How relevant is the peer review process in the digital age? In our fast-paced world of instant Twitter, innumerable and often-illuminating blogs, comprehensive wikis, and insightful electronic magazines, does peer review still have a place? Does it help imbue scholarly e-books and e-journals with resonance, heighten quality, and encourage objectivity?

Robert Townsend’s article about the Future of Peer Review on the American Historical Association’s web site is well worth reading for its thoughtful analysis of both the challenges of traditional peer review in the digital context, as well as some goals for perfecting the system.

It’s a long, fairly grueling process to get a peer-reviewed article published in a scholarly journal, even in a predominantly e-journal. I’ve been thinking about this as I completed the process for my article, The Progression of Digital Publishing: Innovation and the E-volution of E-books. The article touches on peer review in the context of an ongoing, digital resource and regarding digital textbooks, but it’s not the subject of the article, which focuses on innovative electronic texts. At the end of the publication cycle, however, I started to wonder about the balance between the rigor of the process and its pace. I wrote the article in November 2009, expanding on presentations I’d given in October. After review, revisions, and approval, I submitted it to the International Journal of the Book in mid-January, whence it journeyed merrily through double-blind peer review (contributors also volunteer to be a reviewer for the journal), a bit of revision and updating in April (Apple’s iPad was now a reality instead of a rumor), typesetting, and finally, in June, publication. Toward the end, I must confess, I was a bit winded, wondering if proceedings would ever come to an end (having worked with hundreds of authors over the years, I know I’m not alone in this feeling). Seven months, more or less, which is fairly rapid for a journal, so I’m not complaining.

This article isn’t about a new scientific breakthrough or method, obviously, or a gathering and manipulation of data, it’s nothing particularly controversial. I am not a professor, so the self-interest of tenure, which may steer some scholars onto the peer-review highway, is not at all applicable in my case. Both this article and my previous article on the subject were conceived and executed primarily for intellectual exercise. Peer review, one expects, contributes to accuracy, rigor, and, I suppose, legitimacy, and these motivated this scholarly pursuit.

Michael S. Gazzaniga, in Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique, says “to separate the verifiable from the nonverifiable is a conscious, tedious process that most people are unwilling or unable to do. It takes energy and perseverance and training. It can be counterintuitive. It is called analytical thinking. It is not common and is difficult to do. It can even be expensive. It is what science is all about. It is uniquely human.” (p. 273-274).

Peer review is not flawless, nor is research. For an example, Jim Lindgren’s Yale Law Review article, Fall from Grace: Arming America and the Bellesiles Scandal, gives an often quite fascinating account of the twists and turns of the academic scandal involving Michael A. Bellesiles’ book on the history of gun control in America. Bellesiles’ book was awarded the prestigious Bancroft Prize, subsequently rescinded, for the first time in the award’s history, after flaws, and perhaps even fraud, in the author’s methodology came to light. Lindgren mentions that the entire scandal may have been avoided through better editing (and presumably better peer review) at the Journal of American History, which published Bellesiles’ original article on the subject. The book was published by Knopf, which while assuredly not an academic publisher, one would expect to nevertheless have an interest in publishing accurate books.

A paper by the President of the RAND Corporation, James A. Thomson, about the increasing polarization in our society, goes beyond peer review to the concept of bulletproofing: “By far the most important is the quality assurance (QA) process, especially the concept of ‘bulletproofing.’ To some of us who were trained to believe that the most important part of the QA process is the scientific peer review, this can sometimes be an alien concept. Of course, the scientific peer review is the sine qua non; the science must speak. But if controversy lurks, bulletproofing is essential. This involves thinking in advance about the political lines of attack against the results and then identifying individuals who might come from those political quarters. Such individuals should be brought into the review process.”

Dan Cohen, in a blog post about the social contract of scholarly publishing, posits that an exchange of analysis for attention, as it were, is central to academic value and reward. He underscores how the supply side of this social contract—writing, peer review, editing, publishing—and the demand side—the space for attention and consumption—must be aligned, and wonders if these may be slipping out of gear in the digital age.

