Networked Academic Publishing and the Rhetorics of Its Reception
by Eyal Amiran, John Unsworth, and Carole Chaski
Centennial Review 36:1 (Winter 1992)
Electronic
publishing is part of what Mark Poster calls a cultural shift from
"print-wrapped language" to "electronically wrapped
language" (11), and it is here to stay. But just what is inside the
wrapping? What does this shift portend for academic publishing and for culture
in general? This question has been the subject of lively debate, in the course
of which, we contend, some significant misconceptions have arisen. Electronic
text has been put on trial in disquieting ways, for many of the same reasons
that printed text was, in its infancy. Responses to electronic text tend to be
shaped by several metaphorical narratives which reflect and amplify these
misunderstandings. These narratives, in turn, influence the institutional
reception of electronic publishing. After a brief overview of electronic
publishing, we examine the details of some of these narratives, look at their
origins, and consider the implications of using them; finally, we discuss the
institutional realities that have resulted, in part, from the ways in which
electronic text has been described, and suggest some new ways of thinking about
the future of the medium and our role in determining that future.
I. What Electronic Publishing Is
Electronic publishing takes several forms: it includes desktop publishing
(where an electronic text is printed), the publishing of computer diskettes and
CD-ROMs (as with many library-based databanks and reference works today), hypercard stacks, and networked publishing -- the
dissemination of text over electronic mail networks. The last
of these forms, which we discuss here, is currently the least expensive and most
relevant to academic publishing. Most research universities and
four-year colleges in the United States (and in much of the industrialized
world) are connected to one another on at least one of several international
computer networks. These networks themselves interconnected and enable faculty
to communicate with each other by electronic mail. Until recently, academics
have used these networks primarily for informal discussion; now several
electronic journals are appearing on the networks, in science, business
management, the humanities, and the social sciences, and there has been a
virtual explosion of electronic newsletters and discussion groups over the last
few years.
Electronic
journals require the subscriber to have access to a computer with a modem (or
to a terminal), and to have an electronic mail account (a computer mailbox, in
effect). These accounts are usually on mainframe computers, but commercial
telecommunications companies (AT&T, MCI, Sprint)
also supply electronic mail services for a fee. Academic institutions usually
provide a mainframe account for sending and receiving electronic mail at no
cost to the user. Different journals publish in different ways: some send their
subscribers whole issues, others send individual essays and dispense with
"issues" altogether, still others send only the table of contents
with abstracts for the issue. Postmodern Culture, the journal that two
of the authors of this essay co-edit, is distributed in this last manner. Once
subscribers receive the table of contents for a new issue of Postmodern
Culture, they request the items they want to read or else ask for the whole
issue as a package. When the requested material arrives, subscribers can read
and discard it on their mainframe account (another copy will always be
available on request), or they can download the material to their personal
computers and read it, store it, print it, and search or otherwise manipulate
it there. Subscribers can request times from back issues at any time and can
automatically receive updated versions of works in progress. There are no
special hardware or software requirements for doing any of this, and Postmodern
Culture also offers diskette and microfiche subscriptions, for a fee.
Over the
next few years, the most pedestrian of economic reasons are certain to flush
scholarly publication out of its roosting place in wood-products and into the
electronic ether. Faxon, the major U.S. subscription
agency for research libraries, predicts an average ten percent increase in
serials prices for next year; at the same time, library budgets are shrinking
because of our nation-wide recession. It will soon seem counter-productive to
print archives, data banks, government and business documents, and much
scholarly material. Today we still produce limited numbers of books whose
physical well-being must be guarded at archival institutions around the world;
we must have these objects shipped to us, or travel to centers where they are
collected. Compare this to a situation in which all books would be available to
anyone with a library card, where a library, rather than housing a given number
of volumes, would provide both searchability and
access to all books in the library network (see Lande).
