While I do think the idea for this volume was interesting, and agree with many of the points in the post, I really do think that you need to outline your methodology and time frame for reviewing the submissions and making a decision on inclusion. At least in the case of my submission, if it is not accepted, I need to know, so I can begin to seek other outlets.

This is not about careerism, but about service to the community, about disseminating work in the most effective way, and in planning for the future.

To be a bit critical of the post, I would argue that the fact that materials are not deposited into repositories is not a valid measure of willingness to share. The bottom line is that there are better ways to disseminate research (e.g. blogs), and that depositing into an IR is a royal pain in the backside; which is why I choose not to do it, even though I am an archivist. Finally, what is ‘open access’ is not necessarily a black or white issue–the main journal I publish in is my society journal. The content is behind a firewall, but only for two years, after which point is freely available. The society cannot kill off its major source of revenue merely to support OA concepts, but they are doing the best they can.

Finally, I think it is useful to keep in mind that there is a legitimate role for speaking to your colleagues in technical ways. Public service can, and is, evaluated as well as formal publication. In other words, blogs can and do count for something in the P and T process, at least at my university. the P and T criteria have been updated in the past, and will continue to be in the future, perhaps not at the pace we’d like, but still . . .

This is because we are ruthless, bottom-line driven careerists. The modes of employment, advancement and research funding in the humanities and social sciences are based around sole authored monographs or journal articles.

This is particularly true in Australia where the federal government funding signaling to institutions, institutional culture of research reporting, the funding model of major grants which allow for teaching relief, and the methods of promotion for individual academics are strong economic drivers.

In such a climate the federal government definition of acceptable research publication is centered on _two_ definitions of acceptability.

1) Commercial publication of monographs or chapters contained in monographs. That’s right, Australia’s core humanities high esteem output is _by definition_ limited to capitalist modes of output.
2) Peer reviewed journal articles in journals intended for a scholarly audience or conference papers. (Conference papers involves a number of caveats, but these merely reinforce the commercialised nature of the research output publishing). Such journals are unsurprisingly controlled by the current set of interlocking publishing cartels.

The immediate solution of “well why don’t we set up our own journal / Humanities and Social Sciences version of arXiv.org is not an effective one. New journals lack the esteem which is commonly used as a substitute measure for research quality in HASS fields. Substituting impact factors for esteem is just as hazardous. Let us assume we can over come through computation the differences in citation styles and density _even with_ particular disciplines. We’ve just transplanted ourselves to a vicious economisation of esteem and impact. I think we are all well aware that both of these are poor measures of “quality”.

As both volume and “quality” of research are economised by the funding and labour structure of the HASS fields, and, as the structure is geared towards publication in traditional closed journals, and, as HASS scholarly output and audiences are limited to people with access to academic libraries due to their employment, there is no motivation to produce an alternative system.

And the result is a conservative attitude by scholarly workers in HASS fields towards what a publication is.

[This blog post response earned me zero publication points, and zero esteem factors. The time I used thinking about it, and the time I used to become a person who could think about it, resulted in no economic benefit to me.]