Scholarship in the Open
I have recently read, and I highly recommend, Toni Prug’s and Benjamin Geer’s work-in-progress essay on the limits of academic publishing and the need to renovate it in a new, technologically radical way. To summarize its main points (but do not let this discourage you from reading the whole thing), Toni’s aim, in the first part, is to counterpose an open-access (OA) model, to an open-process (OP) one. OA stands for a free internet access to journals and articles with limited copyright, a model which we would all like to see ubiquitously implemented, but which however leaves the development of a paper–from the original author’s idea to published version, through submssion, peer review and revisions–largely unmodified as compared to the, often Kafkaesque, standards we all know, which end up being an obstacle for young scholars. See for example this interesting article on the topic, which highlights the systems of power and prestige of big journals and how these structures of interests do nothing to help new scholarship.
OP, on the other hand would indicate a structural revolution of the whole publishing process, where through the implementation of dedicated software (or, to start with, even a mere mailing list) submissions would be visible by editors and authors alike and the peer review process would be similarly done ‘in the open’, with the aim of producing higher-quality material, minimizing delays due to laziness of reviewers, and pruning away authors of low-quality or unoriginal work, who would be immediately exposed and marginalized, where all of this would end up increasing the efficiency and the prestige of the journal.
The details of a (possible) OP are described in the second part of the essay, details developed on the model of the Linux kernel development process (one of Ben’s famous night-time strikes of genius). In other words, the OP model of academic publishing would integrate both the elements of the standard ‘open source’ paradigm: free access to the ‘final’ product and free access to the process of production of the product.
Now, I cannot sufficiently stress how much I like, believe in and support this kind of idea, for such a revolution in the process of publishing is absolutely necessary and long overdue. Our whole academic infrastructure is stuck with quaint, dated and frankly plain anachronistic means of concretizing and publishing the outputs of original research which are its raison d’être.
I believe that the perceived need for this kind of revolution will increase in the next few years. According to Toni OA will be very popular within 5-8 years; I hope sooner than that. Through our brief conversation some elements through which it will be necessary to work in order to bring OA (and eventually OP) in the spotlight arose. I want to re-organize them here:
1) Activism to spread and promote the idea. Provoking enough consensus in both students and staff to force universities’ administrations to actively implement new policies. This will include events, talks and demonstrations (for example, what happened in London last March). Unfortunately, editorial policies of journals and publishing houses are often detached from the purely academic environment, and rely for funding and prestige on research and quality assessments by national councils dependent on government funding. Still, publishing houses and journals, in themselves, produce nothing, as they rely on the imput of ‘raw materials’ from academics. What would happen if scholars (to start with, a number of ‘big names’ would already send a powerful message) would start refusing to publish in non OA journals? An immediate analogy comes to mind, the music industry. With one, big, difference. Publishing scholars do not rely on their publications for economic survival, for that comes from their university salaries. Scholarly publications are only made for the enlargement of knowledge or (as often is the case) for personal glory. But hardly to get rich. (i.e. I have a paper waiting for approval in a ‘prestigious’ journal of comparative philosophy. Even if I’ll get published, my readership will probably be around, if I am lucky, 30-40 people. I will not get a single penny for that, but the journal will require a subscription for the article to be downloaded).
2) Diffusion of sufficient technological literacy in universities. This means that it is not enough to have infrastructures (hardware) and IT departments (to implement the software), if the average academic is not be able to use them. It seems like a trivial point, but I have to met faculty members who ignored the existence of Internet journal archives such as Jstor or IngentaConnect. Among the required skills of existing and new scholars there must be a basic knowledge of the technological means to do proper research. As long as our colleagues, supervisors, deans, and principals do not perceive the need to renew and expand the–often intrinsically nepotistic in their predilection for a closed ‘board’ of peer reviewers–methods of research and production, no large scale implementation will occur. And as long as the technological mean is seen as an obstacle rather than a tool to reduce time-wasting and to increase the amount of feedback (and hence overall quality), those who are comfortable with the old ways will never perceive this need.
3) The elaboration of a philosophical interpretation of OA and OP, to set theoretical coordinates capable of grounding the necessity and exposing the fertility of such a new method of interfacing scholars with their work and with other scholars. This explosion of directionality, disseminating the process of creation of knowledge on a cloud-like structure, hence breaking open the vestigial, quaint, closed-track avenues of thought which are a leftover from pre-digitalization scholarship, will allow for new methods of research, characterized by real-time feedback where the technological mean will drammaticaly increase the space of action for other subjects to serve as members of a networked dialoguing community. The point is that both the network and the actors involved in it (and here I hint at Latour’s actor-network theory, but I will try a complete Latourian reading of OP scholarship when my readings will be completed) will undergo continiuous structural rearrangement: the produced knowledge will modify the infrastructure of communication rather than the other way around.
