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Ted Striphas, author of The Late Age of Print (2009) recently published an interesting article in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies on the inconsistencies in the current journal publishing system, focusing specifically on the situation within the field of Cultural Studies. In his article, entitled Acknowledged Goods: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Academic Journal Publishing, Striphas gives a very clear and concise summary of the problems this system of ‘academic capitalism’ has created. The article is a must-read for anyone who sees her/himself as a critical scholar (and anyone else for that matter). It is freely available via the wiki accompanying Striphas’ blog Differences & Repetitions, where it was already published as a working draft or paper-in-progress in 2008.
Striphas main argument is that the current political programme dominating journal publishing, has led to a restriction of access to much of the material produced within the field of cultural studies, therewith diminishing the potential (political) impact of cultural studies. I strongly feel the situation Striphas describes matches the situation in most of the fields within the Humanities and Social Sciences (HSS). Striphas would probably agree to this thesis, as he, in his article, often takes the situation of the HSS as a starting point, after which he zooms in on Cultural Studies as a specific case study. However, Striphas feels the situation is more grave in the latter field, as this is (one of the) field(s) that is known for its critical stance and disposition towards the (economical and political) structures behind the production of culture. Striphas criticizes the field for its passive position concerning its own political economy of production, which is increasingly in the hands of neo-liberal market and profit oriented firms. In this economy the main reason of communicating one’s research results—making the work accessible to one’s peers—has been exchanged for the gathering of large profits. Saying that the current system is broken is only a half-truth. As Striphas writes, “the system is functioning only too well these days—just not for the scholars it is intended to serve.”
He claims that the situation for scholars has grown worse with the rise of multinational monopolistic publishing houses, making academic practices increasingly dependent on them. Publishers have been producing more and more journals to gain a larger profit. This overproduction has led to a qualification-inflation. The crisis of overproduction has led to the paradoxical situation were one now has less of a change to be noticed and read.
Striphas’criticism of the political economy surrounding academic publishing ends up to be a larger criticism of the academic system as a whole. As he states:
“Broadly, the goal of present-day academic capitalism is not merely to apply business precepts piecemeal to the running of academic institutions (…) Instead, the goal is to make the latter over in the image of the former, fundamentally, by imposing new norms of efficiency, productivity, and competitiveness on university employees.”(9)
Not only the current publishing system, but the whole system of academic capitalism is affecting the dissemination, accessibility and thus the potential impact of scholarly research results.
A few remarks. First of all Striphas’ approach to the so-called monograph crisis seems to be a bit fuzzy in this paper. Although he does state that he focuses mainly on journals, somewhere halfway his paper he writes down the following mysterious sentence: “The humanities’ enduring commitment to books thus has shielded its constituent disciplines and fields, cultural studies included, at least somewhat from the harshest effects of academic publishing’s recent transformations.”(16) In the subsequent paragraph he goes on to explain exactly how monographs were harshly influenced by the whole crisis, severely downgrading his earlier sentence. Why then the need to write down this earlier statement? In any case, Striphas only mentions one side of the monograph crisis, the decline of library acquisitions’ budgets and the subsequent dwindling sales of monographs. He does not go on to mention the fact that this situation consequentially led to big decreases in monograph print runs. Not only does this mean publishers are increasingly taking the less-risk-option—preferring more commercially viable titles over the publication of for instance highly specialized research and research written in non-English languages—the titles they eventually do publish are not nearly disseminated as widely as they were in previous era’s.
Secondly, I feel Striphas could have given some more attention to the protest that is and has already risen against these political and economical superstructures. Although at the end of his paper he gives an elaborate list of possibilities for scholars to pursue in order to make a stand against the current system, to me it seems these could have gotten a bigger position in the body of his article and I feel they should have been a more vital part of his argumentation. Only mentioned briefly in the end, the Open Access movement—also a presence in the field of cultural studies—is not getting the credit it deserves. Particularly in the last couple of years this movement has grown significantly, in the HSS too, and also in Cultural Studies—why is Culture Machine not mentioned for instance?—and has become a true alternative to the current subscription-based publishing system. Furthermore, Striphas does not discuss activities that have been happening at the fringes of scholarly communication, where perhaps, one could argue, the true activism is taking place. The rise of informal communication through blogs (such as Striphas’ own), discussion lists, Twitter, wiki’s etc. has grown over the last years, creating an ‘alternative space’ to the one dominated by the larger publishing monopolies. Even more on the edges, on P2P file-sharing sites such as Scribd and AAAAARG.org, people are actively challenging the publishers’ distribution channels by taking the dissemination of scholarly texts into their own hands, and freely spreading them over the internet via distributed networks. Perhaps a real institutional field-wide change has not yet come about in Cultural Studies and perhaps this is what Striphas is aiming at. Nevertheless, things have been happening that I feel could have gotten some more attention in this paper.
