Can the subaltern google? A wikified reflection on the connection between open source publishing and making our research available to our research subjects by Kerim. Via the very good anthropologi.info. We’re building the anthropology blogosphere one entry at a time folks — keep at it!

Two revs ago, on an early form of this blog I remarked on the Kantian nature of the datasphere — making your words world-readable enforces a weirdly universal morality. A few quick dictums:

A lot of stuff we right is not intelligible to nonspecialists because it is technical. This is OK — the world needs technical works.

A well-roundeed scholar should be able to write more than technical works. So I think there is an important role that anthropologists play as ‘public intellectuals’ to make their work available to non-specialists.

We must always proceed as if our research informants were also our audience — increasingly, they are! We must always be thinking: what would one of my research subjects say about this? In the case of technical work, we must always say: what would an anthropologist from my (tribe | ethnic group | field site ) say about this?

We must do our best to make our work available to our research informants without sacrificing the needs of our discipline.

Academics have the best incentive structure in the world to publish free (as in speech) texts: we are paid teaching, not by royalties (modulo a few outliers). But one’s desirability as a professor (and hence earning potential) is proportional to one’s fame, which is furthered by being read. Ditto for your sense of achievement, popularity, and a bintillion other factors. Everything about academics points towards making our texts free.

Acid-free, bound copies of our work need to be stored in cool, dry places — treeware really is still the best way to ensure knowledge sticks around. We still need paper, and we need it distributed widely enough that a few catastrophic disasters don’t decapitate our cultural patromony. This is one need of our discipline.

There is more out there than anyone can possibly read. Certain anthropological brands have whuffie. We use this setup at a filter — we choose what we read based on where it was published, and the institutional affiliation and personal ties of the person who published it. Students of famous professors, articles in flagship journals, monographs published by prestiguous presses — these are the things we read.

With all due respect — and I honestly mean this — University Presses are unique beasties with some very strange characteristics. I say this based on my experience (which is limited, but has centered around a pretty well-known press). Let’s face it: I don’t really know anything about the publishing business. But I thought I’d at least give it a shot:

The staff is sometimes choosen based on their personal connections rather than their ability. People are rarely fired for poor performance. Office politics are even more personal and intransigent than in other sorts of offices. Strong resistance to innovation.

Production is inefficient. Basic editorial functions such as catching typos or poor grammar are increasingly ignored. Quality control is often an issue.

Presses respond to increased competition and increased cost by raising prices or taking further shelter in the protection of the subsidies afforded them by their parent universities. They do not respond by increasing efficiency.

Attempts to reform presses to be ‘more businesslike’ go afoul in two ways: first, a backlash against the idea that business is a good model for presses devoted to The Life of the Mind (a good objection in theory, but perhaps not appropriate given the state of academic publishing) second, poorly-implemented attempts at reform that misunderstand how businesses work. Demanding that a press ‘turn a profit’ is really not the lesson to learn from commercial publishing.

So with all due respect I have to wonder whether resistance to innovation by presses is sometimes misrecognized as an objective fact that ‘academic publishing is just a fundamentally impossible thing’.

Let’s rethink what we want from presses:

1) a small amount of high-quality treeware for archival purposes.

4) Distribution that is quick, cheap, and easy for less privileged people: cheap and ubiquitous delivery of treeware through the well-established subscription channels that 3rd world libraries have been using for some time now.

How do we do this? My argument — which is certainly not original — is to make the electronic text cannonical. Rather than produce the book first and then worry about getting it online, make the online article the definitive version of the text and then publish the book form wherever needed.

How do we do it?

Make presses imprints. Make them smaller, leaner and meaner — since they are essentially brands which provide high-quality texts, hire editors and (for lack of a better term) A&R people to sniff out the best new talent (there are issues here I’ll skip about whether they ought be academics or not). Then hire good designers and pay them what they’re worth to make sure they don’t quit. Focus on producing documents in standards-compliant formats (*ahem* xml) that can be transformed into PDF, HTML, RTF, SXW, and paper formats without too much difficulty.

Shift to print on demand. Consortiums of presses pool their resources to create a cafe-press type setup that can produce cheapo one-off treeware as well as more expensive high-quality archival stuff. Economies of scale will drive down the price of the books. Having a single point of publication means more volume, which means cheaper costs. It also means simpler distribution mechanisms. I know this is wishful thinking, and there are obstacles to overcome, but perhaps we could try thinking in these terms.

I think we might be suprised at what happens to the economics of distributing journals if we were to do this.

Distribute electronically. Distribute electornically. Distribute electronically. Charge if you need to offset hosting costs — that’s cool. Create new lines of ‘occaisional papers’ and charge by the paper. Innovative and forward looking services such as Australia National University’s ePrints service have heaps of great stuff on line even as we speak.

Buy stock in companies that make printers and toner, sell stock in companies that do photocopying. People are going to be printing out a buttload of stuff.

It could even be the case: if anyone could publish anything anywhere they wanted, perhaps quantity of publications would not matter as much. Perhaps quality would become a more important metric of someone’s publication record? Perhaps people would be driven to high-whuffie publications?

Perhaps we’d find monographs are not the best way to publish anymore? I have trouble going there, but is it truly unthinkable?

Perhaps people might start judging the quality of an imprint for “what its done for them lately” in addition to traditional (and potentially ossified) notions of prestige.

Perhaps we’de have 500 small presses instead of 50 big ones.

As I said, there are problems with this model, and it would change how publishing happens. But as those of you who follow the industry know, academic publishing is in a pretty sad state. The future would look different. Very different. But:

How much do we have to loose, and how much do we have to gain?