Monday, 29 December
618. Roundtable: What Is a Scholarly Journal? Identity Issues in Our Digital Age
3:30–4:45 p.m., Union Square 14, Hilton
Program arranged by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals
Presiding: Robert Lowry Patten, Rice Univ.
Speakers: Elizabeth Brown, Johns Hopkins Univ.; Martha J. Cutter, Univ. of Connecticut, Storrs; Sheri Spaine Long, Univ. of Alabama, Birmingham; Alan Rauch, Univ. of North Carolina, Charlotte; Steven Tötösy de Zepetnek, Northeastern Univ.
Steve Tötösy talked about the problems with metrics – if a journal is not indexed in ISI’s Arts Humanities Citation Index, then authors often don’t get any credit in some places. This is increasingly the case in Europe and China. The impact factor is of high importance to a for-profit enterprise, and the new European equivalent is coming. However, ISI favours the sciences and social sciences while the humanities are neglected – many key journals are simply not listed.
The ERIH (European Reference Index for the Humanities), the European Science Foundation’s equivalent of ISI, has received many objections, but is still going ahead. Journals inside and outside Europe will be rated A, B, C or D.
MELUS is not listed in ISI’s AHCI, meaning for example that a Taiwanese scholar is not getting credit for appearing in a guest issue in MELUS. The journal was submitted to ISI back in 2001, and yet it is still not listed. It is almost impossible to exert pressure on ISI.
Despite there being the same editorial process for digital and print journals, the indexes seem not to be dealing adequately with digital journals.
Martha Cutter (MELUS) noted how aggregators such as EBSCO, JSTOR, Project Muse were disintegrating the journal format. Articles are presented without any front/back matter and any reference to the journal scope. If a journal has themed issues, it becomes hard to keep the pieces together. And yet special issues in print are some of the best backsellers.
Alan Rauch, editor of Configurations, considered the issue of open access. Innovative responses are needed to changes in academic publishing – we should be controlling the software, not vice versa. In order to compete with the largest publishers, he called for the sharing of best practice amongst journal editors.
He mentioned the Harvard Open Access initiative with its opt-out option for scholars, which is taking place against a backdrop of rising costs and lower subscriptions for journals.
He raised certain questions about the Harvard experiment. What happens if the author makes a change to the PDF and replaces a version that’s already been cited elsewhere? It could become a bibliographic mess. What if an article proves a source of embarrassment for the institution, would they simply remove the PDF?
Alan mentioned one field where institutions do not have a problem with producing content and buying it back again later – fiction and poetry. Creative writing colleagues publish and then republish for commercial gain and indeed are measured by that.
Alan also reiterated the feeling that there need to be more workshops and colloquia to share best practices between journals and look at ways to generate revenue. Presses need to hear from the editors as editors, as scholars, and as end users.
Sherri Spaine Long tackled the topic of peer review, noting that 76% of editors now use online tracking systems for this purpose.
She noted that certain things remain unchanged:
Firstly, scholars wish to publish in prestigious journals to further their career and peer-review is needed for a robust vetting process.
Secondly, peer review is the vehicle for a scholar to get needed feedback on their work.
Digital peer review offers more speed, better communication, automation and a record of the entire peer review history.
Sherri noted some changes that can be expected with the new online review systems:
Firstly, increased speed means there is time for additional drafts, more revisions and ultimately a stronger final result.
Secondly, the referee pool is now larger but how do we maintain a sense of who they are and what they can do? There is less reliance on elite reviewers and a broader array of levels – but the editor has the increased pressure of assigning an article appropriately. Increased internationalisation can be seen but editors often don’t know the referees.
Finally, an expansion of post-publication peer review and comments can be seen, stimulating scholarly discourse. Articles are not an end-point and peer review can continue. Articles can also adopt pedagogical strategies, linking up with syllabi and ancillary material, resulting in the sharing of best practice. Professional organisations have to meet various needs of their members and digital multi-purpose forums can respond to these needs.
Q & A
It was noted that a free software package was in the works for an online peer review and revision system. Manuscript Central can cost $6k a year depending on volume of content.
A movement is underway to create society communities and clusters of journals in a common period, in the hope of increased collaboration.
A scholar from Australia noted that the creation of a new metrics system there has been a productive and public process, if challenging. Metrics shouldn’t automatically be feared.
One person noted that being international doesn’t just mean receiving submissions from around the world – rather, journals should be directly collaborating with e.g. a journal in Japan or Korea as well.
The power and appeal of special issues was again underlined, while also noting that the loss of print versions has often meant the loss of notices about the profession, books received, attribution of credit to reviewers. The search tools often mean that a user has to reaggregate themed issues in a folder of their own.
Tags: bibliometrics, celj, digital publishing, ISI, metrics, MLA, MLA 08, Publishing, scholarly journal, scholarly publishing
