Provostial Publishing
Posted: May 25th, 2008, by Joseph J. EspositoOn one side we have user-generated content (UGC), exemplified by Wikipedia; on the other we have traditional publishing, which is characterized by an editor or series of editors (acquiring editor, developmental editor, copy editor, production editor), who review submitted material and make judgments as to its shape, argument, and suitability for publication. UGC is on the rise and is now a distinguishing aspect of the consumer Internet, with such busy sites as FaceBook, MySpace, Digg, YouTube, and many others benefiting from it. Traditional publishing, on the other hand (perhaps we should call it “editorial publishing”), has been having a harder time in the digital age. The New York Times gets scooped by a blogger somewhere, Encyclopaedia Britannica gets corrected by a band of anonymous enthusiasts, and network television is increasingly dependent on YouTube for promotional support.
What do you look at online? Speaking for myself, my surfing day is divided between the two wings of Internet content, almost in a parody of CNN’s old Crossfire show: sites such as that of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal (on the Right), but also sites such as Slashdot.org and Publishing 2.0 (on the Left). Still and all, these choices seem too stark, out of touch with the reality of how content gets created and brought to our attention. Unlike computers, the world of content (and the society that creates it) is not binary. The choice between UGC and editorial publishing is not a real one.
One would be hard pressed to find a traditional publishing form that is not experimenting in some way with the tools of what has become known as Web 2.0. Many old-line newspapers now sport an expanded stable of columnists, but they are called bloggers and appear online exclusively. Returning to The New York Times, I was surprised to see myself now waiting as eagerly for new posts by blogger Stanley Fish as I have long waited for the columns of Thomas Friedman, Paul Krugman, and David Brooks. Stories now routinely come with a “comments” section, which typically undergoes a wee bit of moderation to weed out commercial messages, pornography, and overly exuberant spirits. Traditional book publishers now post sections, and in some instances the entire text, of their publications online to stimulate book purchases; not unusually, these product samples are accompanied by user comments. As Bob Stein of the Institute for the Future of the Book likes to point out, content inevitably will be embedded in a conversation, for which the online medium has clear advantages over print. The original publication may often be an instance of editorial publishing, but the commentary is likely to be UGC. The binary split is disappearing; just about everything now is a hybrid.
Over on the UGC side, there are a great number of techniques to refine the raw output of the solitary user. Online communities vote on the merits of a particular post almost as though content were running for office. To get a comment to the top of the pile at Digg is a challenge. It helps to have been around a bit and to know how the game is played. On Wikipedia every new contribution goes through a series of checks, which attempt to weed out fraud, self-interest, simple knuckleheadedness, and pranks. It is probably no longer enough to say that content may be user-generated; increasingly it is community-refined.
Of particular interest to me is what I will call “membership publishing,” an umbrella term for the phenomenon of “provostial publishing,” which serves as the title of this post. We can imagine a club or community that seeks to qualify its members. Not everyone gets into the Rotary Club or the Boy Scouts; very few have a chance to become members of elite institutions such as Amherst or Cornell. A membership community has a gatekeeping committee and attempts to ensure that all who are invited to join are distinguished representatives. In the academic community (the publishing segment that most interests me) the iconic gatekeeper is the provost, among whose many tasks is the appointment of faculty. While there are always some who will challenge a provost’s decisions, the merits of the faculty speak for the institution as a whole. Insofar as the faculty serves as authors, their publications represent the provost’s choices.
With the growth of institutional repositories, which aim to collect the output of research faculty, a new model of publishing is emerging. It would be wrong to think of the output of research faculty in the same way that we think of the comments on Digg or even in Wikipedia. Anyone can contribute to Digg, but very, very few can place a document into the repository at MIT. Research faculty are experts; some of the contributors to Wikipedia may be experts as well, but there is no gatekeeper, no provost, to vouch for them. So this is UGC, but it is expert UGC.
