{"id":22358,"date":"2017-02-15T07:00:59","date_gmt":"2017-02-15T11:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=22358"},"modified":"2017-04-21T10:53:02","modified_gmt":"2017-04-21T14:53:02","slug":"as-goes-the-media-so-goes-scholarly-publishing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2017\/02\/15\/as-goes-the-media-so-goes-scholarly-publishing\/","title":{"rendered":"As Goes the Media, So Goes Scholarly Publishing"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>In this post\u2014adapted from a recently published piece<\/a> making the case for open access in media scholarship<\/a>\u2014I argue that media sociologists and other members of the media-studies diaspora should be applying our concepts and critiques to the world of scholarly publishing itself. We have, after all, an overpacked quiver of analytic tools that we\u2019ve developed to scrutinize popular media. With care, these lines of critique and analysis could be delivered to the sibling domain of scholarly communication. With notable exceptions, media scholars have opted out of the cross-disciplinary conversation on the future of academic knowledge-sharing. That conversation, sustained by peer-reviewed articles, blog posts, foundation-supported reports, and even Twitter, welcomes contributions from an admirably broad range of disciplines. Media studies figures like Ted Striphas, Leah Lieuvrouw, Gary Hall, Timothy Stephen, and Kathleen Fitzpatrick are rule-proving exceptions, who directly engage on open access and related topics. But there\u2019s so much untapped insight waiting to be adapted to the academic publishing context.<\/p>\n

The multi-stranded political economy of communication (PEC) tradition is a good example. The incumbent, cartel-like scholarly-publishing industry<\/a> deserves a thorough-going PEC-style analysis in the mold of the 1990s media-consolidation studies of Robert McChesney and Janet Wasko. The later work of Herbert Schiller, with its focus on the commodification of information, could be refracted through the self-styled information conglomerates like Informa<\/a> (parent company of Taylor & Francis<\/a>) and the RELX Group<\/a> (Elsevier\u2019s parent, known as Reed-Elsevier until a 2015 re-branding). Both are London-based, publicly traded giants with diverse \u201cinformation solutions\u201d expected to generate maximized profits and upbeat Wall Street whispers. RELX boasts about its 90 million data transactions per hour, while Informa sprawls across four \u201cOperating Divisions,\u201d each \u201cowning a portfolio of leading brands.\u201d The companies\u2019 real competitors are in the equally merger-happy news-and-data business, like Canada\u2019s Thomson Reuters<\/a>, News Corp.<\/a> (with Dow Jones), and Bloomberg<\/a>. Some of the information-industry froth surfaced in Thomson Reuters\u2019 sale<\/a>, in summer 2016, of the venerable citation database Web of Science (and related businesses) to private equity firms for over $3 billion. Schiller\u2019s 1989 Culture, Inc.<\/em><\/a> is badly in need of an update.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s an analogy to be drawn, too, with Dallas Smythe\u2019s notion of the audience commodity<\/a>. Back in the late 1970s, Smythe made the startling but compelling point<\/a> that couch-bound TV viewers are a product that broadcast networks sell to advertisers. All that television programming, he wrote, amounts to a \u201cfree lunch\u201d exchanged for the viewers\u2019 work of watching. If Smythe\u2019s point that audience attention is labor<\/em> was an arguable stretch, the multibillion dollar valuations of Silicon Valley startups vindicated the Canadian political economist\u2019s core insight decades later. In this respect SAGE is not all that different from Facebook: Our journal submissions are uncompensated, user-generated content that\u2014like Facebook posts\u2014get aggregated, repackaged, and sold back to us. Though the publishers\u2019 main rent-skimming tactic is subscriptions, not tailored ads, the basic dynamic is shared. Media industry scholars already have the analytic toolkit to draw these parallels.<\/p>\n

Wiley<\/a> and Elsevier<\/a> are a big part of the story. We should also train our scholarly scrutiny on the dizzying, buzzy array of new models and experiments themselves. After all, open access\u2014especially in its author-pays incarnations\u2014could substitute one kind of inequality (pay-to-publish) for the other (pay-to-read). Even respected nonprofit initiatives like the Public Library of Science<\/a>\u2019s stable of natural-science titles charge author fees that come close to an adjunct professor\u2019s pay for an entire course. Indeed, the big five publishers have all \u201cembraced\u201d open access with brazen cynicism. In addition to a small number of OA journals with usurious author-processing charges, SAGE and the rest dangle the option to unlock individual articles, for a hefty charge. The result is double-dipping<\/em>\u2014a new OA profit-layer on top of subscription revenue. There are other OA models, including the Open Library of Humanities<\/a>\u2019 successful library-subsidy scheme<\/a>, but the open-access world\u2014brave and new as it is\u2014would benefit from media scholars\u2019 critical takes.<\/p>\n

