Caveat Lector

Now that my antennae are up regarding all things social and journal-y (as opposed to “journalistic,” which means something else entirely), I keep noticing relevant tidbits!

For example, Steve Lawson comments on the uses of one’s social network as a research filter (which I said something about to STM, if not quite so cogently). I use this. I daresay you do too. Insofar as discovery systems pay no heed to it, they are rather hobbled.

Now, of course no discovery system can exactly reproduce what I get from my professional network. Even link-tracking systems like del.icio.us, unalog, and CiteULike can’t do that, because they don’t necessarily track provenance (where I noticed a work), attention level (how important a work turns out to be to me), or works that I don’t actually bookmark even though I found them to be worthwhile reads. Despite that, link-tracking systems have a better proxy for professional word-of-mouth networks than anybody else does at the moment—yes, even better than most current forms of citation tracking, in my humble and somewhat-uneducated opinion, because they’re faster off the mark. We could do worse than work with that.

I note also experiments such as Faculty of 1000, which attempts to create recommendation networks ab initio, starting from people believed to be experts. I don’t know whether the created or the organic approach is more workable; like as not they can survive alongside each other.

Either way, though, the journal is not the unit of recommendation, absolutely not the center of the social process that gets an article read and valued. Maybe it was, once, before I was born—maybe the mere fact of publication was sufficient recommendation. That’s not so any more, if it ever was. If I were a journal editor, I would worry about that.

Elseweb, Dan Cohen talks about the social-professional benefits of blogging (added emphasis mine):

Surely the happiest and most unexpected outcome of creating this blog has been the way that it has gotten me in touch with dozens of people whom I probably would not have met otherwise. I meet other professional historians all the time, but the blog has introduced me to brilliant and energetic people in libraries, museums, and archives, literary studies, computer science, people within and outside of academia. Given the balkanization of the academy and its distance from “the real world” I have no idea how I would have met these fascinating people otherwise, or profited from their comments and suggestions. I have never been to a conference where someone has come up to me out of the blue and said, “Hi Dan, I’m so-and-so and I wanted to introduce myself because I loved the article you wrote for such-and-such journal.” Yet I regularly have readers of this blog approach me out of the blue, and in turn I seek out others at meetings merely because of their blogs. These experiences have made me feel that blogging has the potential to revitalize academia by creating more frequent interactions between those in a field and, perhaps more important, between those in different fields. So: thanks for reading the blog and for getting in touch!

If I were a journal editor…

I think Dan’s word “balkanization” is key to part of the problem. Journals can’t reasonably serve as community-builders because their sheer numbers and their use of blind peer-review tend to obstruct loyalty of authorship and readership. How can a journal build a community, when its authors publish in seventeen other journals, its readers read bits and pieces of a hundred other journals, its interactions with both readers and authors are routinized and anonymous, and its actual producers (from editors through reviewers on down to conversion peasants) are faceless nonentities? How can a journal show any given author to best advantage within its nominal “community” when it doesn’t hold all that author’s work, barely organizes itself by author anyway, and as often as not uses toll-access and OA-hostile publishing agreements to forbid the author from creating such a showcase herself?

(Trust me, an unlinked CV online is a remarkably ineffectual self-marketing tool. A linked one, now, with one- or at most two-click access to the works that look intriguing—now that is a marketing tool. And let’s just not get me started on the self-marketing problems created by citation styles that use author initials plus surname. I have had to fight to figure out who some people in my proverbial Pile of Papers actually are!)

Whereas my blog is easy to ferret through, easy to learn about me with, even easy to find a fair chunk of my formal-publication record from (as often as I link to my MARS page!). I can attract expert attention with it; in fact, I have. I can use it to insert myself into professional conversations; in fact, I have. Even considering the potential disadvantages of oversharing (and honestly, I’ve yet to run into any serious actual disadvantages thereof, despite a lengthy record of oversharing), blogging stacks up well against journal publishing as a tool for integration into a given professional community. And I don’t even have comments enabled here!

I hear a lot about journal “branding,” but I don’t think community is a brand that journals (including society journals!) are working for these days, usually touting “quality” above all other considerations. Maybe that’s how it’s had to be. I don’t know; I wasn’t in the business very long, and I was never privy to this kind of strategic discussion. I don’t know that matters need to continue this way—but that’s up to societies and journals.

If I were a journal editor, though…

Journals are losing face to other knowledge-distribution mechanisms because of speed differences, access differences, quality-of-service differences, cost differences, social-networking differences, all sorts of differences. What they’ve kept, kept a stranglehold on in many disciplines, is the perception of career advantage: “if I publish in journal X/a peer-reviewed journal/any journal, it will advance my career.”

(You’ll notice I just dodged the “quality” bullet. Whatever a lot of journals are peddling, it ain’t quality. I should, however, note that editors of open-access journals have somewhat less to worry about than their toll-access counterparts, because their speed, access, and cost differences vis-a-vis the unfettered Internet are less, and they still retain at least some career-advantage potential. Exactly how much is discipline-dependent.)

What if blogging, performed well, represents a viable alternate route to career advantage? Sure, no academic in a field that requires journal publications is going to survive tenure hearings without them (for now). But if blogging introduces a young scholar/professional to more people who can help that young scholar or professional advance than does slogging through one or a few more journal articles, I expect young scholars and young professionals will figure out for themselves the most profitable avenue of action. And if tenure continues receding out of reach for young scholars, journals have even less to offer; visibility and networking will inevitably become a better career tool.

The less dependent a given discipline is on journal articles, the more journals in that discipline have to fear. Take me, for instance. I’ve had the same experience Dan recounts, many times over. Looking at my current CV, blog contacts account (directly or indirectly) for everything I have published and presented this year (not all of which is on my MARS page yet, mind you), with the sole exception of the JCDL tutorial. Will what I’ve done stack up against peer-reviewed journal articles when I come up for retention and promotion early next year? We’ll have to see… but as I read the stipulations in MPOW’s Librarians’ Handbook, it will.

(I hasten to say that I don’t think I have a lock on promotion, though I feel reasonably secure about retention given how rarely MPOW decides not to renew contracts. The promotion problem isn’t my record, which I will make bold to say stacks up well against those of my colleagues. The problem is my seniority, or rather lack thereof.)

Find me one library journal—ONE—that could have done as well for me as that. (No fair bringing up contests.) Quadruple points if it’s peer-reviewed; as I noted above, peer-reviewed journals are even less effective networking tools because of the author-randomization effects of peer review. Why should I write for peer-reviewed library publications if I don’t have to? Might as well dig a hole and bury my writing in it, for all the tangible good it’s going to do me.

The estimable T. Scott recounts the usual tired death-of-journals boogeyman scenario: everything goes open access and librarians stop subscribing to journals. For various reasons, that’s not how I think things are going to go, though I’ll happily be straight-up in the way T. Scott wishes—I do believe open access will damage the existing journal system, perhaps fatally, and I’m still all for open access. (The folks at STM Innovations kindly laughed at me when I said I was the enemy. I wasn’t kidding. I am the enemy, just not for the reasons they think. If the chapter I wrote for Rachel Singer Gordon’s book ever manages to come out, then they’ll realize why I’m the enemy.)

I think the death of toll-access, for-profit, heavily-bureaucratized journals may well occur not with the bang of lost subscriptions, but the whimper of lost authors. Not today, not tomorrow either… but maybe sooner than even I think.

If I were a journal editor…