Academic Publishing

I’ve spent most of this academic year working to bring a handful of projects to publication. This is not always the most creative work. In fact, it often involves heeding the recommendations of reviewers by making small adjustments, adding or deleting text, gently massaging an idea here and reorganizing an argument there. The best part of this process is that it is a good excuse to read my text through the eyes of others and most of the papers that I’m revising have had time to simmer on the back burner while going through review. Invariably, most of the substantive revisions that I end up making reflect the influence of reviewers. It takes a village to produce knowledge.

One thing that I’ve been thinking about during this process is how to preserve some evidence of the process that produced the conclusions that my public paper will present. It seems to me that publishing as a process remains a bit of a black box. In particular, the results of the work tend to overwrite the process. While in some cases, this mean that factual errors, rhetorical infelicities, and misunderstandings are smoothed out, it other cases, the revisions tend to be more technical in nature. Most publications have a fixed word length, have certain stylistic expectations, and have a set of editorial priorities. This tends to result in a work that is consistent with the standards of a volume, a journal article, or a book series. 

It also means that good work finds itself on the cutting room floor, it means that articles that reflect a plurality of positions and possibilities are reduced to one, and the voice of the village sometimes drowns out the voice of the author. Of course, I understand that many of these compromises are good things and done in the name of professional standards developed over a century of academic publishing.

At the same time, I increasingly feel like the potential of digital publishing of data, for example, already holds forth the potential for alternate interpretations or analyses that subvert the tidy conclusions of a traditional archaeological article. It also seems like the discipline of archaeology has developed a greater tolerance for poly-vocal texts and conclusions. Ambiguity and even contradiction are no longer seen as weaknesses in an argument, but as acknowledgements of the kinds of interpretative decisions that archaeologists have to make all the time to produce knowledge. As I work on several project where I’ve accommodated the interests of peer reviewers, I wonder whether the original text before revision retains some value even if the published conclusions are different. Could earlier versions of the text be linked to in footnotes? Could the text include alternate conclusion? Could authors link to sections of the text excised for stylistic or length reasons? Is there a place for the kind of coda that I blogged up yesterday and that would be associated with but not part of a formal publication? 

Finally, I wonder whether our confidence in the authority of peer review, the intrinsic value to editorial consistency, and our patience with standards in publication that serve the economic interest of the publisher has begun to wane. In the last few years, I’ve encountered publication standards that insist on contributions to an edited volume being the same length, conceded to arbitrary editorial standards designed to enforce stylistic conformity, and other oddly proscriptive policies that add little value to the the knowledge produced. This is not only time consuming for the authors but also unpleasant work (especially when it’s being done in the name of publisher profitability). 

This isn’t a post meant to sledge academic publishers. Indeed, when I wear my publisher and editor cap, I recognize that certain policies designed to streamline production are valuable and necessary. I also recognize that I’m tarring a wide range of publishers with a broad brush and that many publishers have seen the intellectual and practical value of more flexible approaches. That said, I wonder whether publishers — even mainstream academic presses — and authors might embrace a greater degree of transparency, dynamism, and even ambiguity in their work. 

This might both have the advantage of creating more interesting texts as well as relaxing some of the pressures on academic authors who often