What about a Threadless-style peer-review system—treating academic articles like crowd-sourced designed, limited edition t-shirts? (Threadless, in my opinion, has produced one of the web’s most successful and innovative mashups of creativity, social media, and e-commerce.) Is an e-book model a la Smashwords feasible for academic monographs and articles?

There are already numerous examples. Rice University’s Connexions, for example, is a digital textbook platform that accepts everything. Their system of peer review is the philosophy that the cream rises to the top, that better modules will be rated higher and therefore get more use, a self-reinforcing system. MERLOT (Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching), is a community designed to share peer-reviewed online teaching and learning materials.

Brian Whitworth and Rob Friedman lay out in a First Monday article the tenents of an online Knowledge Exchange System that could reinvent academic publishing with a system that accepts all, reviews all, and publishes all. This system would allow for both anonymous expert ratings as well as general reader ratings in order to increase both dissemination and discrimination, both rigor and relevance. User ratings could be broken down by criteria like relevance, rigor, writing, comprehensiveness, logical flow and originality.

These new systems of scholarly publication, peer review, and dissemination won’t come easily, necessarily—the central question remains as always “who pays for this?” not to mention “who has the time for this?” Yet a hallmark of this digital age is experimentation, exploration, and upheaval.

We live in interesting times.

When Paul Baran conjured out of the haze of sunny Santa Monica summer afternoons the concept of “distributed communications”—later called packet switching—did he imagine that his theory, born out of the Cold War as a means to help survive a nuclear attack, would bring new connectivity both high and low, that the desire to hurtle bits through the ether with a “go/no-go” message would somehow lead inevitably to email, instant messages, and ‘tweets, to Facebook and LinkedIn, to new tools that change the way we learn, create, and collaborate?

I’m looking forward to three packed days of learning and discussion at O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference. So many great sessions, workshops, and keynotes are scheduled on an impressive variety of topics, not to mention a social event here and there. I don’t know when I’ll sleep!

As a prelude to the TOC conference, I posed some questions to my panelists for the TOC blog, on the prospects for e-book devices in education, the digital divide, open access, and reconciling the push for lower textbook prices with the desire for multimedia and interactive functionality (Full post).

I’ll be moderating a panel on the Future of Digital Textbooks with Eric Frank, Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer, Flat World Knowledge; Frank Lyman, Executive Vice President of CourseSmart LLC; Nicholas Smith, Chief Operating Officer, Agile Mind; and Neeru Khosla, Co-Founder and Executive Director of CK-12 Foundation. The format will be Q&A, but our presentation slides are available now.

We’ll be discussing how emerging technologies are impacting teaching, learning, and creative expression in K-12, higher education, and professional learning. This is a subject that has interested me for many years. In my first year after college, I was teaching Spanish to K-6 students at a private elementary school in Santa Cruz. The 4^th and 5^th graders were wowed by “The Oregon Trail”—an early interactive computer game played on the Apple II. Two things struck me immediately: the students didn’t think of it as learning, for them it was a fun game, and they had no problems with the technology; and the teachers were completely unnerved by having to learn how to operate the computer. Fast forward a decade later, in the mid-90s I was developing and marketing products featuring pioneers like David Thornburg, Alan November, Jamie McKenzie, Michelle Swanson, and Skip Stahl, training teachers on how to use technology in the classroom. Schools and teachers then struggled with many challenges: how to employ new technologies and teaching strategies with an extremely limited time allotted for professional development; how to implement new technologies across the curriculum to improve student performance and make projects more meaningful; how to afford new technologies at school and reconcile differences among students’ ability to access technology in the home.

Always, it seems, technology is on the verge of promising a breakthrough in teaching and learning. And while it appears we may again be verging on a breakthrough, with new products like the iPad, the Kindle DX, and smart-phones promising to change the way we teach, learn, create, and collaborate, and with forward-thinking companies like CK-12, Flat World Knowledge, CourseSmart, and Agile Mind helping to drive change, the challenges described above remain significant.

