Comments on: Open Access, re Journals vs. Books

By: bowerbird

bowerbird — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 18:14:49 +0000

books, journals, it’s all just words on a page.

as such, it can be digitized just fine, thank you.

-bowerbird

By: Michael Jensen

Michael Jensen — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 02:55:07 +0000

Right you are, Sandy. I think of books — as I write elsewhere — as “immersive reading.” They have a different systemic reality than journals, and are less easily “disintermediated” because of it.

And Adam: while I think the distinctions twixt journals and books are being challenged, I’m of the belief that books (which demand linear immersive engagement) are a different ilk than journal articles (which demand only transitory attention).

That may change in the future, but for now, the immersive treatise or monograph still requires a non-digital treatment, to be “read” as it was meant to be read — as a sequential argument.

Currently, that demands a print book. There could be successful tools developed soon that could make it a successful e-book, rather than a p-book, but those tools are not yet in place, for the economics of publishing to work.

By: Sandy Thatcher

Sandy Thatcher — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 23:01:02 +0000

One major difference not noted here is that publishers are invested differently in books and journals, at least university presses are. Presses do not get involved in the peer-review process for the journals they publish; that is managed by the journal editors themselves. By contrast, press staff are heavily involved in the peer-review process for books. Indeed, the peer-review process in university press publishing has no counterpart elsewhere, even in commercial academic publishing, because the faculty editorial board plays a critical role in this process and commercial publishers do not have faculty editorial boards with decision-making power. The dialectic among press editorial staff, external reviewers, and the editorial board is a complex and unique process, combining elements of special expertise and general judgment. Although this is a simplification, staff editors tend to favor cutting-edge research that overturns paradigms and pushes fields in new directions; faculty on editorial boards tend to be senior scholars with vested interests in their field’s established knowledge. Staff editors get to choose who the external readers are and hence can leverage this power to support their preferred outcomes. But editorial boards have real authority and have been known to reject challenging manuscripts even when they have enthusiastic reviews. No such process occurs in journal publishing; peer review is more narrowly disciplinary focused. Because publishers’ contributions to journal publishing are limited to providing services like subscription fulfillment, the contracting of printing and binding, and some marketing, they do not have the same stake in it as they do in book publishing since the all-important editorial-review function is not involved as the publisher’s responsibility. Thus, publishers of journals are much more easily displaced (”disintermediated”) in the electronic arena than are publishers fo books.

By: Adam Hodgkin

Adam Hodgkin — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 04:09:50 +0000

From where I sit it is not so clear that the world of ‘books’ or the world of ‘journals’ are either of them as homogenous or as contrasted as this argument would seem to suggest. We sometimes use the word ‘journal’ to mean the kind of ’serial’ that (mainly) only researchers and scholars will read/write, and we sometimes use the word ‘monograph’ in a similar sense to cover those kind of ‘books’ that (mainly) only researchers and scholars will read/write. But the underlying content flow is in both cases very heterogenous and peculiar. Many magazines uneasily straddle the scholarly/cultural/general interest divides, especially in fields such as music, literature, art history. But there are interesting and borderline cases in all disciplines: though bigger areas of fuzziness in ‘popular music’ and ‘architecture’ than in ‘high energy physics’ or ‘formal logic’. The large scientific and scholarly publishers have been in some respects very successful at embracing digital publishing (much, much, more so than the mainstream consumer magazine publishers) but they have done so with mostly closed, silo-style, distribution models which now face problems and possible market failure. As book and periodical publishing moves into ‘the cloud’ it will need to respond with much more subtle and nuanced distribution and access models: models which respect and serve the markets which print and digital publishing create.

By: Jason Baird Jackson

Jason Baird Jackson — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 15:18:45 +0000

Thank you for this useful commentary. It speaks to monograph specific conversations now ongoing here at Indiana University Bloomington (where MAR is being published).