William Gardner, in "The Electronic Archive: Scientific Publishing for the
'90's," and others responding to that essay (Mani, "Megajournal"), have discussed
the electronic archive/database as a future possibility, but it may not be far
from being a reality. Ted Nelson's Xanadu, a
"worldwide open-hypertext-publishing network," is under development
by AutoDesk, an innovative software company which has
already invested several million dollars in the project; the first Xanadu stands are scheduled to open in California in 1993
(see Engst, Tidbits 30, a special issue devoted
to Xanadu). Present technology already allows
users to search library card catalogues and existing text databases via a
telnet connection. The SPIRES facility at Syracuse University, for example,
permits remote users to search a complete archive of all the mailing of
HUMANIST, a moderated discussion group from Brown University, sorting the
database by author, column, subject, date, or text strings in the body of the
messages. These searches can be combined and restricted in various ways, using
a full range of boolean
operators.
Electronic
resources such as these promise to transform the world of scholarly publishing
in the next decades, and though electronic text may not replace print any time
soon, it is likely to dominate where information storage, retrieval, and
manipulation are more important than the aesthetic qualities of the text --
though even the aesthetic appeal of electronic text is steadily improving as
computer equipment becomes more portable, more legible, and simpler to use.
II. The Rhetorics of Electronic Text
The rapid development of computer technology has given rise to both the
utopian and apocalyptic claims about the medium itself; subtle rhetorical
shifts in these claims affect our initial reactions in significant ways, as do
the metaphors we sue to describe electronic text. On
the one hand, we are told that electronic communication will lead to an erosion
of language, a loosening of our hold on logic, and a loss of personal freedom;
on the other hand, we are told that it will lead to an egalitarian social order
approximating Lyotard's vision of an equal-access
utopia of free information for all. We are told, from both sides, that exposure
to electronic text will alter the way we think, the way we write, and way we
construct our societies.
The
contradictory descriptions of this new form of text delivery -- as either a
messianic or a monstrous birth -- are a result of the outmoded ways we have
conceived of and responded to the medium so far. Certain kinds of statements
about the medium come up again and again, statements that rely on and
implicitly reformulate ideologically charged narratives. These narratives
function as a conceptual blinders that keep us from
seeing the electronic medium for what it is and for what it may become. Both
proponents and detractors of electronic text use these narratives to suggest
that the social effects of the medium are hard-coded into it, that the changes
it may make are changes it must make. By the same token, both proponents and
detractors of the medium tend to measure its implications using the yardstick
of print: they doubt that electronic text can be "real" (permanent,
important) if it does not exist in space, or they claim that because of its
infinite reproducibility it will do away with the notion of an original,
authoritative text; they worry that the ease with which electronic text can be
disseminated will make it impossible to protect intellectual property and that
the ease with which it can be revised will make it impossible to ensure textual
integrity, or they hope that the dialogic possibilities of the medium will
erase the boundary between writers and readers. When it comes to scholarly
publishing in this medium, they as, "will it
count toward promotion and tenure?" and not whether it will be read and
used by colleagues in the profession, or they feel certain that the medium
itself will somehow revolutionize scholarly practice.
Those who
have grappled with the implications of electronic text have tended to narrativize their hopes for and resistance to the networked
future in terms that recall movie matinees or yesteryear. We would like to
point out three such narratives:
1.
The Space adventure, in which
computer-mediated communication figures as the final frontier, which is a knew kind of space.
2.
The Western, in which
computer-mediated communication is the wild west or
the virgin land of the pioneers.
3.
The Return of Eden, in which
computer-mediated communication returns us to a prelapsarian
(or pretextual) state.
Each
narrative foregrounds the new medium, but in doing so discloses a nostalgic
impulse that hardens the old paradigms rather than allowing new ones to form.
In fact, the irony of the claims made in these narratives is that although they
are explicitly or implicitly based on a comparison of e-text to print, the same
claims were once made in comparing print literacy to oral discourse. Our
primary purpose in this essay is not to decide these claims, but to point out
that they predate the "new" situation which ostensibly calls them up,
and to suggest that it therefore makes more sense to regard electronic text as
continuous with older forms of textuality and
literacy than to celebrate or revile it as a completely new moment in the
history of human communication.