What it is not, except in special instances, is an aspect of editorial publishing. Faculty may deposit preprints, working papers, conference presentations, whatever into an institutional repository, but it is entirely possible that no editor has reviewed the material first. (There are also instances where the faculty deposits papers after they have gone through traditional peer review by a journal or book publisher, so-called Gold Open Access publishing.) If the faculty is a community of experts, their output is likely to be superior to that of anyone with an opinion and a keyboard. On the other hand, if the faculty deposits material that has not gone through traditional editorial procedures, then their work has not had the benefit of those procedures–assuming, of course, that one values the work of editors and peer review, as most members of the academic community do.
Provostial publishing, then, is publishing where a gatekeeper, in this case the provost, chooses the authors but does not choose the works. Traditional editorial publishing is where an editor chooses the work. In UGC the choice of the author is made by the author him or herself–but this is not much of a choice, as we all believe our own thoughts are worth something. The more important choice for UGC is one of venue: Do I post this to my Facebook friends? to Digg? to Slashdot? to my blog?
We are likely to see a huge surge in provostial publishing in the years ahead. Part of this is simply a function of the growth in research: all that research will yield outputs. Another part is the increase in the number and sophistication of institutional repositories and also the policies that govern them, which in some instances include mandates (by the provost’s office, of course) for faculty to deposit papers. More and more publications will bear the brand not of traditional publishers (Elsevier, Wiley, Random House) but of parent institutions (Harvard, Princeton, the University of Chicago). These brands will come to compete in new ways in the marketplace, likely crowding out brands of lesser distinction.
May 27th, 2008 at 1:45 am
There is no provostial publishing. There is only peer-reviewed publishing and non-peer-reviewed publishing. And the peer review itself can vary in rigor and selectivity: The quality standards and track records of journals differ.
Journals also differ in whether or not they make their articles accessible for free online. If they do, this is called Gold Open Access (OA) Publishing. Otherwise it is ordinary, non-OA publishing.
Non-OA publishers differ in whether or not they give their “green light” to authors to make their own articles OA (accessible free online) by self-archiving them in their Institutional Repositories. When articles have been made OA by their authors through self-archiving, this is called Green OA.
If provosts mandate that their authors self-archive their published articles, that too is called Green OA — but not Green OA publishing, of course, because it is the journal that publishes and the author merely self-archives, to provide (Green) OA to his own article.
The author may also self-archive articles published in non-peer-reviewed journals; this too is access-provision, not publication. The publisher is again the non-peer-reviewed journal that published the articles.
The author can also self-archive unpublished papers. Legally speaking, this counts as “publishing,” but of course in an academic (”publish or perish”) CV the author cannot list such a paper as “published” (let alone as peer-reviewed). It is listed (and cited” as “unpublished.”
In all of this, there is no such a thing as “provostial publishing” — though provosts who mandate self-archiving might perhaps be honored in calling this “provostial access-provision”…
Stevan Harnad
May 27th, 2008 at 3:52 am
‘There are also instances where the faculty deposits papers after they have gone through traditional peer review by a journal or book publisher, so-called Gold Open Access publishing.’
Is this not called Green OA? Gold = OA Journals. Green OA = (self) archiving of (peer reviewed) research papers in OA repositories. I do not think OA proponents refer to Green OA as “publishing” or anything of the kind.
And if you are the same person that suggested* that institutional repositories might not ‘be with us in even a few years’, how does that coincide with this post of yours, which is essentially focusing on the potential value of (institutional) repositories and its increase in significance/popularity ‘in the years ahead’?
I do agree that (institutional) repositories are likely to grow in significance, especially with Green OA growing. And that they are potentially suitable platforms for supporting journals with the certification function of scholarly communication, which is currently the most significant one to consider, as the other functions of scholarly communication are already being supported by (OA) repositories.
