Recomposing Scholarship | Impact of Social Sciences

" ... The day to day reality of research is often much messier, more complex and more mundane. If really pushed about what we actually do as scholars, we would have to get into the business of describing an unwieldly constellation of different people, objects, and practices: editorial boards and email threads, style guidelines and spelling conventions, indexes and search engines, bookmarks and bibliographies, legal agreements and literature reviews, conference dinners and calls for proposals, seminars, scholarly societies and social media. This sprawling edifice of interactions and exchanges is what scholarship is made of. Today I’d like to invite you to reflect upon whether you believe that this contingent bricolage of arrangements is adequate for the task we’d like to give to it. In particular does it succeed in supporting the kind of scholarly exchange that we’d like to see in the 21st century? If sheer quantity is a measure of success then things aren’t going too badly. The amount of research being published is growing at an astonishing rate. Recent studies estimate that around 50 million journal articles have been published since their first appearance in the mid 17th century (Jinha). This colossus is estimated to be expanding at around 1.5 to 2 million articles per year, which is roughly 3 to 4% annually. (Scopus lists about 1.6 million in 2012. The UK Publishers Association suggested global output is around 2 million per year, quoting 120,000 articles as around 6% in evidence to UK parliament. This is up from an estimated 1.3 million in 2006.) But more people publishing more words does not necessarily mean that our system of scholarly communication is serving us well ... Unfortunately our current system of scholarly communication has often developed with other priorities in mind. For a start it echoes our broader cultural and social attitudes towards sharing the fruits of our creative and intellectual labour more generally: our disproportionate focus on protection and compensation, commodification and control. The default is still that our creations cannot be shared without payment or explicit permission. Even though they are unlikely to receive a penny for it, scholars are often inclined to be more guarded than generous about sharing their published work. This social and cultural hostility to sharing in turn reflects the state of the law, which is profoundly imbalanced towards protecting and rewarding rights-holders rather than recognising that copyright is an instrument which should strike a balance between protecting private interests and providing the public with access to the fruits of our collective intellectual labour.  Furthermore, the academic career structures in many disciplines are heavily focused around and driven by publication. Not even on scholarly output, but very specific forms and genres of publication, with a strong focus on certain journals and publishers. Journal articles and monographs have become the de facto currency of scholarship, and certain venues are worth more than others. Other forms of engagement – from collaborative projects to conferences – are often not recognised, or only recognised insofar as they result in publication.  If publishing operations such as journal titles and monograph series are the stars which structure the orbits of scholarly communication, then we may forget that what gives them their gravitational force is ultimately the scholars and scholarly communities associated with them. Hence we may conflate the trust, reputation and authority that derives from the scrutiny, energy and attention of a particular group of scholars, with the avenue through which this is manifested: namely the title of a particular publication or series ... Unfortunately the social, cultural and institutional conditions we looked at above conspire to create an environment in the humanities and social sciences which is generally unfavourable to the idea of open access – which at first sight might look to be an affront to authorial sovereignty and integrity, an impediment to career progress, and at best ignorant and at worst brutally indifferent as to how scholarship and scholarly communities actually function.  These are myths ... What must happen if we want to make this constellation of people, things and practises more open? If we want to make our scholarly system less exclusively focused on protection, monetisation and control, and more fair, more inclusive, more collaborative? What must happen for it to become more centred around the production of meaningful interaction than on the production of saleable commodities for the publishing industry?  Two critical ingredients are public-interest policymaking which is sensitive to the dynamics of scholarship, and proactive support from researchers to champion new initiatives and arrangements discipline by discipline, institution by institution, country by country ..."