Larry Hurtado says: >But we need to legitimize and make fully respectable internet >refereed vehicles. How to do that? How do we get academia to >get on board? How to we get heads of depts and tenure/promotion >committees, univ. V-Ps, research grant bodies, etc., to see >publications in refereed internet vehicles as in principle and >eventually in fact as significant publication as the known paper >vehicles?
I suggest that although professional legitimization is a necessary condition and an important one, it is not in itself sufficient, and want to point out that Steven has already shown how that is to be done, both through his own activity as an on-line developer and through his discussion of peer review in general in many different papers. But legitimation is not something that can be globally established at a single stroke, as it were, and on the level of general administration. Legitimization is discipline-specific, and even that describes it too broadly: it is something that is established at the level of professional organization which is usually referred to as "areas" (as in "area of specialization") or "fields". I don't think these units can be strictly defined or delimited in practice, but academicians typically do identify themselves with some special interest or range of interests in common with a number of others whom they regard as their special peers and with the communicational media in service to those particular interests (usually including but not necessarily limited to journals). When the professional colleagues who mediate the communication in that area by editing, refereeing, arranging, and otherwise organizing communication within the area go on-line, the people who identify themselves with that area will go on-line with them, and the figures who are leading the migration will legitimate it because they are already regarded as legitimate. Legitimization is essentially a grass-roots phenomenon, and it cannot be brought into existence by any sort of top-down management strategy. It is not a matter of whether it should be or not: scholarly and scientific legitimization CANNOT be established by any sort of top-down administrative arrangement. Thus when you ask "How do we get academia to get on board", and then specify that further as getting "heads of depts and tenure/promotion committees, univ. V-Ps, research grant bodies, etc., to see publications in refereed internet vehicles as in principle and eventually in fact as significant publication as the known paper vehicles?" the problem is being stated in a way that makes it insoluble because it suggests that we can and should do something that will persuade these people of its legitimacy. I don't know whom you mean by "we", but that is not the task, in any case. The task is for us -- you, me, and other faculty taken singly -- to move what is legitimate on-line insofar as we are personally in position to do so or to assist in doing so and leave it to all of these people you mention to recognize legitimacy when they see it, as they will, since it will already be familiar to them. They legitimize nothing and the faculty is not required to legitimate itself to them (except insofar as they are themselves faculty), but only in the eyes of professional colleagues. This is not an insult to administrators -- who are, after all, faculty themselves -- but a simple fact about intellectual life, and it is implicit in the very idea of peer review, by the way. The task of legitimization is first of all a faculty task, not an administrative one, and it is a piece-meal task of migration, area by area, not one that can be globally conceived according to any general formula. This is perhaps substantially the same as what Stevan was getting at in his dismissal of the elaborate managerial arrangements for legitimating new journals and the like and pointed out that the existing journals are doing okay. Or perhaps he had something else in mind. I leave that for him to say. But, in any case, the problem is not primarily an administrative problem but a faculty problem. We have to do it ourselves, one by one, insofar as we have any power to do that or to encourage that. There is indeed something that the administration can do, but it is not by devising a new scheme of managerial control but rather by devising ways of providing support for the faculty who are willing and able to do what they can to move their professional life on-line. That has not been happening thus far in American academia, and that is one reason why so little has been happening at the faculty level as regards making a transition to networking. I will not go into detail here about why faculty are so little prone to move their activities on-line at present other than to point out that there has to be some concrete professional motive for this particular person here and that particular person there to go to the trouble of going on-line, something that is discipline- or area-specific that requires it. As a friend of mine in mathematics put it, "I'll re-tool when I have a new task that requires it." Now, for almost any area there probably are in fact many reasons for going on-line, but these reasons have to be concretely relevant area by area, and they have to relate to what are already problems in the field to which going on-line is a solution. To be sure, there are some general considerations that might apply in many areas. For example, in many humanities fields the lack of jobs in the past couple of decades in this country has resulted in the distribution of talented young Ph.D.'s across the country to many small colleges at remote places where they have heavy teaching loads and no travel money and become lost to the profession as regards any continuing communication with their colleagues, national and international, and anyone who supposes that this loss is negligible because the best got good jobs is . . . let me just say wrong. Indeed, there are many who have left higher education altogether and work in all sorts of places now. The establishing of network arrangements that could bring such people back into vital contact with their field could generate such an increase in productivity, if productivity is what is wanted, that the time and expense involved in doing it would be negligible in comparison. To do this effectively would require that the journals and other communicational media go on-line properly, among other things, but that, too, is not a matter of much expense except for the professional time involved in developing on-line facilities. Now, it is an open question as to how many journal editors and others would be willing to put their time into this, but I am confident that some would, and if it is not being done now it is because there is no support for it anywhere to speak of, whether it be financial or in terms of academic status or prestige. Who gets any reward for a mere professional service function? Indeed, who can think in terms of professional service knowing that any time put in on that is almost certainly going to be cause for punishment for failing to produce routine publications instead? The administration could do something about this sort of thing, for example, if it realized that it is not a matter of instituting a new administrative unit or defining a new kind of job but simply of providing protective support for individuals who do have some sense of professional service but never have opportunity to practice it. There are many, many ways in which the paper-embodied word has limited us, but it will take people in the various special fields to figure out what, specifically, the powers of networked communication can do to compensate for those limitations. Little of this will be done, though, as long as there is no accommodation made for it. The administration could enable this, but again, only so long as it is understood that what is wanted is protective support, not administrative control and planning. I'll stop with the following point, of immediate importance here. The single most important reason why nothing is happening in the faculty yet as regards migration on-line is that administration has not yet come down in the right way and with definiteness of intent on the question of copyright. Nothing truly worthwhile can be done on-line until we gain the power to put our work on-line without first having to get permissions (when we can get them), or else run the risk of lawsuits. Nor is it limited to that. There is also very real reason to be unsure of one's own university deciding, without further ado, that the development work one has done is theirs to dispose of as they will. Issues like this in connection with intellectual property rights come up again and again now and they are NOT being resolved in favor of the author. Until these things are resolved and in the author's or developer's favor there will be occasional websites of interest and use, but mostly it will just stay as alien to academia as it is at present. -- Joseph Ransdell <[email protected]> or <[email protected]> Dept of Philosophy Texas Tech Univ. Lubbock TX 79409 (806) 742-3158 office 797-2592 home 742-0730 fax ARISBE:Peirce Telecommunity http://www.door.net/arisbe http://www.door.net/arisbe/homepage/ransdell.htm