*http://listserver.sigmaxi.org/sc/wa.exe?A2=ind08&L=american-scientist-open-access-forum&D=1&O=D&F=l&S=&P=40488
May 27th, 2008 at 7:14 am
Publishers publish i.e. they organize peer review and present the accepted articles to the world either in exchange for cash (in which case they give free open access to the articles) or in exchange for exclusive and irreversible assignment of copyrights (in which case they give toll gated access to the articles). Provosts do not publish. Provosts may mandate or incentivise the posting of published articles into their institutional repository with the idea to give open access to these articles via the institutional web site. Thus contributing to the institutional prestige and accountability. This mandating does not make them publishers. Authors write. Authors may post their (reviewed and/or published) articles on their personal web site (and into their institutional repository when mandated or incentivised). Thus contributing to their personal prestige and citation scores. This posting does not make them publishers.
So, let’s discuss the pro’s and con’s of open access but please avoid confusing sophistications like ‘provostial publishing’.
Leo Waaijers.
May 27th, 2008 at 7:38 am
This starts looking like publishing at the turn of the century — a college-centric model of dissemination where titles like ‘Bulletin of the College of Agriculture’ were the norm (and still exist in places like India). These collections of collective faculty output gradually faded when subject-centric models of publishing became the norm. They faded because researchers can create ‘invisible colleges’ [1] of other like-minded researchers from other colleges, and because these new communities (lets call them ‘journals’ and ’societies’) become much more salient than one’s home institution.
To use Joe’s business term, ‘brand’, a college or publisher is a much weaker brand than a journal or society brand. The Harvard brand carries a gatekeeping stamp [2], since it necessarily filters out everyone who cannot (or does not care) to be part of the Harvard faculty. Yet, it is still stuck in the 1920s model of college-centric publishing. Now someone will respond to my post and claim that it is possible to create ‘channels’ or ‘layers’ to provide some organization to this shoebox model. Or alternatively, that when enough colleges do this, we could create ‘information streams’ that would facilitate a democratic participatory model of subject-focused publishing. Folks, you have just reinvented the modern journal.
References:
[1] Price, D. J. S. (1986). Collaboration in an Invisible College. In Little science, big science…and beyond (pp. 119-134). New York: Columbia University Press. Originally published as: Price, D. J., & Beaver, D. D. (1966) American Psychologist, 21(11):1011-1018
Crane, D. (1972). Invisible colleges; diffusion of knowledge in scientific communities. Chicago: U. Chicago Press.
[2] see: Crane, D. (1967). The gatekeepers of science: Some factors affecting the selection of articles for scientific journals. American Sociologist, 2(4), 195-201.
Garvey, W. D., & Griffith, B. C. (1967). Scientific Communication as a Social System. Science, 157(3792), 1011-1016.
Zuckerman, H., & Merton, R. K. (1971). Patterns of evaluation in science: Institutionalisation, structure and functions of the referee system. Minerva, 9(1), 66-100.
May 27th, 2008 at 9:49 am
Universities have more brand equity in their faculty than faculty have in their institutions. The network of practice is what matters to faculty, which is why a non-aligned subject repository, e.g. arXiv, has stickiness, and an IR doesn’t. I don’t see this dynamic changing, pace Harvard. Major research institutions will wait to see how the Harvard mandate plays out before any decision to tailgate is taken. The word on the street is that Harvard is going to have a very hard time operationalizing this mandate.
IRs will become more sophisticated by “disappearing”. The repository should become a fixed backplane to the more resource appreciated and utilized content services supported by the university. Another solution is to reconceptualize the IR as a process rather than a place. The process begins upstream, at the point of creation. An author embeds an itinerary in his/her work when it is finalized. This would happen via a discrete widget or ideally via the application (e.g. Acrobat). For example, when a research paper is complete, the author wraps the work in what I’ll call destination metadata. The author essentially instructs the paper to send itself to, say, the university’s repository, a selection of author-designated subject servers, the Journal of [fill-in-the-blank], the local instance of Blackboard, and the author’s e-portfolio. Ideally this all takes place in ‘the cloud’. The widget or application also calls and then embeds an appropriate Creative Commons license, and the university’s watermark.
Harvard is a monolithic brand but not a culture that can incubate a disruptive technology. The solution to Harvard’s implementation of their faculty mandate will be found not at Harvard but at a downstream institution.