On June 20 of 2009, I gave what I consider my most significant speech to date, at the Association of American University Presses’ annual meeting, entitled “Scholarly Publishing in the New Era of Scarcity.”  It was the last presentation in the last Plenary session of the meeting, and allowed me to talk about the two issues that matter most to me:

Saving scholarly publishing, and saving civilization.

In 16 minutes.

The full text, and the YouTube videos, are at:

http://www.nap.edu/staff/mjensen/scarcity.html

or you can watch Part I (missing my preface, that’s available in the full text):

and Part II:

A few segments from the text:

The realities I see ahead of us, in the next ten to fifteen years, militate for some radical strategic choices, in the next three years.

I believe that we must shift our business models — publicly, transparently, intentionally, thoughtfully, but radically — to a digital one, with open access as the backbone of scholarly publishing. We must do this to survive a tremendously turbulent next decade, and to ensure that our mission, and its survival, continues to be fulfilled.

…

But CO2 does something much worse. While we bicker with global-warming deniers, the ocean is getting more acidic. Excess CO2 plus ocean produces carbonic acid. Ocean acidification is a clear and present danger. A slight rise in acidity dramatically affects calcium-carbonate-based lifeforms, like most plankton, shellfish, and coral, the cornerstones of the ocean biosphere.

If humans do not drastically reduce our CO2 output in the next ten years, our rich, biodiverse ocean will become an acidic, jellyfish- and algae-filled cesspool, in our lifetimes.

If, over the next decade, humans continue doing what we have done for the last fifty years, then we will construct our own hell, and our grandchildren will curse our names.

…

Within the context of a world in crisis, we *must* demonstrate that we’re radically rethinking our relationship to the future. We must demonstrate that we are part of the solution, not part of the problem. We must seize initiative now, and start making changes as fast as we can.

Open access + digital publishing will help get us to a sustainable world, and keep us in the mix.

Imagine, in five years, a different income stream where 50% of your income comes from some kind of value-added digital sales, and 25% from print-on-demand, and 25% through institutional support of fixed costs. Dissemination and societal impact will increase 50x, because the material is openly available and promoted online.

With that kind of documented dissemination of scholarly value and University brand, to the broadest public, no dean would be motivated to cut the support that enables scholarship to thrive online. And, our CO2 production will be radically decreased.

The presentation was controversial, and raised both some hackles and some hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck. Far more congratulated me than condemned my analysis — and many said they were rethinking strategy in light of what I showed them.

It was risky, but knowing what I’ve learned over the last two years doing the Apocadocs project, it was a risk I needed to take. Time’s a-wasting.

I’ve been interested to see the  responses, and this post can become a response locale — I’m linking back here from the fulltext, in hopes that some discussion can ensue.

I’ve been reading a couple of things lately that could restore, if you were in need of such a thing, your faith in print, and in the vitality of scholarship and publishing in the digital age. The publishing industry is in crisis—well, nearly everything these days seems to be in crisis—but you would hardly realize that from reading these two publications.

The first, Europe Between Oceans, by the renowned archaeologist Barry Cunliffe, is a masterful work, combining history, archaeology, geography, anthropology, and a smorgasbord of other disciplines in explaining the transformation of human culture and society in Europe from prehistoric to the dawn of the modern, encompassing a ten thousand year period from 9,000 B.C. to 1,000 A.D. Cunliffe writes with erudition and clarity, never oversimplifying, but without the befuddling writing designed more to impressed than to illuminate that is so common in academic circles. The publisher, Yale University Press, is clearly at the top of its game here: the layout is splendid, with plenty of pleasing white space, yet full of helpful maps, photos, and charts. Europe Between Oceans covers much familiar ground, but drawing from the latest research in a multitude of disciplines it provides strikingly new insights.