Scholarship is the tradition of trying to improve, collate and resolve uncertainties. The fundamental ground rules are that no issue is ever closed, no interconnection is impossible. It all comes down to what is written, because the thoughts and minds themselves, of course, do not last (the apparatus of citation and footnote are simply a combination of hat-tipping, go-look-if-you-don’t-believe-me, and you-might-want-to-read-this-yourself). “Knowledge” then–and indeed most of our civilization and what lasts of those previous–is a vasty cross-tangle of ideas and evidential materials, not a pyramid of truth. So that preserving its structure and improving its accessibility, is important to us all. This is why we need hyperlinks and thinkertoys.
So Ted Nelson, in 1974. Today however, we can expand his intuitions and break out of the purely written form, towards new kind of media. A hyperlinked way of indexing knowledge will indeed produce a new hybrid space, where the limits of the written text will be evaded hence creating a new cognitive paradigm in the humans which inhabit it, where linear and intentional subject-object thinking will be replaced by a multilayered approach to reality capable of rearranging the epistemic gaze of humans over the non human world (and here I am thinking of Harman’s object-oriented philosophy).
These thoughts are still quite embryonic, but I do see a line that goes from the ideology of OP through a philosophical re-evaluation of interactions between subjects and between objects towards a new paradigm (or better, towards the dissolution of such a paradigm) of ‘human being’ (and here I have in mind the transhumanist movement and the idea of augmented reality as an expansion on the ‘real world’ of the indexical system of hyperlinking). The vision of Vannevar Bush, if we consider its application to the world of academia, which seems to paradoxically lag behind the internet world, is in most cases still only a vision. 54 years later.
[For a more positive note, I must mention once again the work done in the UK by Gary Hall, in particular when it comes to his OA journal, Culture Machine, which often deals with these kind of themes (see here and especially here), and his recent Digitalize this Book! The Politics of New Media or Why We Need Open Access Now (which, ironically, I don't think is available in OP!!).]
This field is powerfully emerging in these years on the academic scene, and the potential for philosophical speculation are as many as the actual potential for academic and–why not–political renovation. My observations here are partial and still somewhat inconsequential, but the direction–I believe–is the right one. I will soon try and unpack some of these themes in a more systematic fashion. In the meantime, any comment is–of course–very welcome.
Fabio Cunctator
You might enjoy Peter Suber and Gavin Baker’s very interesting blog, Open Access News, at http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/fosblog.html . It’s a great general clearing house for information on OA, including, for example the many mandates for OA coming from funding agencies. There’s also a lot of interest in the use of open source approaches to research in the sciences. See, for example, a summary of a recent project here: http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/the-polymath-project-scope-of-participation/
Thanks Michael, I’ll check them out.
EDIT: I did check your blog, very interesting. I’m adding you to my blogroll.
You might, also, find interesting this article from the Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/nov/24/file-sharing-free-piracy
At the risk of blowing my own horn, let me also direct you to my book draft, Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, which is currently undergoing an open review process at http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/plannedobsolescence. The manuscript argues for the kinds of open processes that you discuss here, in a number of different forms — open authoring, open review, open publishing structures, open standards, etc.
No problem that actually looks great. As soon as I got time I’ll take a deep look at it. Thanks.
Would it be possible to go even further than this? Could we open not just access to texts (as in open access), and the editorial process by which they proceed toward publication through ‘submission, peer review and revisions’ (as in open process), but the actual processes of creating, writing, editing, publishing, reviewing and revising texts themselves?
And if so, what would the implications be for academic ‘stars’ such as Latour?
See, for one possible example/speculation, http://liquidbooks.pbworks.com/Introduction+to+Version+One+Point+Zero
Hi Gary, thanks for your comment. Yes I completely agree with your proposal, and I am aware of your project of LiquidBooks (which I find not only a good idea, but a necessary one) and that is what I had in mind when I made some point in the conclusion of a post of mine.