1. The Final Frontier
The "final frontier" narrative, although cast in futuristic terms
of space adventure, envisions a utopia familiar from movies, books, and TV
shows -- one in which we seek out new worlds where no "man" has gone
before. Here we play the part of the ingenious and advanced homo-scientificus, part of a larger technological enterprise,
working (but not too hard -- a few keystrokes of genius) in a complex world of
the electronic power lunch. "With networked semiconductors," writes Richard Powers in The Gold Bug Variations,
"physical location becomes arbitrary." Actually, this is one of the
advantages of print literacy, an important function of which is to allow us to
communicate with absent others across space and time. Spatial dislocation in
particular, though, seems to take on a new salience in the case of networked
communication: consider Alan McKenzie's remarks in an essay on electronic
resources:
Learning to navigate within and between programs is an exhilarating
challenge. It used to be the humanists' texts that sometimes got mislaid, but
now humanists can, temporarily, lose themselves. (43)
The implication, when we talk about losing ourselves in the net, is that
electronic communication dislocates the user from his or her physical space; in
some version, this experience produces in the user a loss of self and an
inability to separate self from the other, subject from object. The self is
lost, new worlds are found. The new reality, like virtual reality, absorbs you.
The self in this world strains toward the limit of Deleuze
and Guattari's "Body without Organs" (e.g.,
20), or as Mark Poster puts it, "the body . . . is no longer an effective
limit of the subject's position. . . . communications
facilities extend the nervous system throughout the Earth to the point that it
enwraps the planet in a noosphere . . . of
language" (15).
Although
this response to electronic literacy seems modern, it echoes an ancient
hypothesis advanced in the Phaedrus concerning the intrusion of print
literacy into the oral culture of Classical Greece. According to (Plato's)
Socrates, written discourse in an embodiment of its author: thus, in what is
more than cute metonymy, Socrates refers to the copy of Lysias
speech as Lysias himself (Phaedrus, section
228e). It follows from this that print literacy will have a disastrous effect
on the integrity of the self, since it will cause the absorption of the reader
into the writer: when Phaedrus declaims Lysias's
speech as his own, he becomes Lysias. The proof of
this, for Socrates, is that although Phaedrus does not actually agree with many
of Lysias's notions, he is willing to declaim them as
his own. Socrates tries to keep this fusion from occurring and insists on the
distinction between Lysias's and Phaedrus's opinions,
but this separation of reader and writer is not easy: Phaedrus is in love with Lysias (section 279b), or at least in love with Lysias's rhetoric, and when he reads Lysias's
speech he experiences the ecstasy -- the dislocation --and worship which are
reminiscent of the lover's attitude to his beloved (section 255d, and see
234d). Through reading, Phaedrus can sound and think like Lysias,
but the dialogues suggests that this is neither a holy
nor a true love. In fact, Phaedrus has been so absorbed in Lysias
through reading that he cannot see the flaws in Lysias's
reasoning, which Socrates finds obvious and unacceptable (section 235e).
Georges Poulet has described reading in remarkably similar term:
Reading . .
. is an act in which the subjective principle, which the I
calls I is modified in such a way that I no loner
have the right, strictly speaking, to consider it as my I. I am on loan to
another. . . . It is important to note that this possession of myself by
another takes place not only on the level of objective thought . . . but also
on the level of my very subjectivity. (44)
Decried by Plato, celebrated by Poulet, and now
identified as a distinguishing feature of postmodernity,
the loss of identity is an ontological problem that is neither
new in the information age not unique to electronic literacy.
2. The Old West
A second scenario produced in response to electronic publishing is a more
historically specific narrative of new frontiers. Consider the following
passage from "desperados of the DataSphere"
by John Perry Barlow:
[The Net] extends across that immense region of electron states,
microwaves, magnetic fields, light pulses and though which sci-fi writer
William Gibson named Cyberspace. Cyberspace, in its present condition, has a
lot in common with the 19th Century West. It is vast, unmapped, culturally and
legally ambiguous, verbally terse . . . hard to get around in, and up for
grabs. . . . To enter [this silent world] one forsakes both body and place and
becomes a thing of words alone. . . . It is, of course, a perfect breeding
ground for both outlaws and new ideas.
