Some thoughts on the AHA's statement on Open Access

This is just a brief note on the AHA Statement on Open Access (with a special hat-tip to Jason M. Kelly’s insightful point-by-point response).

Though I’m writing from a standpoint within academic publishing, I won’t comment on whether we deprecate works published open-access as dissertations (for various reasons I'm sure you can imagine). I want to pull the focus back a bit and point out a few obvious things. (Hey, somebody has to!) The AHA’s statement is quite pragmatic in working within the status quo: publishers have a lot of power, especially over young academics’ careers.

However, publishers have that power because departments (and, perhaps more crucially, university administrations above them) have given it to them: hiring and tenure are not, cannot be done in today’s university, on the basis of a departmental decision. Rather, there needs to be outside evidence, measurable evidence!—checklists and scores and quantifiably lawyer-proof mountains of Why we hired X and not Y. This is a fact of life, and the AHA is wise not to take on the ABA (and that ain’t the booksellers’ association here).

But the AHA could have done more. Let me quote one point from the AHA and Kelly’s counterpoint.

AHA: By endorsing a policy that allows embargos, the AHA seeks to balance two central though at times competing ideals in our profession–on the one hand, the full and timely dissemination of new historical knowledge; and, on the other, the unfettered ability of young historians to revise their dissertations and obtain a publishing contract from a press.

Kelly: It is important to protect the interests of early career historians.  But, this statement seems to understand their interests narrowly.  What kind of academic community should we help craft with them?  I would suggest that we help craft a community of openness and collaboration — one that embraces technologies that are likely to expand our impact and reach wider audiences.  This may mean remaking the conventions of the profession and likely requires that we abandon ad hoc attempts to protect the status quo.  This will likely mean confronting the habitus of our profession and disrupting the institutions that we have been working in for over 100 years.

(my emphasis)

The “ability of young historians to revise their dissertations and obtain a publishing contract from a press” is not by any possible stretch of the imagination an “ideal in our profession”—it’s a means, a practical stepping point to keep future scholars in business. But far more importantly, academic publishing is exactly the business of “full and timely dissemination of new historical knowledge.”

And here’s where the AHA erred. They should have called out both publishers and their own membership for slowing down the timely publication of new scholarship. “Confronting the habitus of our profession and disrupting the institutions” is another way of saying, “We need to raise our game to a new level, and fast, or we're going to be looking for a new game."

Young scholars--don't just "obtain a publishing contract," make that diss into a manuscript. 

Senior scholars--turn around your goddamn manuscript reports.

Publishers--you know how complicated this is and the gazillion things that can derail or slow publication.

Everyone: Do it better. 

Map Is Not Territory*

It's not enough to write a book any more. Now you have to write a proposal to get the book under contract, a grant application to get funding, another grant application to get funding (rinse and repeat as necessary), a report for your department on what you've done this year, and what you plan to do next year... and now your publisher is asking for chapter abstracts and keywords when you send the final manuscript in for editing.

"Have you had any push-back from authors?" our manager asked. Well, no. They're used to writing about what they've written about—not that it's necessarily enjoyable, or valued. But the reflexivity of that activity (writing about what you're writing about) isn't just a cute way of stating the obvious, it reveals a bit of a truth about writing: the object of the writing (the research, the story) and the writing itself aren't easily separable. You're always trying to tell the story, you're always inevitably condensing and narrating and leaving out and framing and filtering. Whether you're giving your elevator pitch ("You'll love it; it's about this early modern German named Hermann Connring and the fundamental shift in the relationship of past and present.") or writing an 800-page manuscript, or editing that manuscript down to a reasonable 120,000 words, or even distilling that manuscript into a 7-line table of contents (Germans, by the way, call it a "table of content"—that little change always reminds me that there must be substance to the book.), it's always a representation. The only sharp line in representation is between the representations and reality.

And so, no, we don't get push-back. Maybe grumbling about another task to do, but hey, we've been adding to authors' tasks to do ever since we took away their typists (well, most of their typists) thirty years ago. (The division of labor giveth, and the division of labor taketh away.) We still overexplain the need; we throw around words like "mixed media environment," "searchability," and "discoverability," but fundamentally, we're asking for a map.

And so I write: You’ve already created one map of your book: the table of contents. The table of contents is a large-scale “highway map” of the general route that your readers will take. There will soon be another map in the form of an index; this is a very local map (“Where was that excellent taco restaurant? Come to think of it, where are all the taco restaurants? This guy did a wildebeest-shooting helicopter ride but I want to do a cross-country taco hop.”). The abstracts and keywords are yet a third kind of map: they’re like the maps posted on signs at the entrance to a campus, with a “you are here” to situate the visitor, and to show that reader, who may not have come in the main entrance, what there is to see. Publishing now involves searching and coming at books (and chunks—that's a technical term—of books) from all sorts of directions, and so you can't rely (if you ever could) on a reader looking at the Table of Contents and the Introduction.

But it's all representation, and it's What Authors Do.

*Thanks to J.Z. Smith for my title phrase.

How do you do this again?

R. Levi son of Rabbi says: A pure menorah came down from heaven. For the Holy One, blessed be He, said to Moses, "And you will make a menorah of pure gold" (Ex 25:31).
Moses said to Him, "How shall we make it?"
He said to him, "Of beaten work [shall the menorah be made]" (ibid.)
Nevertheless, Moses still found difficulty with it, and when he came down he forgot its construction.
He went up and said, "Master of the Univers, I have forgotten how to make it!"
The Holy One, blessed be He, showed Moses again, but he still had difficulty.
He [God] said to him, "Look and make it," and finally He took a coin of gold and showed him its construction.
Still he [Moses] found its construction difficult.
So He said to him, "See and make it" (Ex 25:40) and finally He took a menorah of fire and showed him its construction.

Yet in spite of all this, it still caused Moses difficulty.
Said the Holy One, blessed be He, to him, "Go to Bezalel, and he will make it."
He went down to Bezalel, and the latter immediately constructed it.

Midrash Tanhuma, be-Ha'alotkha 6, quote in Steven Fine, Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World, p. 101

The state of the stacks (first in a series)

Fat Cyclist keeps us informed as to his weight, a public self-shaming into positive progress. I hereby tell you, with the same goal, the total height of all the stacks of crap paper on my desk.

147 cm