As I see it the two issues you underlie are crucial, and related: 1) what kind of different philosophical production (I mention philosophy because it is my field, but of course this works for other disciplines too, with a different set of priorities and goals) could an ‘open source’ philosophical text bring to the fore? In what different pathways (of thought) would a non-individualized intellectual production proceed?; 2) What of authorship? This is a delicate issue because it not only involves academic ‘production’ per se, but because revisiting academic authorship would collapse the mechanisms of academic self-regulation. When I’ll finally submit my PhD thesis, it will be expected to be my original production (no plagiarism) and at the same time it’ll have to be supported by a network of academic references (names, individuals). I understand that to complain about this without offering an alternative is silly, but at the same time I think that it is time for academia to open up to different possibilities. What about a ‘collective’ PhD ‘thesis’ composed by text written by me, images produced by a graphic designer, and a mathematical structure contributed by a matemathician? Of course, again, problems emerge: how do you evaluate how much work this specific person has done? Do they deserve a PhD? But on the other side, this opening up of the academic grassroot (grad students) to multidiscliplinary collaboration since the beginning of our careers would have positive effects on the next generation of academics.
Unfortunately, for now, these are just random ideas.
Working in an Art School, I’m aware that people do complete practice-based PhDs which may feature collaboration. If they’re in the performing arts, producing dance or theatre performances as part of their PhD, other people are often involved in collaborating with them on those elements. But that’s different from the kind of collaborative PhD thesis you’re referring to. I know some people have at least thought about writing their PhD’s on collaborative media in a collaborative fashion – i.e. they provide the basic outline of the thesis, and make it open for others to build upon and develop – but I don’t know anyone as yet who has actually got a PhD in this way (although I’m sure there must be someone by now).
I think you’re right, for all its interrogation of concepts such as writing, the author, the subject, the text, the human, the proper name, the signature, and so on, philosophy currently does seem to have its basis in a quite individualized mode of intellectual production. What’s more this is as true for the Latour/Ranciere/Zizek generation as it was for that of Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, et al. (Watching the film ‘Examined Life’ , it’s interesting how often the philosophers featured say things like ‘This is what I call….’).
What you say in the other post you refer to, about what blogging and the blogosphere has meant to SR, is interesting in this respect, too. Because of course most blogs don’t allow for collaborative writing. The work of a blog’s author is kept very separate from that of those who may wish to use the same blog to respond to that work (as is happening here and now, on this very blog in fact). The two identities and roles (mine and yours in this case) are kept quite distinct and separate by the particular technology employed.
So presumably the medium of the blog is an actor in the production of SR – an actor which shapes that philosophical form which would otherwise not be the same – in this way, too. Because blogs help to maintain and support the individualization of the production process of philosophy and SR you’re talking about. Which makes you wonder, is this another reason blogs specifically have been so important to SR?
it is very true, and this is a problem in which authorship/intellectual copyright intersects with ethical issues: does a claimed patronage over a terminology or a philsophical position undermine its ethical neutrality (if this neutrality is claimed, of course)? Philosophical positions are not discovered, are formulated. Let me quote something of which I am very fond:
Again, it seems to me that an ‘open source’ restructuring of intellectual production would bring these issues to the open: highligth the problem of our intellectual individuality, which should not be neutralized in a Borg-like philosophical community, but actually enhanced as long as it is carried forward in close contact with other individualities.
Precisely. And if our identities are constrained by the technology, and if our philosophical positions are a part of our identity, doesn’t the technology itself condition intellectual production? And yet, if I was to give you my ID and Password or otherwise grant you open access to posting on this blog what would readers read? Names carry weight: would it be ‘Fabio’s blog featuring Gary Hall’ or ‘that blog on which Gary Hall writes’? Whatever our production, the reader’s response will be influenced by what they expect to find and who they expect to be the author. Does it mean that authors should philosophize in anonimity for their pure thought to be carried forth without distortions?
As for SR, a critical outlook should of course keep in view these issues: I do claim that the technology is shaping its evolution, but of course, individualities are crucial: lots of people read Harman’s blog because he is Harman, even if he writes about the songs he’s got in his iPod (which is a perfectly legitimate thing to do on your own blog of course). Moreover, the SR network is still a network. Where I mean that for all its hyperlinked structure, a network is still an ultimately closed (at any given moment) structure. Flexible, expandable, but still limited by its own nodes. Of course here I am pushing it too far, for in practical terms, what kind of real-time open structure is ever possible? Would it be a structure at all?
So concluding, I do think that issues of copyright/open source, ethics, technological medium and individuality are closely related when it comes to intellectual production, and they all participate in the way this production shapes and influences others.
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