Scholarship
You're likely already familiar with the scholarly infrastructures: the genre expectations in your field, the preferred citation schema, appropriate methods, aligning the work with publication venue and its audiences. The practices of peer-review (which vary by publication and by discipline) and choices about what to cite (not just how to cite it) also fall into this category. Ethical considerations in this category are very broad, so we’ll primarily focus on questions of plagiarism and collaboration.
Actors and Social Networks
All of these choices take place in specific contexts, and they are carried out by people - and it is the relationships among these people that constitute the social dimension. People bring their lived experiences into the processes of authoring, editing, and reviewing, and their connections to each other in the networks of publication also impact the whole enterprise of knowledge-making. We love to scorn 'reviewer two' ... but behind that review is a real person, and understanding the social aspects of scholarly publishing can help both the author who wishes to be published and the editor managing the publication process. From an ethical standpoint, we’ll focus on developing guidelines for practicing and responding to peer review.
Technical Infrastructure
Many of the constraints of publishing in the past were set by the limitations of the media and the technologies available - printing with ink on paper is far more expensive than digital publication, and circulation is also more difficult. However, print is more likely to last longer in an archive, and there are advantages to the materiality of books and print journal that still make them attractive repositories of knowledge. In digital publishing, the technical infrastructures include everything from file formats to domain names, from tools for supporting the work of peer review to the social media we use to announce new work. Digital formats also come with specific ethical challenges, from predatory journals, to paper mills, to wholesale theft of publishing venues.
The Specter of AI
All three of these components are now being impacted by the rise of generative AI, which has potential roles to play in authoring, editing, and reviewing. We'll explore the practicalities of using (or resisting) AI in the context of scholarly publishing and look at the policies that editors and publishers are developing in response.
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Our focus will be primarily on publishing in humanities fields, although the sciences have been very active in seeking innovation in peer review (and, more recently, in the response to AI), so we'll also draw on scholarly-publishing related work in other disciplinary spaces as well.
Each student in the course will focus their work on this topic through the lens of working on a publication project of their own, with the aim of applying what we learn to increase the likelihood of publication--understanding how these systems work can have a positive impact on your own process of publishing an article, webtext, or book chapter.
I'll be bringing my own experience as editor (since 1996) of publisher of Kairos, alongside my experiences as author, reviewer, editorial board member of other journals and book series, as well as the research I've done on editing and publishing, but we'll also draw on the experiences of colleagues and scholars whose scholarship focuses specifically on publishing and scholarly communications.
