained before we turned them loose on a manuscript. Now imagine a situation in which the complexities of designing and publishing work is reduced because we have adopted standard publication designs or turned to content management systems to handle much of the work of preparing scholarly books and articles for readers. There will always be effort expended in design – if not by the editors, then certainly by the authors – if only because we want our work to be readable, effective, and distinctive. But much of the work that currently goes into publishing and distributing print books and articles can be reduced by relying on electronic tools. Finally, imagine the uses of tools such as electronic mailing lists, RSS feeds, and book reviews to announce the availability of new work in the field. Oh, wait, we already have those.

For a number of years, I’ve been involved in a project that has forced me to confront the problems with scholarly publishing. I’ve lived through the objections of Luddites such as the chair of my department, who blithely told me that the book I was holding in my hand was a “book” while the PDF version available on the Web was not – as if the essence of a book were the pulp, ink, and glue that made up its physical form and not the words, ideas, and arguments of its author. I’ve lived through the foolishness of senior scholars, typically acting in their roles as the arbiters of tenure and promotion for younger colleagues, who argued that anything published “online” was suspect (an attitude that is changing only recently – as they retire and as mainstream journals go online). And I’ve lived through the attempts – mostly successful – of mainstream publishers such as Elsevier and SAGE to charge extraordinary amount of money for database and Web access to articles published in “their” journals. As I’ve lived through these events, I’ve had the good fortune to be able to work with scholars who had a clearer vision than most, people who saw value in exploring new strategies for providing access to scholarly work. That project, the WAC Clearinghouse, had a rocky start but has since developed into a successful project. Our work has resulted in an approximation of the model I’ve outlined already, but it falls short in several areas. We are relying, currently, on either sweat equity from our editors or donations to fund our efforts to copy edit and develop our articles and books. And we have a long way to go before we are seen as anything remotely like a “scholarly press” – and that in spite of publishing two journals (soon three) and more than a dozen books.

More recently, I’ve become involved in a related project, the Research Exchange, that extends the idea of sharing our scholarly work using a similar collaborative manner. This project, which builds on Wiki and database technologies, and which links the CompPile and WAC Clearinghouse initiatives, has the potential to create a valuable resource for writers who are not yet ready to publish their work but who nonetheless wish to share it with colleagues.

Along with CompPile, the two projects I’ve described provide some concrete examples of how we might move toward more collaborative, “commercial” free strategies for ensuring access to our scholarly work. I welcome suggestions about how we might work toward developing more project like these and, ultimately, developing the scholarly publishing cooperatives that I believe should be the home of most scholarly work in our field. I hope that those attending this panel, as well as those who view it online, might consider how they might get involved in such ventures.