The second is Lapham’s Quarterly, a literary journal edited and published by former Harper’s editor Lewis H. Lapham. I wasn’t enough in the cognoscenti, I’m sorry to say, to get on board for the first issue, nevertheless I’d learned of the journal’s existence by the second issue, had subscribed by the third, and purchased a gift subscription for my parents by the fourth. Published quarterly, each issue covers a theme—thus far War, Money, Nature, Learning, Eros, and the current issue, Crimes and Punishments. Lapham mixes and mashes genres and primary sources in his investigation of each theme, from ancient to modern, employing excerpts of stories, essays, poetry, art, charts, and photography. Imagine Herodotus and Lazarillo de Tormes slapping high-fives to Franz Kafka and Raymond Chandler because they made it into the latest issue. Reading Lapham’s is like being an observer to the musings of an accomplished collector gripped by bibliomancy during an extended weekend visit to his abode.

Both of these works, at the apex of modern publishing, might cause one to wonder how they could possibly be improved upon in electronic form. Surely they prove the point that e-books could never fully replace print. And yet, and yet…

Jumping just a bit into the future, let’s grab our podkinfliptop, with its color touch screen and multimedia capabilities, and run. Placing the cursor next to an unfamiliar term in Cunliffe’s book, like Bosphorus, brings up its definition. Clicking on the place-name of Tyre deploys Google Earth. Maps of migrations or empires, instead of static, depict the spread and flow over time. Instead of a single picture depicting the ancient city of Miletos, or a bronze warrior god from the 12th century, a gallery of photos is embedded in the e-text. Links lead to further scholarship or modules about topics of particular interest to the reader. Cunliffe’s tome is a big book, nearly too hefty to curl up in bed with comfortably for a nice reading session, but in its e-format it poses no problem on the podkinfliptop, which you read while touring the Aegean region with your family. At the ruins of the Byzantine fortress in Anadolu Kavagi, you take a striking photo and instantly upload the photo to the book’s gallery.

With Lapham’s, the electronic version might explore the theme over the course of a few months with a daily or weekly segment, loaded automatically onto the device, instead of a quarterly publication. Links abound between and among volumes; users add links to other content in order to further illuminate the theme, sharing the links with other users. The podkinfliptop version includes old newsreels, film segments, Billie Holiday singing “Strange Fruit” or Johnny Cash at Folsom, a poem read by its author.

All of these capabilities exist today, in one form or another. A central question is, of course, who pays for all of this? I’m not optimistic that many publishers can, with a positive ROI, create both a beautifully laid out print version and a link- and multimedia-rich electronic version, but nor is it yet clear that many electronic-only publications are financially viable. As I point out in my recent article, larger publishers like Cengage or Pearson certainly have the resources to create resource-rich electronic publications for higher education, and a number of non-profit initiatives, like Connexions or Yale Books Unbound, are underway. But while readers may not balk at forking over $35 for the beautiful hardcover Europe Between the Oceans, customers seem to expect a lower price for electronic versions. Perhaps instead of selling 20,000 copies at $30.00 each of the hardcover, and dealing with returns, YUP could sell 250,000 copies at $10.00 of the e-version. Lapham’s could get a larger number of subscribers at a lower price, or offer it free under a government grant, or corporate or foundation sponsorship. The “publisher” provides the platform and content, encouraging the community to contribute additional links and resources, building on the “book.” I have to remain optimistic that this type of publishing can survive and prosper in the digital age. The University of Michigan Press seems to be betting on it.

A few days ago I was riding home on my Xootr push scooter—yes, it’s a tough commute—when an old Ford Falcon pulled up next to me at the light. I noticed the undercarriage splotched with rust, the tires baring their sole, but what struck me most was the backseat, brimming with books, magazines, and yellowed newspapers, the entire car sagging from its gallant effort. A mobile library, indeed, though best of luck finding a book at the bottom of that pile. I’m no stranger to messy cars, in fact, I once found a certificate of appreciation from the local 4-H to my father, from 1974, when I was borrowing my Dad’s car during a trip home in 1999–and it was in the third car he’d had in those twenty-five years. But I digress.

