publishing as systematic?

Thanks to Amy Buckland for sending “Effects of Editorial Peer Review: A Systematic Review” my way. It’s from 2002 and was cited in a blog by Heather Morrison.

True, it’s an old study for me to blog about, but I was happy that Amy thought of me and I was amused by the study. Its authors looked at previous studies and concluded that more studies were necessary before a conclusion could be reached about the positive impact of blind review by referees.

I’m not surprised that there was nothing concrete showing the benefit of peer review. (Anyone know if there is now?) Is there anything systematic about publishing? How do you even go about showing the benefits? Compare different versions of manuscripts?

Peer review is about people, as is acquisitions, as is copyediting, as is design. Even though biomedical journals contain real data and high-level theory, we’re still dealing with people, people with fixed ideas about how information should be presented, biases, jealousies, and preferences that have more to do with themselves than with the work they’re reviewing.

The usual fix

<post edited March 13 thanks to a clarification> On our AAUP listserv today was a note from Greg Tananbaum of Consulting Services at the Intersection of Technology, Content & Academia quoting researcher Atanu Garai, who was calling attention, among other things, to the fact that articles submitted to institutional repositories before publication will be posted before the articles are copyedited and thus will be shared in a rough form potentially embarrassing to their authors.

In his note, Garai quotes Adam A. J. Deville, the author of “Sinners Well Edited” from the most recent issue of the Journal of Scholarly Publishing. I haven’t read the article, but Deville is quoted as criticizing some unedited papers as “rambling, repetitive, insufficiently researched, and badly argued.” Copyeditors can fix the first two, but university press copyeditors don’t, at least in my experience, usually introduce new sources, and they can’t fix an argument that is truly faulty, though they can repair and at least query some missing links.

Maybe my reaction to Garai’s pointing to the lack of copyediting in articles in repositories and his quote from someone complaining of writing problems that might not be addressed in the editing process is the standard gripe by editorial managers when we’re asked to fix something in copyediting that isn’t really fixable in our usual copyediting workflow. But I’ve also noticed that when university presses want to distinguish themselves and praise the work they do as a reason for why libraries shouldn’t become publishers or why scholars shouldn’t introduce their work into institutional repositories, they like to hold up copyediting as an example of their care and art. That was the context in which this note came to the listserv.

I’m not making a judgment call here about the repository. I’m merely pointing out that we (that is, university presses) are inconsistent about the value we place on copyediting. I’ve seen copyeditors criticized for “doing too much” when they  attempt to revise, even intelligntly so, or when they question content, and I’ve been asked to do a triage edit to move a book through the pipeline more quickly when someone feels it’s more important to get the book into the hands of readers than it is to make sure everything’s just so.

If I were to make a judgment about the Harvard mandate, I’d say that I don’t feel concerned about the lack of copyediting. The pieces being put in the repository are being called drafts, even though they are papers accepted for publication. They’ll be shared as information, not as finished packages.

And you know how I feel about text as information.

on text taking precedence

There’s nothing quite like being read to motivate writing. Thanks to the Chronicle for blogging my blog. Of course I now wish I’d said something about what motivated me to discuss “free.” Whether online publishing costs less than print publishing is an ongoing topic of discussion pretty much everywhere these things are discussed, but I specifically had in mind Cathy Davidson’s HASTAC blog in which she reminds the “new technology utopianists” about the high cost of producing scholarship in terms of housing and staffing people to work on that scholarship.

Michael Jensen’s post to Publishing Frontier (http://pubfrontier.com/2008/02/29/open-access-re-journals-vs-books/) was also on my mind. In a thoughtful piece about the differences between the cultures of journal and book publishing, Jensen offers some reasons for the relatively easy move to online formats for journals. He spells out some norms in scholarly publishing that are based on the value we put on nearly all of our books. The careful approach we take to every monograph (from thoughtful acquisition and extensive review to careful copyediting and creative design) doesn’t translate in full or easily to the work of publishing online.

Publishing born-digital books is not only technically beyond many of us but also, simply, foreign. Publishing PDFs of published books keeps the book design intact, but the feel of the book gets lost. To a lot of university press people a book online just doesn’t feel like a book. Its content seems more commoditized, its lifespan shorter.

My husband, a freelance copyeditor for university presses, used to work at a Macmillan imprint that publishes college textbooks, and he often talks about how quickly things changed once the senior management starting talking about “product,” not books. He wasn’t long for that place.

Moving to a text-takes-precedence model, where design gives way to an XML style sheet and printing is offered only on demand and serves just to hold the book together, means we have to focus on content and use and search, not aesthetics. It’s not exactly like thinking about books as “product ,” but it’s not too far off. Personally, I’m OK with it. I would be equally proud of my work if our books were published only online. Until I became responsible for design and production and not just editorial, I really did think of design and printing as a vehicle to get the text out there, and maybe that some of that view will always stick with me.

On working at a university press

When I’m feeling positive, I believe that university press staffs will find their way through the talk of finding a business model that allows us to stay in business and that allows scholars open access to the work of their colleagues. I believe that we’ll settle on some methods that will work well to sustain us. When I’m feeling overwhelmed by home (washing baby bottles, cooking food a three-year-old will eat) or work, I feel a little beaten down about the lack of change in university presses as a whole. I get it, of course. As at other presses, at mine we’re focused on the day-to-day work of publishing books–an effort that doesn’t leave a lot of time for abstract thinking and planning. I volunteered to lead my press’s effort into figuring things out, but so far I haven’t made enough time for it, being so bogged down by my “regular” work.

When I’m feeling positive, I find my own excuses very irritating. I have read for years about the changes in scholarly book publishing, and that subject is what motivated me to get a master’s in library and information science. So if I know something about what we need to do, I shouldn’t let anything stop me and I should get to work on our methods.

The solution seems obvious: university presses should publish hyperlinked scholarship online for “free.” It’s really neither that obvious or that simple, of course. Note the quotes around “free.” Note the lack of funds forthcoming from our administrations to support “free.” Note the growing list of expensive-to-produce regional books we’d have to sell in large quantities to support “free.” Note the lack of staff experienced in converting and tagging Microsoft Word documents and knowledgeable about creating XML-authoring systems.

What the Ithaca Report made clear, what researchers have been saying for years, and what university press leadership generally believes is that our university administrations need to play an important role in any macro-level changes university presses make. Most of all our libraries need to be involved. Ours is willing to be, and I’m supposed to be forwarding that relationship. As with presses, some libraries are more “advanced” than others. Harvard just mandated that its faculty must submit their published journal articles to its repository to be made available with open access, which means that Harvard faculty can only publish in journals that allow postprints. Wayne has a repository, but it is undermarketed and underutilized, and its use is not mandatory.

One of the first decisions we need to make, one that isn’t often discussed, is what kind of books we want to publish as objects and what kind of books we want to publish as information. When I was purely an editorial manager at Wayne, it was easy for me to value books purely as text that conveyed research and perspective. Now that I’m also responsible for design and production, I want our books to look good. Whereas before I believed that design was a vehicle for a clear and well-constructed argument, now I have a much better grip on the reality that authors, staff members, and, presumably, book buyers and readers want books to look and feel beautiful.

I’m feeling positive today. Writing about the challenge of addressing the challenges university presses face is motivating me to do some work on my goal of finding a way for Wayne State University Press and Wayne State University Libraries to work together that combines our publishing knowledge and the libraries’ IT and cataloging infrastructure and that keeps us both relevant and responsible to our universities, to the Detroit metro community, and to the readers of our books.