Fellow-traveling developments like altmetrics<\/a> and post-publication peer review<\/a> should also claim some of our attention. Media researchers are in a good position to do some of this analysis, if only because we have already produced rich understandings of all-too-relevant analogues: the media industry\u2019s digital makeover, for one, and also the rise of social media micro-celebrity. One way to understand the dynamics at work in scholarly communication, after all, is in terms of unbundling<\/em>. The journal-issue package that has, since the 17th century, grouped articles together is already coming undone. The very idea of a \u201cperiodical\u201d\u2014of regular, batched release under an ongoing publication title\u2014is a blend of inherited convention and the affordances of print. In the academic world, journal prestige and discipline-specific flagship status have long served as quality-signaling proxies to fellow scholars as well as tenure-review committees. This system is already under strain, and not only because of mounting (and compelling) criticism of the Journal Impact Factor<\/a>. Paper- and scholar-specific measures\u2014some qualitative, but most captured numerically\u2014are suddenly everywhere: journal-site download counts, Google Scholar citation tallies, and \u201cview\u201d totals on Academia.edu. Type a book or article title into the new Open Syllabus Explorer<\/a>, and you will get back a \u201cteaching score\u201d\u2014a scaled, 1-100 measure of how often a reading appears in the project\u2019s one-million syllabi database\u2014with a 99.9 for Plato\u2019s Republic<\/em> and a meager 0.8 for Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld\u2019s Personal Influence<\/em> (1955). As with other scholarly-communication developments, the natural sciences are a step ahead. Post-publication review sites like PubPeer<\/a> publish anonymous comments (from published scholars) on individual papers, while the U.S. government\u2019s own PubMed Commons<\/a> highlights \u201ctrending articles\u201d\u2014\u201cthose with recent increases in activity.\u201d Recommendation aggregators like Faculty of 1000<\/a> feature \u201cCurrent Top 10\u201d and \u201cAll Time Top 10\u201d leaderboards.<\/p>\n

To a media scholar\u2019s ear, all of this sounds eerily familiar. Take the article-unbundling phenomenon: For years now, we have been tracking how search, social shares, recommendation algorithms and other \u201cside doors\u201d have, in effect, untethered the individual story from its publisher. The old, bundled model of legacy media\u2014exemplified by newspapers\u2014relied on the blunt metrics of subscriptions and newsstand sales. Editors and publishers knew that the comics were probably subsidizing their foreign bureaus, but bundled consumption kept these cross-subsidies fuzzy. Real-time analytics\u2014down to automated headline A\/B testing\u2014and social-media site content hosting have eviscerated the editor-curated, periodic \u201cpublication\u201d model. Now journalists and editors are glued to their Chartbeat<\/a> dashboards, tracking second-by-second audience tallies by author and article. Success means a video ricocheting around Facebook, which may well host the media file on its server.<\/p>\n

Another strand of media scholarship has, of course, catalogued the lava-like overspread of celebrity culture into everyday life, with the means of production (smartphones) and distribution (social media) in the hands of ordinary people. The \u201cdemotic turn,\u201d to use Graeme Turner\u2019s phrase<\/a>, has fed the adoption of visibility strategies once confined to film and music stars. Social media micro-celebrities, as Brooke Erin Duffy has documented<\/a>, carefully monitor follower counts and likes-and-comments tallies\u2014and mete out packaged bits of authenticity to keep their audiences \u201cengaged.\u201d It\u2019s fame on a smaller scale, but it\u2019s metricized<\/em> fame propelled by rich-get-richer algorithmic dynamics.<\/p>\n

As media researchers we can bring this work to bear on scholarly communication. Academics, after all, are already \u201cpublishing\u201d on social media, with journal-article shares on Twitter the quintessential \u201caltmetric.\u201d There is, moreover, a parallel universe of academic micro-celebrities who have amassed large followings on social media and, to a lesser extent, blogs. The sociology of academic reputation\u2014traditionally fixated on citations and mass-media visibility\u2014should be updated to account for the \u201cdemotic turn\u201d in scholarly life. Indeed, the most compelling applications of media scholarship will take up the academic-world analogues to Instagram and Snapchat. Academic social networks like Academia.edu<\/a> and ResearchGate<\/a>, though generating some high-profile criticism<\/a>, have largely escaped scholarly scrutiny. Yet both networks have powerful, and partially overlapping purchase\u2014with Academia.edu boasting about 36 million unique monthly visitors<\/a> and even more academic-members<\/a>.<\/p>\n

