Publication, Power, and Patronage: On Inequality and Academic Publishing – Critical Inquiry

"... we interpret the data we collected from the past half century of scholarly publication in the humanities to suggest that historical and contemporary attempts to undo the effects of systems of patronage and cultural capital through systems of print and now digital publication have failed. The concentration of power and prestige within elite circles has continued, even if in different form, from the early modern republic of letters and family universities to the contemporary academy. Invoking Clauset’s and others’ notions of “free” ideas—of removing all filters from a system—overlooks the very clear ways that systems of publication always encode forms of bias and selection within them. Knowledge has never circulated freely, unencumbered by institutions, technologies, traditions, and norms. The “free exchange of ideas” requires media––things, concepts, technologies, practices, institutions––that intervene and get in between. Be it the patronage systems of early modern universities, the bureaucratic systems of the German research university, or the mixed systems of contemporary universities, systems of communication and transmission are never free from mediation.

So what is to be done?

We would argue that the answer is neither a return to ideals of incalculability nor a belief in the power of free knowledge. Using new digital technologies and methods to better understand academic institutions does not necessarily make one complicit in the “neoliberal” university or exacerbate the “inequality both between ‘the haves’ of digital humanities and the ‘have-nots’ of mainstream humanities.”[41] Wisely used, such technologies and methods can help reveal how longstanding, persistent, and intractable such disparities have been. What we need in our view is not less quantification but more; not less mediation but mediation of a different kind. It is not enough to demand intellectual diversity and assume its benefits. We need new ways of measuring, nurturing, valuing, and, ultimately, conceiving of it. We need alternative systems of searching, discovering, and cultivating intellectual difference. We need platforms of dissemination that don’t simply replicate existing systems of concentration and patronage, just as we need new metrics of output and impact that rely less on centrality and quantity and more on content and difference."