General Observations about Academic Publishing
It is important to understand academic publishing as part of a larger market (as well as part of the marketplace of ideas).
The Broad Publishing Market Context: Publishing itself is a very dynamic market sector. Here are a few scattered facts about publishing and academic publishing:
Academic publishing is generally set up to provide information to defined members of a reader community. As such, works will not generally be brought to publication unless there is an identified customer base. Works with very limited audiences will often involve a high price point. Or the costs of editing, typography, production, and distribution are shifted to the academic producers themselves. (Some open-access publications charge hundreds to thousands of dollars to authors in order to make their works available on the Web.)
The Work of Publishing: All to say, the work of publishing is an eminently social and individual (even solitary) process simultaneously. It requires professionals to collaborate around the shared goal of promoting quality work in their respective fields. While publishing hails back hundreds of years (to the mid-1400s), such endeavors have not been replaced by content-sharing social networks or social media platforms. Rather, there are simply more channels for the sharing of information. Book and journal article publishing, this asynchronous sharing of knowledge, will continue into the foreseeable future.
A Thought on Pragmatics in Publishing: No matter what the intellectual property (IP) and copyright laws now, everything eventually spills out into the public domain by law (as a factor of time or of conscious release, such as through the Creative Commons licensure). Many researchers start with the most prestigious journal they think they could appear in (many just start at the top) and work down from there in the mental hierarchy. For most, the striving to appear in a top-tier journal ends in rejection (as a numbers game alone), and the cost in effort drains effort, focus, and energy from the work itself.
Personally, it seems to me that the important thing is to get a work out into the world to the proper audiences and in a way that preserves the work into the future and to learn and move on. While entrancing for some, publishing is not magic; it’s just work. There are risks to loving the limelight for its own sake. (A colleague of mine pulled an article that she was working on when someone else published a similar work. Both were working on the same issue but on different tracks. There’s something to be said for that level of respect.)
It is important not to share bylines unless one has actually done the work and know the provenance and quality of the research. This means starting with research colleagues at the beginning and seeing the work through from beginning to end, not just free-riding at the end of a project on work that one may not have contributed to at all. Reputation, like trust, can be nulled with one bad decision.
- As of 2011, the U.S. was publishing some 292,000 new book titles and editions annually according to UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), as cited in Books published per country....
- Globally, the book titles published annually are over 1.5 million (according to Worldometers).
- Using indirect and inferential means, researchers estimate that as of 2006, there are at least 1.3 million academic articles published annually (Bjork, Roos, & Lauri, 2009).
- There are over a hundred academic book publishers in the U.S., and many of these also maintain journal holdings that also publish academic works.
- Academic publishing is big business, with science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)-field journal publications estimated to bring in revenues of some $19 billion back in 2007
- With the advent of for-pay open access journals, various entities and individuals have been maintaining lists of “predatory publishers” who are there to profit off of the need to publish. (Such publishers are very quick to find lists of authors and conference presenters in order to spam them with offers of publication or editing opportunities. It’s a good idea to send those straight to the spam folder.)
Academic publishing is generally set up to provide information to defined members of a reader community. As such, works will not generally be brought to publication unless there is an identified customer base. Works with very limited audiences will often involve a high price point. Or the costs of editing, typography, production, and distribution are shifted to the academic producers themselves. (Some open-access publications charge hundreds to thousands of dollars to authors in order to make their works available on the Web.)
Even though publishing can be highly profitable in some areas, peer reviewers themselves are not usually paid for their services. (This is yet another point of contention in publishing.) Still, to maintain market dynamism, publishers need to ensure that what goes to press has originality and value, so peer reviewers are a critical part of the publishing process.
The Work of Publishing: All to say, the work of publishing is an eminently social and individual (even solitary) process simultaneously. It requires professionals to collaborate around the shared goal of promoting quality work in their respective fields. While publishing hails back hundreds of years (to the mid-1400s), such endeavors have not been replaced by content-sharing social networks or social media platforms. Rather, there are simply more channels for the sharing of information. Book and journal article publishing, this asynchronous sharing of knowledge, will continue into the foreseeable future.
"Publishing is Social": A Visualization of a Social Network
A Thought on Pragmatics in Publishing: No matter what the intellectual property (IP) and copyright laws now, everything eventually spills out into the public domain by law (as a factor of time or of conscious release, such as through the Creative Commons licensure). Many researchers start with the most prestigious journal they think they could appear in (many just start at the top) and work down from there in the mental hierarchy. For most, the striving to appear in a top-tier journal ends in rejection (as a numbers game alone), and the cost in effort drains effort, focus, and energy from the work itself.
Personally, it seems to me that the important thing is to get a work out into the world to the proper audiences and in a way that preserves the work into the future and to learn and move on. While entrancing for some, publishing is not magic; it’s just work. There are risks to loving the limelight for its own sake. (A colleague of mine pulled an article that she was working on when someone else published a similar work. Both were working on the same issue but on different tracks. There’s something to be said for that level of respect.)
It is important not to share bylines unless one has actually done the work and know the provenance and quality of the research. This means starting with research colleagues at the beginning and seeing the work through from beginning to end, not just free-riding at the end of a project on work that one may not have contributed to at all. Reputation, like trust, can be nulled with one bad decision.
Finally, there is a cost to being productive in research. Researchers have to invest time and effort. They expend social capital in order to work with colleagues. They spend limited funds on graduate students and equipment. And then, the culminating achievement is a published work. The reason why cost is important to remember is that there are plenty of invitations and "asks" to publish, and it may be too easy to agree to collaborate or to offer a work--without remembering all the effort that goes into the research and writing.
How not to get used (as an author and as a reviewer). There should be a small note here about not getting used. This list is set up as a list of bulleted assertions.
- Publishers are businesses. To exist, they have to turn a profit. The core focus of the enterprise is to make sufficient funds in order to survive. As friendly as their marketing people are, those who work in marketing are trying to make sure that they monetize the "relationship" with the author.
- There are always people who will email with requests for professional collaborations or for original writing for their own projects. They may offer foreign funding for projects. They may offer access to their social networks ("I can introduce you to..."). They may pre-promise positive treatment for the manuscript, sight unseen. Generally, these non-starters because these are individuals without any track record. Just because they have access to one's email does not mean that there is any basis for trust. It is easy to test this. Just send a candid but friendly email to see if there is any sense of professional reciprocation or care; in all likelihood, the email exchanges will stop without any further interaction. These are invitations to a one-way free-ride, nothing more. (The default setting, if you will, should be "no".)
- Some people will write with requests for releasing prior-published works for re-release for a new book. This is a form of poaching on the prior editors of the prior texts. Don't do it. This sort of approach already breaks all the ethical rules, and assuming that this person wrote the invitation out of a sense of naivete may be tested. Mention how this is inappropriate in various ways, and see what response returns. Usually, the response is silence.
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