This does not alter the fact that I love the recommendations Striphas gives at the end of his article, urging people to no longer play the passive card but to actively try, collectively, to change the current system. One of the things he stresses is to change our research practices, to experiment with new, more open forms of communication: we need to experiment with form, content and process and we should try to leave aside our paper-centric notions. And this change starts at the individual level. It is all a matter of choice. Concerning the capital intensive value-added services Striphas mentions and which publishers are currently marketing as a necessity, I would like to add that many of these services are available in a freely and open source varieties on the web. Open Source software and platforms like OJS, OMP and Zotero—just to name a view—are meaningful choices in a highly politicized publishing industry.
Finally I agree with Striphas take on how we, as well as the publishing industry as a whole, need to become more transparent. Especially in this digital age we need a wider discussion on what it is a publisher exactly does, what kind of value he adds, and what the price-tag for such a service should (maximally) be. How much should the publishing function cost within a structure based mainly on publicly funded research (especially in the HSS). We need more transparency with regards to how these underlying structures are set-up and function. And even more importantly, we need more transparency where it concerns the structures of governance that determine and control the political economy of the publishing industry and of academia as a whole. In this respect, Striphas paper is an important exhortation.
Nicola Dale - Browser (2008)
Definitions are intrinsically time-bound. Imagine the fundamental question of ‘What is a book’. To ask this question at this moment in time means we have to take into account the present transformation or remediation of the book. Definitions concerning the nature of the book need to bare in mind its past as well as its potential future. Any definition is for this reason a highly contextual one. The concept of the book has always been flexible as books are constantly evolving, as is our perception of them. Books have survived various medial changes and they (or we) have always found a way to adapt to their new carriers: from scroll to codex and from paperback to e-book. Rather than to pin-down a static definition of the book, we are better of seeing (the concept of) the book as an unfolding process.
I would like to take a look at a few theorists who, since the coming of the Internet and digital media, have tried to problematize and re-think the definition(s) of the book that were in use before the digital era. To determine whether there exists a common denominator to define the book, and if so, what it is, these theorists have focused on a few aspects of the book. By looking at its specific materiality, and at the way the book’s carrier differs from and influences its content (text), and by comparing the book with other media, they collectively guide the conversation of what a book is and should be, further into the future.
On if:book, the group blog of the Institute for the Future of the Book, some interesting posts on the concept of the book have appeared over the last few years, written by the institute’s staff. Dan Visel, in a post entitled What we talk about when we talk about books (2006), explains how there actually are two main discourses surrounding the book: one that focuses on the physical form of the book (the book as a specific reading-device) and one that focuses on the content of the book. He explains how these discourses have eventually led to some confusion in the digital world were an e-book for many people could mean both the content itself, as well as its carrier (more commonly known as an e-reader). In his post Visel examines how the so-called limited character of the printed book is being challenged by the potentially evolving content of the online edition. He wonders where we draw the boundaries with so-called networked books. Are the texts it connects to via hyperlinking part of the book? Are the readers’ comments part of the book?
Kevin Kelly, Internet dinosaur and one of the founders of Internet-magazine Wired, states in his essay Scan this book! (2006) that a book can hold essentially everything. In his ideal future of the book, the book becomes a kind of synecdoche of the ‘universal library’. As Kelly states, the universal library will consist of ‘the entire works of humankind, from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages, available to all people, all the time.’ In this world of networked books, no book will be an island (as they are in the print world). Each book will be integrated and connected by means of links and tags. Books transform into one universal book. As Kelly writes: ‘in a curious way, the universal library becomes one very, very, very large single text: the world’s only book.’
Interestingly enough, in Kelly’s view this universal book will incorporate all media, textual media as well as for instance sound and visual media. The writers on the if:book blog wonder however if we, when we use such a broad concept of the book, will not turn it into a meaningless term. Will the book in the end still be a useful concept to use in the online world?