Here we have slipped comfortably into the worn boots and leather fringe of
cowboy individualism. For this narrative of the hacker as "legally
ambiguous" gunslinger -- a sort of Clint Eastwood for the keyboard --
assumes that cyberspace produces a new place in which to work out
socio-political issues.
But print
literacy too --in its origins -- is "unmapped, culturally and legally
ambiguous." Writing systems of various sorts develop in the context of
both sacred mysteries and accounting schemes -- twin bases of culture (e.g.,
Chadwick, Walker). And because the technology of print writing is ultimately
connected with the religious and economic fundamentals of culture, it too poses
practical , moral and social questions. On of the most serious of these is whether technology
should be restricted to particular professions or social classes. Historically,
different cultures have answered this question differently: in the ancient
world, the democratization of print literacy in Classical Greece contrasts
sharply with the restriction of print literacy to the priestly class in Egypt
during the Old Kingdom. The protestant Reformation spurred on translation of
sacred texts and general literacy. Even in this century, we have not solved the
moral and social implications of print literacy. UNESCO has sponsored literacy
campaigns, but some have argues that the impetus for universal literacy was
inherently economic and guided by the autonomous benefits of literacy (Berggren
and Berggren, and see Street). Print literacy, then, is just as ambiguous as
electronic literacy in the issues it raises and the political responses it
elicits.
Still in the
Old West, but just outside of the cowtown, we find a
related set -- that of the pioneer, steadfastly colonizing the promised land. Here the manifest destiny of e-mail will be
either to realize or to destroy the dream of the autonomous individual
mastering nature with the iron plow of reason. Steve Birkerts,
writing in the Information Technology Quarterly, speaks in these terms
when he worries about the supposed non-linearity and achronicity
of electronic communication, and though he begins by characterizing the shift
toward electronic communications a movement into "terra nova," he
soon turns to worrying that this new land will absorb the pioneer without a
trace. Who is this pioneer, one wonders? Even by Birkerts's
account, it is a romantic individualist who stands out as "a solitary self
before a background which is the society of other selves." Who is going to
be left out, pushed out, reservationed, in the
colonization of the new frontier? Not only the uneducated or the illiterate, we
suggest, but those who (for economic and/or political reasons) are denied
access to the "global" information society -- to computers,
telecommunication, and the networks. But the problem Birkerts
sees is that people are being enveloped by, rather than excluded from, the net:
"one day soon," he warns, "we will conduct our public and
private lives within networks so dense . . . that it will make almost no sense
to speak of the differentiated self." This, as we have seen, is an old
fear, as is Birkerts's concern that the pervasive
electronic media will shorten our attention span and lead us to abandon
difficult literature and thought. Socrates said the same thing about print in
the Phaedrus: enfeebled by literacy, Phaedrus cannot memorize a speech
unless he has a printed copy of it before his eyes, and he cannot even remember
the details of an old (orally transmitted) legend (sections 228-30, 274-75).
Again, the irony here is that Plato, one of the progenitors of the literary
tradition which Birkerts sees himself as defending,
feared print -- Birkerts's refuge -- in the way that Birkerts fears electronic text.
Birkerts bases his claim about the effects of electronic
literacy on a model of reading which many cognitive psychologists and
psycholinguists discarded in the 1970s. Fore example,
his claim that electronic communication will induce passivity and muddled
thinking (because it is less :linear: than print) is
based on the common but now often discarded notion that the reading process is
essentially linear, and on the equally questionable assumption that logic
itself is linear.:
The order of
print is linear and bound to logic by the imperatives of syntax. It requires
the active engagement of the reader, for reading is fundamentally an act of
translation: ciphers are turned into their verbal referents and these are in
turn interpreted. (Birkerts)
Birkerts distinguishes, as linguists do, a letter level,
a word level, and a semantic level, in written communication; he also
recognizes that reading is an "active engagement." But this notion
that the reader proceeds unidirectionally from letter
to meaning is wrong, Ever since Rumelhart's
"Toward an Interactive Model of Reading," reading specialists have
held that the act of reading is not a step-by-step progression from visual
cipher to textual meaning. Even Gough, who had argues for a linear model in
1972 ("One Second of Reading"), later rejected this idea:
This model is wrong. . . . The claim that we read words letter-by-letter
from left to right is one such claim: it is almost certainly wrong. ("one Second of Reading: A Postscript.")
