Social Software will wrest control of academic publishing from centralized publishing institutions and give it (back) to authors. But what happens to quality when everyone has a voice that sounds the same?

In an earlier post, I argued that social software threatened the very core of academic publishing due to social software’s decentralized publishing paradigm and its ability to easily support interconnections among contributors and readers.

In that post, I said that I “now find that I learn much more about “what’s going on” in my discipline from reading a growing collection of daily personal and professional weblogs than I ever did from the seven papers that would be published once a month in my favorite journal.” I can bet that after reading this, skeptics of social software’s “personal publishing paradigm” will have serious reservations. Their main objection — what I call the “Connected Canine” argument (from the infamous New Yorker cartoon “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog“) — might sound something like “Ahh, but how can you have any confidence in the quality of information you’re reading in that growing weblog collection? After all, the ‘publisher’ on the other side of the screen might be a well respected scholar reporting experimentally sound studies, or he may be nothing more than an uninformed amateur babbling aimlessly.”

It’s the ivory-tower’s version of the 1994 Drudge Report imbroglio. But, as this debate centers on peer review, tenure and academic integrity rather than news reporting, politics and sex, the stakes are much higher and the rhetoric more explosive. <insert sarcasm here>

Defenders of academic publishing’s status quo typically cite peer review as the critical mechanism that certifies and ensures the value of both the publication and the author. For example, a report cosponsored by the Association of Research Libraries, the Association of American Universities, and the Pew Higher Education Roundtable (“To Publish or Perish,” March 1998, Volume 7, Number 4 ) stated:

Academic publication accomplishes four objectives of critical importance to universities and colleges: the certification, dissemination, indexing, and archiving of research and scholarship. Publication both advances the state of knowledge within a domain and provides the mechanism to assess the quality of contributions that individuals make to a discipline. Publication is understood to be the primary channel through which individual faculty demonstrate their worthiness for tenure, promotion, grants, and fellowships. The peer review mechanisms that underlie the decision of any publisher to accept an article or full-length manuscript help to certify the value of any given contribution as well as contributor to the field.

However, the same report goes on to highlight how the publishing process might not be as objective as it seems:

What gives this enterprise its peculiar cast is the fact that the producers of knowledge are also its primary consumers. In most fields the market for scholarly publication is driven largely by the internal mechanics of a culture, in which further specialization increases greatly the volume of published work at the same time that individuals come to read more narrowly within their fields. For the faculty of a university or college, the act of publication constitutes what many have termed a “gift exchange” among a community of devotees bound by a common interest; the giving of such gifts is intended to win the regard of other members of the community.

If this is true, it’s interesting to ask if the trackback links, referrer reports, an blogrolls used to connect disparate personal blog sites are no different than the publication “gifts” bestowed by fellow academic community members on each other. And if they aren’t different, then shouldn’t those metrics “count” towards establishing an author’s credibility, and in the academic world, tenure? While I doubt many department deans see the peer review process of academic publishing as a gift exchange, if you do subscribe to this strong socio-political viewpoint, I believe you must then accept the equivalency of trackback-like and related reputation management tools to academic peer review. The follow-on is that you must then also accept that the blog ecosystem has the capability to certify academic quality.

Note further that in this scenario, the academic publisher is no longer needed, or rather, does not maintain its monopoly on the academic publishing process. Instead, it is the community of authors that directly owns and drives every aspect of the publishing and quality certification process. As I described in my earlier post, academic publishing doesn’t morph via addition of new rules to the status-quo, but rather becomes an entirely “new game.”

The academic publishers won’t give up their game easily, however. Already, we see them trying to stave off extinction by scrambling to find new approaches that co-opt the new world they inhabit and maintain their control. For example, the Association of Research Libraries report suggests that academic professional organizations that publish refereed journals consider:

…three levels of entries for a given organization, each conferring a greater measure of certification. At their first level, (the professional organizations’) Web sites would become places for open postings for which there were standards of presentation and citation, along with a full listing of the authors’ credentials. The site would indicate to users that the postings at this level had not been subject to formal review and, as such, had not yet earned the organization’s seal of approval. What would likely appear are drafts containing early results and first findings. A second level would present results that had been reviewed and hence accepted for electronic publication. Finally, the site would offer a limited selection of papers and reports the review panels had deemed as having particular significance. Each year the organization might also publish a printed volume containing papers with this designation which had appeared initially in electronic form.

Academic professional organizations and their commercial publishing partners will no doubt enact schemes like this (many already have). However, while such contrivances will likely coexist for some time alongside the new species of decentralized publishing communities, make no mistake: traditional academic publishers are an endangered species. Their game may soon be up.

(07/11/03 Update: Talk about timing! A day after posting the above, physicist Frank J. Tipler posted Refereed Journals: Do They Insure Quality or Enforce Orthodoxy? {link to pdf document; published in the International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design June, 2003}. Tipler convincingly outlines the deficiencies in the current journal referee system, and proposes a tiered publishing structure not unlike that described in the ARL report above. (He describes lanl (http://xxx.lanl.gov), an online physics publication that allows anyone to post a paper or finding.)

Oddly, he also suggests that local state governments control grant funding as the fix for the “gift exchange” attributes of the current system (though he does state that in the ideal, no federal funds would be used to support research). While the paper loses focus as the author turns the topic to why papers espousing “intelligent design” (i.e., faith-based physics) theories have been discriminated against, the paper nonetheless is a good read on how and why the current peer-review system just doesn’t work.)

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