As Roger Sperberg states, in an if:book post entitled What is a book? (2006), a book is foremost something you read, distinguishing it from media that we watch or listen to. He feels that some way or another ‘text’ should remain on the foreground, where text involves a certain amount of what he calls ‘commitment’ from the reader:
‘But if “book” no longer means the intellect is permitted to come to the foreground in this way, if text and how it requires this is diminished to insignificance, then we will have thrown the baby out with the bathwater and what we have then will perhaps be entertaining and educational and absorbing, but it will not be a book, whatever label attaches to it.’
Brian Dettmer - Book Autopsies
Sperberg wonders at what point, with all theses multimedia additions in the online world, we still recognize a ‘book’ as a book. What is the essence of a book? Sperberg feels we should be able to distinguish some salient features or expectations of the book. Visel agrees where he states in his previously mentioned post that we should be looking at similarities and relationships between the objects we commonly denote as books. But both Visel as well as Sperberg admit that this remains a non bullet-proof approach. Sperberg finally throws it on intuition (‘we will know a book as we see it’) and Visel concludes there will probably be multiple futures of the book.
Where in Kelly’s utopian future the (printed) book will in the end give way to the screen as the dominant medium or device for reading, the viewpoints of Robert Darnton—the renowned book historian—are more inline with Visel’s, where Darnton foresees a hybrid future for the book. In his seminal article The New Age of the Book (1999) he gives a more practice-based outlook on the book, based on the way books are actually being used at the moment. From these usages he distills a future scenario in which printed books and e-books will continue to exist side-by-side. E-books will become an extension of printed books, an add-on. The book as a reading device is just way too good a format to store and communicate information, Darnton explains. It is a very usable format. Furthermore, reading from screens remains an inferior experience, not to say a real hassle for many people. As Darnton concludes, ‘in short, the old-fashioned codex, printed on folded and gathered sheets of paper, is not about to disappear into cyberspace’.
Darnton’s concept of the book is a hybrid one, one that expands from paper into the digital realm. The digital is a supplement or (in some cases) the paper edition is an abstract. The electronic part is particularly useful for certain publics (especially scholars) and certain purposes (scanning, referencing, searching for information). But Darnton does not believe people will in the end read whole books online. Furthermore, he introduces the importance of the cultural practices and institutional and political economy surrounding the book in academia. In a culture in which the printed book plays such an important role in reputation structures, he wonders whether electronic monographs will essentially be acknowledged as books in these communities.
Nicola Dale - The world as I see it (2007)
The approach to the book of literary critic Katherine Hayles—a specialist in the field of electronic literature—is again a different one. Her focus lies not on the way readers’ usage of books determines its future shape, but on the way the specific materiality of a text influences its meaning, and with that our interpretation of the text. As Hayles claims in her article Translating Media: Why We Should Rethink Textuality (2003), one of the main problems with trying to define the book as it is being ‘translated’ into a digital format (which she sees as a re-interpretation of the book) is that, as she states, ‘our notions of textuality are shot through with assumptions specific to print, although they have not been generally recognized as such.’
In Hayles’ vision of the book as it is transforming she agrees with Visel and Sperberg, where in analyzing this process we should think of correspondences (and as Hayles also adds, of dissimilarities!) instead of ontologies. For Hayles it seems however more interesting to look at the processes of the translation of texts from print to the online than looking at the book and e-book as specific objects. We should try to find out what the differences in materiality are between print and electronic textuality and how this specific materiality influences the way we perceive a text. In Hayles’ vision the format of the book and its content are intrinsically connected, and in this way she pulls together and incorporates the two separate discourses surrounding the book mentioned earlier by Visel. Text is not dematerialized and is dependant on its carrier.
Hayles argues that when we claim the digital is immaterial, we bring along our print-centered notions. Thes kind of notions can be found in both the work of Kelly, as well as in the work of someone who in many ways can be seen as Kelly’s opponent, Sven Birkerts. Birkerts is a literary critic and author of The Gutenberg Elegies (1994), a work very critical of electronic media and online reading. Both in Birkerts’ as well as in Kelly’s view digital text can be seen as missing a specific materiality. With Kelly this immateriality of text and its translation into binary code leads him to perceive all online media as one digital muddle, giving it the potential to mix and recombine with other dematerialized media into ‘a single liquid fabric’. In Birkerts’ opinion on the other hand this immateriality is a big loss. In The Gutenberg Elegies he states that ‘nearly weightless though it is, the word printed on a page is a thing. The configuration of impulses on a screen is not (…)’ For Birkerts it is very important that the materiality of print fixes the word, where the fleeing and weightless character of online text is detrimental to the autonomy of the word and eventually, as Birkerts concludes, it will be detrimental to the autonomy of the self.