Birkerts takes his armchair psycholinguistics one step
further when he asserts that
others may argue that there is little difference
between following words on a pocket screen or on a printed page. Here I have to
hold my line. The context cannot but condition the process. Screen and book may
hold the same string of word, but the assumptions that underlie their
significance are entirely different. . . .
There is not
psycholinguistic evidence to suggest that the process of reading suddenly
changes when it is conducted in a different medium. Although there may be
cognitive differences in the processing of different kinds of script
(alphabetic vs. syllabary vs. logographic; cf. Mann,
and Tzeng and Wang), when this factor is controlled,
reading is reading -- and that context the strict page/terminal distinction is
misleading.
3. The New Eden
The last of the narratives of the new space of electronic communication
takes us even further back in time. Drawing on McLuhan's notion that mass media
would lead to the "retribalization" of a
culture, to living "mythically," Doug Brent makes to following
extraordinary suggestion:
the concept of living "mythically" suggests far more than simply
being more interconnected, or being able to send messages to each other more
quickly and easily than we could last year. It means living in a form of
consciousness in which knowledge does not exist outside of the knower, embodied
in a physical text, but instead is lived dramatically, communally performed as
the myths of oral man were performed. This, I argue, will be -- to some extent
already is -- one of the effects of internalizing the electronic writing space.
(L1. 408ff.)
Electronic communication, on this account, is immediate and therefore
dramatic, performed: it is not . . . well, textual. Further on Brent says:
I am not claiming that electronic text will unilaterally undo almost three
millennia of exposure to literacy. I am suggesting, however, that some of its
psychological effects can be understood in part by referring to the state of
consciousness that existed before writing in general and the printing press in
particular made it possible to separate the knower from the known, to see
knowledge as a commodity than can be owned, traded, rented, and accumulated. (L1. 600ff.)
This statement articulates with unusual clarity what is in fact a fairly
common response to electronic text, both from the techno-optimists and the
techno-pessimists. In this vision, electronic text will return us to a state
which antedates the subject/object split, to a time before there was "nothing
outside the text," to a "preliterate" world: the result will
either be a golden age of intellectual community or a dark age of intellectual
anarchy, depending on the storyteller.
Brent's
prediction rests on the assumption that there are great intellectual
differences between literate and oral societies, an assumption shared not only
by Plato but, more recently (in support of opposite conclusions), by Walter J. Ong, who contends that the literate are cognitively
superior to the illiterate. Research on cognitive ability in literate and oral
societies conducted since Ong made this claim has
raised serious doubts about his position. Some linguistic fieldwork supports
the view that it is not print literacy but institutional schooling that
accounts for whatever cognitive difference there may be between literates and preliterates (Scribner and Cole 131-32, and see Goody).
Brent argues that electronic text will help return us to preliterate innocence,
but evidence suggests that the division of the self which he wishes to overcome
is produced not by literacy but by the institutions that provide it.
There are
several lessons in these narratives. First, they are all backward-looking and
nostalgic, whether they look to the futuristic space fictions of our youth, the
cowboy/pioneer of an idealized cultural past, or the prelapsarian
innocence of a mythological beginning. By adopting this attitude, they
simultaneously underestimate what is undetermined in our future and forget what
we should have learned from our past. Second, these narratives consistently
commit either the fallacy of progressivism, in which New always means Improved,
or the fallacy of nostalgia for a lost Golden Age, in which with every step we
find ourselves further from some imagined past in which we were happy, wise,
and free. These fallacies, in turn, arise from and rely on questionable
assumptions about print and electronic literacy, assumptions that are presented
as new and exclusive to the electronic medium, but which are in fact so old as to
have greeted the advent of print culture. Finally, the different practical
roles which these narrative responses make available to us only serve to
underscore our lack of consensus about intelligent future action: in effect,
they highlight our fears and desires rather than distinguishing useful choices
and possibilities.