What also stuck me, besides the exhaust, while wondering at that car in the intersection, was that the iPod Touch in my pocket had at least thirty books on it, even though I’d had it for about a month. Say what you want about e-books, it’s not the same as paper, right, but try carrying 100 books in your pocket, or in your car, let alone the 1.5 million that Google is already providing for mobile devices.

I enjoy learning about technology, and take a keen interest in how it affects learning, networks, and society. Still, I’m not really much of a gadget guy, that is, I don’t feel I have to go buy every gadget that comes along. No video game consoles in my house, an ancient yet hardy stereo, no cable TV. My DJing rig is laughable. Traveling around South America, to use one example, tends to wean one from over-consumerist tendencies, not to mention thinking seriously about the condition of the planet and some of its possible futures.

So it’s been with both a sense of wonder and a bit of trepidation, perhaps, that I’ve been able to start playing around with both the iPod Touch and Amazon’s new Kindle 2. I remember reading about a study that tracked over time people’s attitudes about what they thought were necessities, versus what they considered luxuries. Things like cell-phones, iPods, and flat screens keep getting added to the list of necessities, but nothing ever comes off.

The iPhone and Touch portend much more the future than the Kindle. While the Kindle works great as a reading device, accomplishing that feat with panache, I don’t think that enough people really want a reading device, and a separate talking device, and a writing device, and so on. Do I want to carry around all that stuff with me, or take four or five devices on a trip? The Kindle will indubitably evolve more toward the direction of the iPhone than the reverse. Doubtlessly Apple, Amazon, Sony et al. have in mind to create a device slightly bigger than the iPod Touch that combines facets of the cell phone, iPod, Kindle, Flip camera, and laptop. Let’s call it a Podkinfliptop. There is, of course, more than a little speculation already that Apple is on the verge of such a release. Its educational potential, in particular, are enormous. With thirty million iPhone/iPod Touches in use already, and the huge success of the App store, Apple seems natural to expand its dominance with a netbook type device, but many others will follow.

On the surface, one wouldn’t immediately think of the t-shirt as a great model for web collaboration and community, often referred to, either fondly or derisively, as Web 2.0. But Threadless has managed to carve out an interesting niche, uniting designers, fans of great design, and t-shirt aficionados (many members are undoubtedly all three). For anyone unfamiliar with the site: designers submit designs for t-shirts, which are scored and ranked by members, and each week the site releases winning designs as limited edition t-shirts. The site provides ample means and incentives to participate: members post photos of themselves in Threadless shirts (for points), designers and members blog, comment, etc., Threadless sponsors contests and uses other means to attract and maintain interest. All in order to produce, and sell, t-shirts. (And now, naturally, spin-off products, like wall art, prints, and other merchandise.)

This makes me wonder how much of this model is applicable to publishing. There are already some entries into this, such as Harper Collins’ Authonomy, Smashwords, CompletelyNovel, Amazon’s CreateSpace. I haven’t seen any yet, though, that quite come close to the level of participation, excitement, and cool/hip level as Threadless. But I think it’s possible, and even probable, that someone will, sooner rather than later.

In the academic space, I find that Common Ground publishing, which runs the International Journal of the Book, has an interesting business model and process. They run ~15 conferences, on subjects in the humanities and science, each with an associated journal. When you present at one of their conferences, as I did in October, you receive a year’s access to the associated journal, and you can submit an academic paper to the journal. When you submit your paper through the journal’s peer review process, you also agree to peer review two to three papers for the journal. Common Ground also is able to implement a striking balance between technology (everything is submitted and approved online) and personal touch (you always have a sense that there are real people involved). They also encourage and offer opportunities for collaboration and participation.

