Two Things on Publishing Tuesday

I’ve been doing a good bit of work on Digital Press projects over the last month. It is very rewarding in that it both gives me time to think about the process of knowledge making and to help bring new works of scholarship and learning into existence. This is what’s prompted today “two thing Thursday”

Thing the First

There is an appropriate and growing concern about the character of academic labor in the 21st century. The “uberfication” of college instruction, for example, relies heavily on part-time adjunct instructors. At the same time, full-time tenured instructors often suffer under ever increasing work loads which lead to burn out and exhaustion.  

This seems to have a parallel with the current situation in academic publishing which relies on free labor from academic reviewers and interns and  the work of freelancers alongside increasingly overtaxed full time editors. It is hard to know whether this system is sustainable especially in the face of open access mandates that will surely produce costs that outstrip dwindling levels of financial support.

The parallel between these two industries suggests that at least one branch of our entire “knowledge economy” is rather unhealthy. I would love to argue that my efforts to create a more sustainable and fair form of academic publishing was successful or even a model for a more decentralized, collaborative, and perhaps even sustainable future, but that wouldn’t be entirely true. My work relies just as heavily (if not more so) on freelancers and uncompensated labor.

Ultimately, I’ve come to wonder how much the standards we as academics have set for how we produce knowledge contribute to the problems inherent in the current system. Or, to ask this question another way, how do we as academic authors work to ameliorate conditions in academic publishing?

Thing the Second

I’m working on a massive project right now with my old friend and colleague David Pettegrew. He has compiled the data from EKAS into a publishable form and I’ve been working on turning it into a book.

At present, I’m like 75% of the way through the first round of layout. This means that most of the external hyperlinks are added to the book, but most of the internal links between chapters are not added. In other words, I’ve roughed out what the final book will look like, but it’s not there yet.

It seems like as good as time as any to share a bit of our progress. If you’d like to see where we are right now, here’s a link to Chapter 8.