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Critical appraisal and acceptance of the new e-genres, the ones that are entirely digital, as in the list of seven above, will come first from the digerati , but the innate conservatism of the evaluation and assessment processes that take graduate students from exuberant experimentation to sober thesis preparation to the grinding of the tenure mill limits the rate of change in embracing true e-genres. The report of Diane Harley, et al., entitled “Assessing the future of scholarly communication,” covers this ground exceptionally well and thus provides a sobering dash of cold reality to Rotunda and others ready to experiment. A few quotes from that report illustrates our quandary: Harley, Diane, et al., from the Executive Summary of “Assessing the future landscape of scholarly communication: an exploration of faculty values and needs in seven disciplines,” published by the Center for Studies in Higher Education of the University of California at Berkeley ( (External Link) ). 1 January 2010.

We found no evidence to suggest that “tech-savvy” young graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, or assistant professors are bucking traditional publishing practices. In fact, as arguably the most vulnerable populations in the scholarly community, one would expect them to hew to the norms of their chosen discipline, and they do. Established scholars seem to exercise significantly more freedom in the choice of publication outlet than their untenured colleagues, although in the sciences, high-impact publications remain important for garnering research grants throughout a career. There is some indication that faculty in newer and less established departments in the humanities and social sciences may be more amenable to risk-taking in publication practices since their particular institutions support such efforts to carve out the identity of niche departments.
Concerns about the limitations of the current publication system have led to growing interest in the potential of electronic publication to extend the usefulness and depth of final publications (e.g., multimedia books, CDs, linked data, footnotes, embedded media, software, etc.). The lack of easy-to-use authoring tools, the perceived difficulty of evaluating such publications, and the prohibitive financial and opportunity costs to produce truly multimedia monographs all suggest that experiments with these genres will likely be rare in the near term. In fact, tenure and promotion committees generally have not seen alternative genres presented in dossiers to date.
Although there is a universal embrace of the rapidly expanding body of digital “primary” sources and data, there is an equally strong aversion to a “glut” of un-vetted secondary publications and ephemera. The degree to which peer review, despite its perceived shortcomings, is considered to be an important filter of academic quality, cannot be overstated.
We cannot suggest that our interviewees had singular or unanimous opinions about what, or even if, change was needed in the current scholarly communication system of their respective disciplines, but we identified five key topics, addressed in detail in the case studies themselves, which require real attention:

  1. The development of more nuanced tenure and promotion practices that do not rely exclusively on the imprimatur of the publication or easily gamed citation metrics,
  2. A reexamination of the locus, mechanisms, timing, and meaning of peer review,
  3. Competitive high quality and affordable journals and monograph publishing platforms (with strong editorial boards, peer review, and sustainable business models),
  4. New models of publication that can accommodate arguments of varied length, rich media, and embedded links to data; plus institutional assistance to manage permissions of copyrighted material, and
  5. Support for managing and preserving new research methods and products including components of natural language processing, visualization, complex distributed databases, and GIS, among many others.

Jon Ippolito, et al., in “New Criteria for New Media,” list and discuss elements of a revised set of determinants for appointment and tenure for scholars engaged in New Media, whether for reporting scholarship, changing the methods and practices of disciplines, or for unsettling the social basis of education (from broadcast to problem-based learning to “network modes of sharing knowledge.” Ippolito, Jon, et al. , “New Criteria for New Media” in Leonardo , v. 42, n. 1, pp 71-75, 2009. Between the antipodes of the conservatism of traditional appointment and tenure processes in the Harley report and the new criteria expressed in the Ippolito article is an ill-populated desert of opinion and practice. We need to see some mapping of knowledge and information networks; a new citation analysis methodology for the humanities is needed. Experience so far in collaborative projects in the humanities suggests that the senior-most scholars provide cover for the juniors, but that in most cases, the junior scholars cannot easily make use in their own career development of such experiences; do collaborative projects in the humanities (big humanities?) define junior scholars as perpetual post-docs? Where in the panoply of publications of large amounts of texts and the amalgamations of those texts into enormous corpora do our editors and publishers become engaged with the possibilities and results of text-mining, natural language processing, and other analytical approaches possible only in the digital environments? Apart from the vexing questions of supply and demand as well as those of assessing and rewarding scholarship, where are the elements of social networking, crowd sourcing, and community commentary in these sorts of publications?

Are we too stuck in our own formalism?

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Source:  OpenStax, Online humanities scholarship: the shape of things to come. OpenStax CNX. May 08, 2010 Download for free at http://cnx.org/content/col11199/1.1
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