But as Hayles tries to argue, we cannot perceive of a text as an ‘immaterial construction independent from its carrier.’ Books undergo a transformation when they enter the digital domain, an aspect too easily neglected by for instance Kelly. Text is not simply digital bits; in its digital counterpart it also has a specific form or materiality. As Hayles writes, electronic textuality ‘cannot be separated from the delivery vehicles that produce it as a process with which the user can interact.’ In her view of the specificity of digital texts, text becomes a distributed phenomenon. She sees a text as an embodied entity, which in the virtual world can be embodied in various reading devices.
Hayles seems to push the discussion on the book to a higher level where in her view we can not determine or distract what a book is from (looking at) its materiality. We can only look at the way the book’s physicality influences the way we perceive a text. We can only look at a book’s content and how this is influenced by its materiality, in which this materiality can, as Hayles sees it, extend beyond the individual object. A text’s materiality is an interaction between the specific format the text is molded in and the specific meaning or content of the text. As Hayles concludes, in this discourse ‘texts would routinely be discussed both in terms of their conceptual content and their physical embodiments.’
From this short review of different attempts to describe the ever-changing phenomenon of the book, it seems there are various (perhaps even inexhaustible) ways to analyze this increasingly distributed phenomenon. We can look at the similarities and dissimilarities of the different shapes the book shifts into, and we can compare these with the appearances of other media; we can look at the way we ‘recognize’ a book, both in its more intuitive sense as well as the in the way we acknowledge something as a book within certain cultural discourses; we can look at the way a book is used, or we can look at its utopian or dystopian potential as a theoretical concept extracted from its format; and, we can focus on its specific materiality or on a combination of a particular device and its content. All approaches, from looking at the medium to looking at its usage and the discourses surrounding it, seem to add some flavor to the discussion. Perhaps we can only get closer to the transforming book by accepting and stimulating such a plurality of viewpoints. Just like the book itself, the discussion on the book will keep on expanding further into the digital future.
Or better yet, who should own research? Last Thursday CRASSH―the Cambridge based institute for Cultural Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities―assembled an expert panel from the publishing and library community to tackle this question. Linda Bree (Cambridge University Press), Rupert Gatti (Open Book publishers), Gary Hall (Open Humanities Press) and Elin Stangeland (DSpace Cambridge), engaged in a discussion with the CRASSH Postdoctoral community on copyright and ownership of research. The exchange soon evolved into a wider debate on subjects as diverse as authorship, (Open Access) publishing and business models, peer review, branding and credibility, and deposit mandates and PhD theses. Google Books, Internet control and plagiarism also seeped into the discussion. The atmosphere was open and the crowd in a problem-solving mood. All the more surprising (and fulfilling) considering the fact that the principles of the panelists and the audience could be located on a sliding-scale from more traditional to highly experimental.
Linda Bree described herself as “the one in traditional publishing”, which, according to her, entails giving away forms of control. By default, she explains, the system revolves around the single author doing a substantial research (preferably in the form of a book). This research is then reviewed, published, disseminated and marketed. The researcher gains in this process by gathering career benefits, where the publisher receives a financial gain―which in academic publishing mostly means not going bankrupt. So, Bree explains, we find ourselves in a semi-commercial situation. In this context the publisher is not so much involved content-wise, but s/he does have a big say in the way research gets presented. This is an important aspect of the publisher’s work and is based on the possibility of presenting a work within certain financial limits. Because all of the above mentioned processes cost money, from reviewing to marketing. And they are all essential in the end for the scholar to, as Bree calls it, get a “nice published book” and to achieve the idea of “I wrote this”.
Although you could say that giving away this amount of control over one’s work costs quite a lot for an author, Bree defends her and CUP’s position by stating that the transference off control to the publisher is a necessary process. The publisher has invested money along the way and needs to attain revenue. And CUP does give some rights to re-use the work (often fee-based). However, the current technological changes in the publishing process have now given individual scholars the possibility to assert more control over their research (through Open Access and electronic publishing). The individual scholar now has much more choices than in the traditional model (which as Bree admits, is in many ways not sufficient anymore). The seminal question an author thus needs to ask himself is what kind of added value traditional publishing gives him (in forms of branding and other benefits) and whether this is worth the loss of control?
