By Ira Fuchs
As others here (and the Ithaka report) have said, technology is certainly part of the solution to the problem of transforming scholarly communications; however, (IMHO) I think it would be a mistake to think that today’s technology by itself will give us, as Ed suggested, “90% of what we want”. As the Ithaka report makes clear, scholarly publishing takes several forms and, as with the elephant and the blind men, everyone seems to perceive the problem a bit differently. For example, in disciplines where journal articles are the most important form of scholarship, some scholars believe that the answer is as simple as self-publication assisted by technology that permits comments, annotations, RSS feeds for subscriptions and so on. In this vision, peer review essentially gets replaced by the blogosphere while “diggs” (or their academic equivalent) replace university press imprimaturs. In disciplines, where the monograph as a “long argument form” is dominant, there appears to be less agreement as to how to maintain monographs as an economically viable form of scholarship; however, efforts to digitize back files and “chunking” books are a good start to making monographs fit into today’s digital landscape.
As others have commented here, part of the problem may be resolved as younger faculty who have grown up using social spaces like Facebook and MySpace assume leadership roles in the academy. Like it or not, blogs, and other informal “publications” will almost certainly be increasingly important components of faculty output although it is easier to imagine these new forms as additive rather than as substitutes for either journal articles or book length treatises. However, as the Ithaka report (and Paul’s comment) points out, reward structures at colleges and universitues are not in sync with new media forms and that’s a problem that will probably not be fixed quickly.
One way to address the future of scholarly publishing is to break the problem into parts (journals, monographs, informal communications, etc.) and address each with its own solution. This might make the problem more manageable but while working on the easy parts, I fear that the harder aspects might be ignored until it was too late to fix them. I understood the Ithaka report to be recommending a more encompassing solution that gets all the parties (librarians, university press directors, university administrators, and faculty) to read from the same page (so to speak) and to create a strategic plan for the panoply of scholarly communications. This is more ambitious and might not deliver the short term results that other less inclusive plans could but can we afford to fix only a piece of what’s broken?