From Library Babel Fish, July 24, 2013
Today I found myself revisiting a blog post by Doug Armato of the University of Minnesota Press just as my Twitter stream was responding to the American Historical Association’s new statement on why historians’ dissertations must be protected from the public eye. Mark Sample remembered it and posted it to Twitter. Public streams of thought have these eddies and undercurrents that sweep back and bring up things from the past to bob along in the onward rush of ideas. Which is, itself, something of an example of what Doug Armato was describing as the way scholarship works today.
The posts are fascinating to read side-by-side because they take such different positions on what it is we are trying to do when we make scholarship public. What’s especially worth noting is that the publisher is more interested than the scholarly society is in how ideas flow in and out of various stages of development and how much more public this activity is today – and why that’s a good thing. Armato sees the publisher’s work as “pattern recognition” rather than gatekeeper or conveyor of disciplinary distinction: arise, tenured historian. By the power vested in publishers, we have certified you as a historian worth keeping on the payroll. That’s not what he does. He enables thoughtful pauses in the fast flow of information so that ideas can take on depth and nuance and reach a kind of coherent complexity by being still for a bit before they flow back into the ongoing rush. We have, he writes, “a common need to create a better, more interoperable system of scholarly communication and publication and a steady flow from the serial development of scholarship into the material event of scholarly publication and out again.”
The smart publisher today doesn’t want to introduce books to the world so new, so pristine, so original that they have never been seen or discussed in any form. Rather,
the current place of the individual book in this emerging ecosystem is as an area of highly concentrated, unitary scholarship amid a flow of less concentrated expression, with a membrane (let’s dub that membrane “peer review,” though it is more than that) regulating the passage between those environments as a form of osmosis.
He has no reservations about publishing a book that has been public, here and there serially in various forms, before. In fact, he sees that prior public activity as an opportunity to anticipate what book projects are likely to be worth taking on because he is able to see how readers are responding. The material itself is shaped usefully by that flow and will go on to join back into it. (As a matter of fact, as I read the blog post I opened a new tab to order a copy of the book he cites. That’s how it works.)
He has a fundamentally different view of the book and its purpose than the AHA does. The AHA believes that opening access to dissertations puts young historians at risk. They should be allowed to keep their dissertations under