Elin Stangeland from DSpace Cambridge explains the special position Cambridge scholars have in the UK, where they (and not their universities) actually hold the copyright to their research. Giving away forms of control can take place in various settings, as an author can also give a publisher a license to publish (as with a Creative Commons license). Other options for a scholar to keep more in-control include publishing your work with an Open Access book or journal publisher (according to Stangeland, half of the journals in the DOAJ are HSS journals) and self archiving. Scholars can also try to retain their rights from a publisher. Often traditional publishers—like CUP—also provide a hybrid option, where the author can opt to make his specific work openly available. DSpace—which can both be used for books and articles—takes care of the storage and dissemination of the researchers work. They also offer services and advice, like the copyright toolbox (developed by SURF and JISC), and provide information on funders’ policies concerning self-archiving requirements. And they are looking ahead, actively thinking about the archiving of research data (and the management hereof), new citation and reward systems for publishing in the digital humanities and developments concerning the social and semantic web.
Rupert Gatti explained how he—an economist at Trinity College—started Open Book Publishers out of frustration: publishers were not responding quickly enough to the digital developments. Publishers will not sell books they deem to be in un-publishable areas (even though they match their quality criteria) and if they are published, these books are only bought by elite libraries in the west. But the POD revolution and the Internet brought new possibilities to disseminate research. And as Gatti states, dissemination is an important justification of research. Society needs access to research, were the current model prevents dissemination. Open Book publishers takes another route where their publications are completely searchable though Google Books and authors and readers have the freedom to transform and distribute the research. As publishers they have a non-exclusive right to publish (via a CC license). And they don’t give in on the quality aspect: OPB’s books are just as rigorously peer-reviewed as books in the traditional model. OPB is not for profit (and in case they do make a profit they share it 50/50 with their authors) and for a large part counts on the work of volunteers. And they take care of the ‘lap value’, as Gatti calls it, where they publish (affordable) hard and paperback copies of their publications—using the same printer as CUP does, Gatti adds. As Gatti concludes, there are alternatives to the traditional model and they are growing quickly.
After shortly describing the development of the Open Humanities Press—an international Open Access publishing collective—Gary Hall focused on one of the more experimental projects the press is undertaking. For next to more traditional forms of publication, OMP wants to experiment—through its Liquid Book Series—with changing the physical conception of the monograph. Liquid books offer open editing and free/libre content on a Read/Write basis and can for instance consist of a collage of different media and texts; snippets, pages, references, podcasts, youtube clips, etc.. This form of publishing directly confronts the idea of the author. Remembering Barthes, Hall explains how by giving a text an author, we at the same time give it a limit. Liquid Books are an experiment with the decentralization of the author. In a way this decentralization is already on its way. With the massive rise of authorship through the online medium the (discourse on the) author has again become more open, decentralized and distributed. With Google as our major spotlight and Internet filter, the performers of different roles (authors, editors, compilers) are not always identifiable. Everyone is potentially an author or an editor online.
The discussion that followed focused for a large part on the differences between the traditional subscription and the new Open Access models. Worries about the sustainability of Open Access models and their quality assurance were systematically taken away by the panelists. As all panelists confirmed and agreed upon, there is no such thing as one sustainable model for publishing books. In the future there is likely to be a mix of eclectic models with various revenue sources. Where it comes to quality standards, Gatti for one emphasized that the thorough peer review methods of OBP confirm to the highest standards (comparable to those of CUP for instance). Bree however emphasized that for young authors—publishing their first book—the brand of a publisher also plays an important role. She clearly advised young authors to think about this when making their choice on where to publish. Gatti replied by stating that the more open availability of Open Access publications (and in OBP’s case the lower pricing of their print books) is also an important aspect of the marketing and dissemination of publications.
In this respect it is again about the added value of the publisher and about which addition you value the most. And as this seminar showed, with the increased possibilities for authors to publish their research online, publishing is now more than ever about making choices. What the right choice is in this respect, especially concerning the ownership of research, is up to the researcher. Perhaps now more than ever, s/he is in control about how and where to publish.
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