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.