After carefully studying Stevan's response to Anne Buck's letter of clarification about the Scholars Forum Proposal, and his subsequent posts as well, I still find myself in complete agreement with both his critical and his positive points, and am left only with the questions I had earlier:
FIRST, about what, EXACTLY, the proposal is going to be as regards copyright policy in particular, and, SECOND, about whether the proponents of the proposal will be willing to have it scaled back as far as Stevan urges, and if so what would be left of it. I think what is wanted as regards copyright is clear enough, though, and I am only concerned with the second question here. And I will focus in the present post on only one point in this connection, namely, that Stevan is quite correct in saying that the idea of the Consortium having an administrative function of the sort described in the Proposal must be abandoned, and this not only because it is simply impertinent to the problem, as he points out, but also because there is no possibility that such a system of support could actually be established, for reasons I will point out below. If the Proposal is still to include the idea of forming a Consortium as basic, then the task of the Consortium has to be reconceived. (I take it that this is what Stevan is urging, in effect, in his laconic description of the Proposal as an "archival initiative"; but I will reserve for another message a suggestion about how that might be fleshed out more intuitively and substantially in the interest of assuring or re-assuring the proponents of the original Proposal that there is something in this which is worth their further efforts. For I don't see that they have enough reason to think so given only what has been said thus far.) The original Proposal is for the creation of a new administrative system, with librarial and computer service components, at an organizational level constituted formally by a Consortium of individual universities, which would oversee, facilitate, and regulate academic publication processes according to a new model of publication which takes appropriate advantage of the potentialities of computer-based networking. The idea is, I take it, that after the basic bugs of the new system have been worked out in connection with a few cases which would illustrate it nicely, there would be a publicizing of the system as providing the facilities for publication processes embodying a new paradigm, called "The New Model", and the member universities would then make use of such persuasive resources as they have at their disposal to attract the editors of existing journals of a reputable sort to use the Consortium facilities with the permission of its administrators and to encourage reputable faculty interested in starting up new journals to locate themselves under the auspices of the Consortium and make use of the facilities as well. Although universities of great prestige have correspondingly great powers of making people offers they are unlikely to refuse, there would seem to be no need to resort to high-pressure tactics in persuading the right sort of people, already in leading roles as editors of journals, to come on board what would be, in effect, The Prestige Express, and there would seem to be no reason for those who support their journals as readers and contributors to hesitate about going along with this as well since there is no change in basic editorial policy entailed by it. This done -- the most prestigious of the journals now being based in the Consortium -- it would probably be more a matter of establishing waiting lists for the privilege of coming on board than of doing any more persuading. I try to capture in the above what I think the proponents of the original Proposal might reasonably feel to be the prospects for such an enterprise because it seems to me that Stevan's point that existing journals don't need to be subsumed under such an arrangement because they are already doing a good job might mistakenly be brushed aside as impertinent on the grounds that the question isn't whether they are doing okay but whether they are making any moves to go online properly, and since there is little indication that they are, why shouldn't the prestige of the universities forming the Consortium be used to persuade them to get on board The Prestige Express and get the migration to the internet started at last? I don't know how Stevan would answer that, though I don't doubt that he is prepared to do so; but my own suggestion is that it all sounds very good except for one thing: it is bound to occur to the rank and file of faculty, when they understand what is happening, that academic publication in the US is being brought under institutional administrative control as regards its content in a way that it has never before been controlled in this country, and the more cynical of them will have a field day in drawing Orwellian comparisons, some of which might in fact turn out in due time to be quite just. Now, I don't wish to engage in any such polemics here, but I do not believe that even the great prestige of the member universities of such a Consortium would be capable of stopping the tongues of the critics, and that those journal editors who didn't think it through clearly beforehand and agreed to such an arrangement initially, with the best of intentions, will quickly perceive that getting out of it fast is their first priority. I suppose the response to this objection might be to say that the Consortium can be formed under the understanding that there will be no prejudice involved in the recognition of editorial boards which it will support, and no control over content except such as the boards are already providing. But what could this mean in practice? That the Consortium will support every editorial board that requests support? Is the Prestige Express going to be so tolerant as to allow journals on-board which its directors believe to be potentially or actually damaging to its prestige? I don't think so. The very thing that gives the Consortium its clout -- the prestige of the member universities -- insures that it will pursue exclusionary policies that can and will be construed as nothing more than power strategies of the elite for eliminating contradicting voices by discrediting them as of inferior rank and worth. There is no way around this, so far as I can see. The Consortium must make choices about who to support and who not to support and these are the choices of the privileged avowedly in the interest of the superior, who can hardly be adjudged superior while at the same time being recognized to be at odds in their standards with the people doing the choosing; and thus with every choice the Consortium contributes to the development of a continually expanding class of outraged enemies, discredited as inferiors by exclusion, not to speak of contributing to a continually growing class of sycophants as well. The only way to save the idea of the Consortium, as far as I can see, is to abandon the idea that it has any administrative or managerial tasks in connection with the journals or editorial boards and reconceive it instead on the model of a TASK FORCE whose task it is to do what is in its power to encourage the migration on-line of scholarly/scientific publication by encouraging and supporting the people who are interested in making that sort of move, doing what is best in the particular case, guided not by the idea that arrangements are to be made to support the prestigious -- who need no support and who will rarely believe that they have anything to gain by change -- but rather by the idea that those who are genuinely interested in extending their fields or disciplines in the direction of international networking are to be supported and protected in their attempts to do so. To do this effectively the Consortium task force would have to do something which nobody has done at all, so far as I know, which is to start thinking about what the life of academic faculty in this country is actually like in order to see why nothing much is really happening now. I won't belabor this further in the present message, though, because the important thing to get clear on at this point, in my opinion, is that the original idea of the Consortium as being the basis for a new level of administrative control must be abandoned because it has no possible future. In a further message I will sketch out a few things intended mainly as supplemental to Stevan's basic conception of the Proposal as an archive initiative, which I take to imply that the Consortium itself should be conceived as having the function of a task force (or something of that sort) rather than as a new and super-ordinate administrative control system along the lines described in the original Proposal. -- 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