My article on “Innovation and the Future of e-Books” was recently published in The International Journal of the Book. My premise is that the development and acceptance of e-books today parallels incunabula in the 15th century. The paper considers three examples of innovative e-books to illustrate the potential and pitfalls of electronic publications. This peer-reviewed paper is now available on the RAND web site (free download):
http://www.rand.org/pubs/reprints/RP1385/

The virtues of print on demand (aka POD) are well known.  Publishers no longer have to store books in warehouses, waiting for an order to come in.  Instead, systems are set up that take advantage of digital files.  When an order comes in, a copy of a book is printed.  This arrangement reduces the cost of carrying inventory and has made it possible to make many books, old and new, available even in the absence of a strong, ongoing market.  This is an instance of Long Tail publishing, and it is hard to find anything about it not to like.

There is another, emerging POD, however:  purchase on demand.  While print on demand (I will be careful about using the abbreviation here, as it can lead to confusion in this context) changes the economics of book production, purchase on demand changes the economics of book consumption.  Both forms of POD are likely to grow in the next few years and their development will increasingly be linked.

Consumers are used to purchasing things on demand, so what’s the fuss?  Someone walks into a bookstore, eyes a copy of The World Without Us or Sense and Sensibility, picks it up, and steps to the cash register, where it is purchased–on demand.  In this situation, the burden of maintaining the inventory lies with the bookseller, not the consumer.  The bookseller provides the necessary aggregation (the huge stock of titles in a bricks-and-mortar store), and the consumer plucks one copy out of that aggregation for purchase.

Not all books are sold one at a time, however; in not all instances is there a bookseller or an equivalent who is willing to bear the cost of carrying inventory.  In academic publishing, for example, one marketing practice is the standing-order plan.  For this kind of service, libraries fill out a profile (“Send me all books on American history, but do not include titles from the following list of publishers”), which is filed by a wholesaler.  The wholesaler then ships all books that fit the profile to the customer.  In this instance the cost of carrying the inventory is borne by the library, which receives hundreds, even thousands of titles, none of which have been individually examined by a librarian.

Purchase on demand arises when a subscription service such as a standing-order plan is already in place.  The aim of the purchaser is to disaggregate the subscription and pay only for specific titles.  This practice, which is just now beginning in the book industry, shifts the inventory risk from the library back to the wholesaler–and the wholesaler may in turn shift it back to the publisher.  The full economic implications of this are not known, but it is likely to result in fewer books being published, fewer copies of books being printed, and higher prices for the books that do get published.

Subscription bookselling is not new (think of the Book of the Month Club), but in a digital age, it is becoming more common.  One growing practice is the sale of digital aggregations of books to libraries, for which Oxford Scholarship Online is the model.  If OSO were to be moved to a purchase-on-demand program, the many titles in the collection would not be paid for until a library patron actually wanted to look at them.  Many publishers are now launching services very much like OSO’s, and Google is arranging to market even larger aggregations as an outcome of its recent legal settlement with publishers.  Will libraries want to acquire the entire collections, or will they determine to pick and choose, letting patron demand drive purchases?  It’s useful to ponder what purchase on demand will mean in the context of the recent Google-publisher settlement. 

For a library to move to purchase on demand, it will have to make a comprehensive catalogue available to its patrons, with instructions on making requests (“only two purchase requests per patron per week,” etc.).  The catalogue will serve as a front end to book acquisition (and it should be noted that many of the acquired books will be printed on demand).  There is no catalogue in existence today with sufficient information to support the various requirements of purchase on demand.  Amazon’s catalogue covers too much territory  for academic libraries and lacks summaries and other essential metadata; the catalogues of the wholesalers themselves are highly compressed; the catalogues of individual publishers are not aggregated in a single place.

While these examples are from institutional markets, it is likely that some of the same forces will apply as consumer subscription services are established.  We have already seen this in the music business, where consumers have gleefully been disaggregating the collections of songs stored on a single CD.  For producers of intellectual property everywhere, it is useful to bear in mind that digital technology can be applied to every point of the supply chain.  The use of bits over atoms does not put an end to the economic jockeying of producers, distributors, and customers.