While
academics and theorists speculate about the inevitability of the next
revolution or of a new democracy of information, the move into an age of
electronic communication is being managed by others, in ways which may well
reinforce and exaggerate disparities of power between the rich and poor, first
and third world nations, educated and uneducated. Other outcomes are possible,
but there is little hope for an improved future without a clearly thought-out,
pluralistic, and egalitarian response to new conditions.
III. Where Do We Go From Here
In light of
the preceding discussion about metaphorical narratives of electronic a text and
the intellectual fallacies that inform them, we would like to suggest that a fist step in the direction of a more productive response to
these new conditions might be to discard the notion that we a
re exploring and discovering when we experiment with electronic text.
The concepts of exploration and discovery suggest that we find what is already
there; we might better conceive of ourselves as inventing what will be there.
Thinking in these terms allows us to take a proactive rather than a reactive
stance.
Existing
practices are sure to affect the way academic writing develops in the arena of
networked electronic publishing, just as the integration of electronic
publishing into those practices has the potential to alter the way we think
about intellectual property, peer review, professional advancement, the function
of the library, and the status of the text. In considering the future of
electronic publishing we need to remember that the adoption of new practices in
scholarly publishing -- however, feasible, logical, and attractive those
practices may be -- depends in part on habits, and in particular on the
institutional rewards and constraints which perpetuate those habits, more than
it depends on technological factors. Where institutional rewards are concerned,
we should consider carefully the incentives or disincentives for using this new
medium to practice and disseminate scholarship in innovative ways.
Authors in
the humanities have traditionally been rewarded for working, thinking, and
writing in isolation. This is not the case in many scientific fields, and it
need not be the case in the humanities, especially when the networks provide an
ideal tool for collaborative authorship among researchers who may never meet
one another. But in the absence of institutional rewards, even those who want
to publish in the electronic medium may be reluctant to take advantage of its
possibilities. Therefore, if we wish to see changes in our practice, we must
invent new ways of acknowledging and evaluating more complex -- and sometimes
more informal -- modes of authorship.
On the other
hand, there is no need to reinvent in the new medium what already exists and
still works: where more formal modes of authorship are concerned, electronic
publication should be seen as continuous with, and equivalent to, publication
in print. The legitimacy of scholarly publishing is a matter of the peer-review
process and not a function of the medium in which peer-reviewed work is
distributed. As Mike J. O'Donnell and Abraham Bookstein
say in their proposal to establish The Chicago Journal of Computer Science
(a juried electronic journal), readers of scholarly publications need to have
a high confidence that they are all reading precisely the same article
created by the author and accepted by the editor, and that this acceptance is
an accurate certificate of the value of the article. The basic protocol of
publication in a scholarly journal -- the author freely chooses to submit an
article, the editor takes the advice of several independent and anonymous
referees, insists on revisions if appropriate, then accepts or rejects the
article is independent of the medium. There is not
reason to change that highly successful protocol in converting from print to
electronic network publication. (O'Donnell)
Resistance to juried electronic journals can only be attributed to a sort
of superstitious faith in "hard copy" and a similarly superstitious
dread of "virtual text," or to the fact that a printout of an essay
published electronically looks and feels more provisional, less authoritative,
and less certified than a typeset offprint or a bound volume.
Ted
Jennings, writing to the Association of Electronic Scholarly Journals
discussion group, raises another issue one sometimes confronts when discussing
electronic publication with authors -- the superstitious fear that there will
be increased opportunities for plagiarism in the absence of "'frozen'
print accompanied by one 'owner's' name." However, these questions are not
(or ought not to be) as troublesome in connection with electronic journals as
they are regarding electronic mail in general, because electronic journals
appear regularly and bear copyright (Bailey).