These networks represent a notable extension of the unbundling dynamics, as they shift the center of gravity from, say, institution or journal title to the scholar herself. Academia.edu and ResearchGate<\/a> also serve as thinly veiled PDF-sharing repositories, akin to Napster circa 1994. Together with piracy sites like Sci-Hub<\/a>, the pair of aca-networks are establishing a de facto regime of open access. (Academia.edu, on its landing page, is unabashed: \u201cAcademia is the easiest way to share papers with millions of people across the world for free. A study recently published in PLOS ONE<\/em> found that papers uploaded to Academia receive a 69% boost in citations over 5 years.\u201d One of the paper<\/a>‘s coauthors is Richard Price, founder and CEO of Academia.edu, and five other co-authors are employees of the network.) Most fascinating of all is the manner by which the two sites mimic core social-media conventions, down to follower counts and activity notifications. Curated profiles with pics, a News Feed-like scrollable bulletin of followers\u2019 uploads, a \u201cBookmark\u201d analogue to the social-media heart button, and even incessant prompts to \u201cimport contacts\u201d (\u201cGet More Followers\u201d)\u2014all the trappings of a Silicon Valley social app. Like Twitter and LinkedIn, but with more goading, Academia.edu showcases user \u201cAnalytics\u201d: followers, \u201cTotal Views,\u201d and percentile rankings. Members get emailed whenever a Google search lands on one of their papers, complete with prompts to view a full \u201cAnalytics\u201d page that resembles a flight control panel. (Users even have the option to make their Analytics page \u201cPublic.\u201d) With an obvious nod to Google\u2019s PageRank and Facebook\u2019s EdgeRank algorithms, Academia.edu introduced article-specific PaperRank scores, which are used to compute a scholar\u2019s overall AuthorRank. We have, in other words, a scholarly Klout score<\/a>, each of us.<\/p>\n

Perhaps it\u2019s not surprising that both academic social networks are backed by Silicon Valley venture capital firms. Academia.edu boasts about raising $17.7 million<\/a> from a \u201ca range of investors,\u201d including four venture capital firms like Khosla Ventures\u2014which is headquartered along the same famous stretch of Sand Hill Road as one of ResearchGate\u2019s backers, Benchmark Capital. Academia.edu is headquartered in nearby San Francisco, where ResearchGate (based in Berlin) also has an office. Both networks resemble the Silicon Valley startups that surround them, and not just for their venture funding: \u201cPerks and Benefits\u201d for working at Academia.edu<\/a> include a Foosball table, free lunch and stock options, while ResearchGate touts<\/a> its \u201chealthy snacks, in-house yoga, [and] relaxation rooms.\u201d The Valley\u2019s hacky-sack-at-break culture is one that media academics have critiqued in a series of excellent studies that are begging to be applied to Academia.edu and ResearchGate. The venture-capital context deserves special scrutiny: Menlo Park firms are placing bets that they hope will yield the proverbial \u201c1000X\u201d returns. Academia.edu, ResearchGate, and other scholarly-communication companies backed by VCs\u2014including the innovative writing platform Authorea<\/a>, data-sharing site Figshare<\/a>, and the eponymous Altmetric<\/a>\u2014are not merely for-profit. They will all have their reckoning with the unique ferocity of VC profit expectations.<\/p>\n

The push for open access is not responsible for academic social networks, most-emailed leaderboards, or even post-publication peer review. Unbundling is happening at tolled journals too, and most Academia.edu papers are anything but open access. But the OA movement is nevertheless hitched to these developments, in practice and by perception\u2014in the same sense that exciting experiments in new publishing formats are often faithful to open-access ideals. The changes roiling the way we share knowledge are tied up in, for better and worse, the push for OA. As media scholars, we have a unique bundle of concepts, traditions and methods to scrutinize the new publishing landscape\u2014venture-capital warts and all.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jeff Pooley<\/span> is associate professor of media & communication at Muhlenberg College, in Allentown, PA. He writes on the history of media research, the history of social science, scholarly communications, and consumer culture and social media. His writings can be found at jeffpooley.com<\/a><\/p>\n

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