In Abundance: Networked Participatory Practices as Scholarship

The second paper from my thesis came out last week, in IRRODL.

I tip my hat to IRRODL…there is something truly lovely about publishing a paper on networked scholarship and being able to share it immediately and without barriers. In actual networks. Here’s the link, Twitter – BOOM. Here you go, Facebook – right there for all the people I went to high school with to enjoy. Whatever. Right there. Just like…like the internet actually works in scholarship!

Oh right.

I didn’t even have to pay any highwaymen hybrid open access rates, which is a blessing, as my institution does not offer funds for that and I enjoy being able to feed my children and other frivolities. I obviously do not understand the oligopoly that is academic publishing. I do, however, understand not paying thousands for things that can – broadly speaking – be accomplished for free. I’ve been trying not to do that for a way longer time than I’ve been playing this academia game.

Sometimes when I read the stuff that comes through my Twitter feed, I actually get the impression that we – “we” being the sub-species homo academicus, seldom the sharpest knives in the drawer of life, oddly – might slowly be getting it. Academic successs is not a lottery, I read today, but a rigged game rife with implicit bias and discrimination. Why, my stars! And then I saw, in black and white, words that said citation metrics “should never be used as the sole criterion to evaluate academics” and I swear little cherubs started singing in my ears.

But while these messages may be making their way through our Twitter skullz they are still not the dominant narratives of a profession in which digitizing journals – thus getting rid of the cost of paper and distribution – has actually resulted in a HIGHER concentration of scientific literature in the hands of a few major for-profit players, even though all the reviewing is done for free by academics who often don’t even have contracts that cover service labour anymore. Uh, brilliant system, guys. I’ll take Boardwalk, please!

And it’s worst in the social sciences…which *mutter mutter shoemakers’ wives something something.*

But we cling to the academic publishing system because it’s a prestige economy. It’s our prestige economy, dammit. And apparently they will have to pry it from our cold, dead, mostly-precariously-employed hands because there seems to be far more attachment to the impact factor of prestigious journals than to the possibility of changing things.

This logic would tell me that open publishing and networked sharing are not in my interest, because they do not fall under the purview of the narrow circle of “what counts” drawn by impact-factor-focused publishing. Yet that impact factor primarily counts because it’s supposed to increase citations and that‘s supposed to count because it’s supposed to help me snag one of the last remaining tenured professorships from the Mad Max landscape of contemporary higher ed…and do please send your tenure lines my way, friends. But. BUT.

This paper is about networks as sites of scholarship. Already. Not some kind of proto-scholarship but actual sites of scholarship of discovery and scholarship of integration and application and teaching – all Boyer’s (1990) categories for the profession. Plus, many participants indicated that their networked scholarship actually fulfills Boyer’s additional vision of a scholarship “beyond the hierarchy of functions” – a more inclusive, comprehensive and dynamic approach to professional practice. Networks are admittedly still supplemental sites, for the most part, because few paying scholarly careers are to be eked out here, and the odds remain slightly better in the institutional game. But in a world where the capacity to distribute ideas no longer requires paper, or printing, or the oligopoly of an Elsevier, it might be cool to at the very least try to reward the IRRODLs of the world and their other handy, hey look you can click this and there’s a paper right there at the end of that link! ilk. It might save our institutional libraries from bankruptcy, even. Maybe.

I probably shouldn’t be saying this out loud. I should be sleeping. I got in a car at 7:10 this morning, fluffed and buffed and ready to give a talk, but my jetlagged body was still under the impression it was shortly after midnight and even though I had practiced deep yogic breathing in my hotel bed for two solid hours I was awake. All. Night. Like Thelma in Thelma and Louise, awake with the kind of raw adrenalin that comes to some when they’re on the lam or me, apparently, when I cross the Atlantic. So now it’s 2am again here. And I am punch-drunk from lack of sleep and from the deep cognitive dissonance the academic publishing monopoly triggers in me, so I will just shut up now and say hey, pssst, click this link if you’re interested in how networks do some of the work of scholarship because the paper is RIGHT THERE, you guys. Because internet.

Magick.

6 Comments In Abundance: Networked Participatory Practices as Scholarship

  1. Maha Bali

    I loooove the tone of ur writing while jetlagged and sleep-deprived ;) and also agree w all you say and it absolutely AMAZES me that, almost 2 years of me believing and saying what you just said (tho not as snazzily) about open access, what seems OBVIOUS to me, to you, to many of us, for some reason still makes no sense to ppl used to traditional academic publishing. As in, blank stares and, “but…quality?” and i am like, “what has quality got to do with it? Writers don’t get paid. Reviewers don’t get paid. It costs v little to host the papers and zero marginal cost for each download. Not only what’s quality got to do with it, but where is all that money going and why are we enabling this?”

    And still – i had not thought of the precarious faculty aspect of it.

    And still – I advocate for and publish/review/edit 90% of my work open access but will take the (not bad) crumbs of Taylor and Francis allowing author manuscript to be immediately available for free. It is not everything but it’s something. Something largely unnecessary (if they just made it open access in the first place!) but better than not allowing it i guess

    Reply
    1. bon

      yes. the equation of (especially blind) review with quality runs deep as a belief system, yet exists in the same breath as – and often the same people as – the whole narrative of “peer review is mean and petty.” and the two statements are by no means mutually exclusive – but we don’t seem, as an academic culture, to be able to get to the place where we unpack the assumptions of both and start asking if we could structure things to still get whatever we consider “quality” while not enabling blind pettiness. Hybrid Pedagogy has been, for me, a real leader in this with their open peer review, because it’s forced me (and likely, many others who’ve been through the system) to grapple with what it means to give and take criticism as a known entity. i think some of the better criticism i’ve ever gotten has been in this venue…because it HAD to be really and truly addressed to me and what i was trying to say, rather than what the reviewer wanted to read.

      on the more conventional journals front, though, i too was pretty happy about the weeks of open access that my T & F paper (about openness) got when it came out in the spring. wish it was still open, as my library doesn’t get the journal it’s in…but it was a least a window that allowed me to share it widely.

      Reply
    1. Keyla

      I think it is important to note that this is also not a call for &#ti80;Protes8ant-2zationࢭ of the Orthodox Churches. Holy icons, chants, and all should remain in tact. I don’t think anyone is seriously stating that we must emulate the local United Methodist parish hall.

      Reply
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