As for the
creation and proliferation of electronic journals, unless university
administrators recognize that editing an electronic journal is no less
demanding than is editing a print journal, and unless they are willing to
support the editors or electronic journals, as they do to the editors of print
journals, few editors will volunteer. This support may be difficult to elicit
when the medium of the journal in question is perceived as ephemeral, inimical
to property-rights, or even preliterate, among other things.
There is
another, more practical problem facing would-be electronic journals:
cost-recovery. In order to establish new e-journals, and in order for existing
print journals to transfer their operations into the electronic medium, we will
have to develop some way of recuperating the costs of production. Many who are
currently involved in academic electronic publishing of academic journals are
working hard to make for-profit e-publishing a reality. The networks themselves
are scheduled to be "privatized" in about five years, at which point
-- if we haven't figured out another was -- we will find that electronics
publications are just as expensive as print, if not more so.
In each of
these situations, the values which inform the narratives of exploration and
discovery are at work in determining the structure of institutional (and
economic) rewards -- we privilege the individual effort which results in
someone laying exclusive claim to new territory. It seems unlikely that
academic institutions will be able to do without the concepts of authorship and
ownership any time soon, but perhaps we can move away from the notion of
scholarship as private property and toward a more collective model of
intellectual production. "Can [electronic publishers] record and document
and certify 'you heard it here first' and at the same time disseminate what
passes through our conduits without restriction as to later use""
asks Jennings in his note to AESJ. In answer to Jennings, we would say that
yes, they can and should do both things.
We would
encourage electronic journals to combine the familiar with the revolutionary:
with O'Donnell and Bookstein, we would recommend that
e-journals use a familiar protocol for establishing the professional legitimacy
of what they publish. The copyright form that Postmodern culture uses is
one in which the author, as the "owner" of the piece, grants the
journal permission to publish; the journal's copyright statement expressly
permits the recirculation of individual items as long as credit is given and no
fee is charged to the user.
In the
spirit of that approach to copyright, we would like to see certain aspects of
the system of intellectual property changed while we still have an opportunity
to change them. Since, where academic publishing is concerned, the producers
and the consumers are one and the same body of people, there is no need for
profit and no reason to involve a middle-man. We do now have a five-year window
of opportunity in which to develop and put in place something like an
information consortium, where research-producing universities would subsidize
electronic publication of that research, would contribute it gratis to the
consortium, and would have access, free of charge, to all the research produced
by other members of the consortium. In order for this to happen, universities
will have to face up to the responsibilities of becoming publishers, and will
have to develop some formula for balancing contributions to and use of the
consortium's holdings; they will also have to find some way of providing for
the use of those resources by non-members, probably a system involving some fee
structure. Even so, such a non-profit electronic publishing entity would, we
think, be able to provide its data at more accessible rates than current
for-profit publishers do. Finally, we would like to see academic institutions
acknowledge the value of more informal contributions to scholarly dialogues:
the impediment here is not one of record-keeping or of identifying authors, but
simply of requiring that peer evaluations take such contributions into account.
If we can do these things, we will have effected a very positive and concrete
change in the way we use, value, and reward intellectual labor.
Works Cited
Bailey,
Charles. (1 Jan. 1991) Intellectual Property Issues;
Association of Electronic Scholarly Journals. AESJ-L LOG9101. AESJ-L@ALBNYVM1; Bitnet.
Barlow, John
Perry. "Crime and Puzzlement: Desperados of the DataSphere."
Whole Earth Review. Fall 1990: 45-47.
Berggren, Carol, and Lars Berggren. The
Literacy Process: A Practice in Domestication or Liberation? Writers and Readers Publishers Cooperative, 1975.
Birkerts, Sven. Letter Information Technology Quarterly.Cambridge,
MA: Harvard, 1991.
Brent, Doug.
"Oral Knowledge, Typographic Knowledge, Electronic Knowledge: Speculations
on the History of Ownership." Ejournal 1.3 (Nov. 1991) [an electronic journal]; ejournal@albnyvms.bitnet.
Chadwick, J.
The Decipherment of Linear B. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1958.
Deleuze, Gilles,
and Felix Guattari. A
Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP,
1987.
Engst, Adam C.
(1990) TidBITS#30/Xanadu_text. Machine Readable Texts Email List; GUTNBERG LOG9011; GUTNBERG@UIUCVMD;
Bitnet.
Gardner,
William P. (1990) "The electronic archive: Scientific publishing for the
90's"; [Abstract form] PSYCOLOQUY 1.1; PSYC@PUCC; Bitnet. The full text is
available from Gardner; write wpg1@uix.cis.pitt.edu. An expanded version of the
piece appeared in _Psychological Science_.
Goody, Jack.
The Interface between the Written and the Oral.
New York: Cambridge UP, 1987.
Gough,
Philip B. "one Second of Reading." Language by
Ear and by Eye. ed. J.F. Kavanaugh and I.G. Mattingly. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1972. 331-58. Rpt. in Theoretical Models and Processes of
Reading. Ed. Harry Singer and Robert B. Ruddell. 3rd ed. Newark, DE: International Reading
Association, 1985. 661-86.
_______,
"one Second of Reading: Postscript." Theoretical
Models and Processes of Reading 687-88.
Jennings,
Ted. (30 Dec. 1990) Electronic publishing; Association of
Electronic Scholarly Journals. AESJ-L. AESJ-L@ALBNYVMS@Bitnet.
Lande, Nathaniel. "Toward the
Electronic Book." Publishers Weekly (20 Sept.): 29-30.
Lyotard, Jean-Franâˆois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minnesota
UP, 1979, 1984.
Mani, Ganesh. (1990) Electronic archival of scientific journals:
The MEGAJOURNAL; PSYCOLOQUY 1.2; PSYC@PUCC; Bitnet.
Mann,
Virginia. "Phonological Awareness: The Role of Reading Experience." The Onset of Literacy. Ed. Paul Bertelson. Cambridge: MIT P, 1986.
McKenzie,
Alan T. "The Academic Online." Profession91. NY: MLA, 1991. 41-48.
O'Donnell, Mike J., and Abraham Bookstein. (4 Feb. 1991) Copy of a proposal to found _TCJCS_.
GARGOYLE.UCHICAGO.EDU; Internet.
Plato. The Phaedrus. The Collected
Dialogues of Plato. Ed. Hamilton, Edith and
Huntington Cairns. Princeton UP, 1961.
Poulet, Georges. "Criticism and
the Experience of Interiority." Trans. Catherine Macksey. The Structuralist
Controversy: The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man. Ed. Richard
A. Macksey and Eugenio Donato.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1972. 56-72.
Powers,
Richard. The Gold Bug Variations. NY: Morrow,
1991.
Poster,
Mark. The Mode of Information: Poststructuralisms
and Social Context. Chicago UP, 1990.
Rumelhart, David E. "Toward an Interactive Model of
Reading." Technical Report No. 56. San Diego:
Center for Human Information Processing, University of California, 1976. Rpt. in Theoretical Models and Processes of Reading. Ed. Harry Singer and Robert B. Ruddell.
3rd ed. Newark, DE: International Reading Association, 1985. 722-50.
Street,
Brian V. Literacy in Theory and Practice.< New York: Cambridge UP, 1984.
Tzeng, Ovid J.L.
and William S.Y. Wang. "The
First Two Rs." American Scientist< 71 (1983): 238-43.
Walker,
C.B.F. Cuneiform. Berkeley: California UP, 1987.
Last Modified: 4 / 11 /
2008
© https://www.ideals.uiuc.edu/html/2142/197/centennial.review.36.1-2.html
[Comedy of Knowledge] [Orchestrating Reception] [Postmodern
Culture: Publishing in the Electronic Medium] [Practicing
Postmodernism] [Networked Academic Publishing and the Rhetorics of Its Reception] [Documenting the Reinvention of Text: The
Importance of Failure] [What is Humanities Computing and what is not?] [The
Next Wave: Liberation Technology]
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Diana Descalzo Conde
diades@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press