Books and journal articles: the textual practices of academic knowledge
The role of knowledge representation in knowledge design
The process of publication is an integral aspect of knowledge making. Far from being a neutral conduit for knowledge, the publication system defines the social processes through which knowledge is made, and gives tangible form to knowledge that would otherwise be relegated to the ephemeral. The message, of course, is by no means reducible to its medium. We take it for granted that there are knowledge referents external to knowledge representations, and that the representations are not ends in themselves. However, the representational media and the social norms of representation are as much the stuff of knowledge as the things those representations purport to represent (Cope and Kalantzis 2009).
But first, what is this thing ‘knowledge’? What do we mean by specifically scientific, academic or scholarly knowledge? After all, people are ‘knowing’ in everyday life in a variety of ways. Academic or scholarly knowledge, by comparison, has some extraordinary features. It has an intensity of focus and a concentration of intellectual energies greater than that of ordinary, everyday, commonsense or lay knowing. It relies on the ritualistic rigour and accumulated wisdoms of disciplinary communities and their practices. It entails, in short, a kind of systematicity that does not exist in casual experience. Husserl draws the distinction between ‘lifeworld’ experience and what is ‘transcendental’ about ‘science’ (Cope and Kalantzis 2000a; Husserl [1954] 1970). The ‘lifeworld’ is everyday lived experience. The ‘transcendental’ of academic and scholarly knowledge stands in contra-distinction to the commonsense knowing of the lifeworld, which by comparison is relatively unconscious and unreflexive. Academic and scholarly knowledge sets out to comprehend and create meanings in the world, which extend more broadly and deeply than the everyday, amorphous pragmatics of the lifeworld. Such knowledge is systematic, premeditated, reflective, purposeful, disciplined and open to scrutiny by a community of experts. Science is more focused and harder work than the knowing that happens in and of the lifeworld (Kalantzis and Cope 2008).
Of course, scholarly knowledge making is by no means the only secular system of social meaning and knowing in modern societies. Media, literature and law all have their own representational protocols. However, we want to focus specifically on the knowledge systems of academe as found in the physical sciences, the applied sciences, the professions, the social sciences, the liberal arts and the humanities. We are interested in their means of production of knowledge, where the medium is not the whole message but where the textual and social processes of representation nevertheless give modern knowledge its peculiar shape and form.
Academic knowledge making is a kind of work, an act of epistemic design. ‘Design’ has a fortuitous double meaning. On the one hand, ‘design’ denotes something intrinsic to any found object—inherent patterns and structures irrespective of that object’s natural or human provenance. Things have designs. Design is morphology. There is intrinsic design in the objects of knowledge, the stuff of the world on which scholars focus their attention. This is design, the noun.
On the other hand, design is an act of conception and an agenda for construction. This meaning takes the word back to its root in the Latin word designate, ‘to mark out’. Design entails a certain kind of agency. In the case of scholarly knowledge work, researchers and thinkers make sense of the world using methods of observation and analysis, and applying and testing conceptual schemas. This is design, the verb. We can make this duality of meaning work for us to highlight two integral and complementary aspects of design.
The knowledge representation process is integral to the making of academic, scientific and scholarly knowledge. It is central to its business of epistemic design. This design process has three representational moments.
The first moment is what we would call ‘available designs’ (Cope and Kalantzis 2000b; Kress 2000). The body of scholarly literature—the five million or so scholarly articles published each year, the (probably) 100,000 books—is the tangible starting point of all knowledge work. These representational designs work at a number of levels, one of which is as textual practices of describing, reporting on observations, clarifying concepts and arguing to rhetorical effect (Bazerman 1988). They are also represented intertextually, at the level of bodies of knowledge, where no text sits alone but constantly draws on and references against other texts by way of conceptual distinction, or accretion of facts, or agreement on principle—among many of the possibilities that fuse a work into a body of knowledge. These representational designs are the fundamental ground of all academic and scholarly knowledge work. They give tangible form to fields of interest.
The second moment is the process of ‘designing’. Available knowledge designs have a textual and intertextual morphology. These are the raw materials of already-represented knowledge or found knowledge objects. Designing is the stuff of agency, the things you do to know and the rhetorical representation of those things. It is also the stuff of communities of disciplinary practice. These practices involve certain kinds of knowledge representation—modes of argumentation, forms of reporting, descriptions of methods and data, ways of supplementing extant data, linking and distinguishing concepts, and critically reflecting on old and new ideas and facts. There is no knowledge making of scholarly relevance without the representation of that knowledge. And that representation happens in a community of practice: with collaborators who co-author or comment on drafts, with journal editors or book publishers who review manuscripts and send them out to referees, with referees who evaluate and comment, and then the intricacies of textual revision, checking, copy-editing and publication. Knowledge contents and the social processes of knowledge representation are inseparable.
And then there is a third moment of the process, ‘the (re)designed’, when a knowledge artefact joins the body of knowledge. Rights to ownership and attribution are established through publication. These do not inhere in the knowledge itself, but in the text which represents that knowledge (copyright) or through a mechanism that the representation describes (which may in the case of methods and apparatuses be captured in patents). Moral rights to attribution are established even when default private intellectual property rights are forgone by attaching a ‘commons’ licence. On the other hand, even the most rigorous of copyright licence allows quoting and paraphrasing in the public domain for the purposes of the discussion, review and verification. This guarantees that a privately owned text can be incorporated into a body of public knowledge and reported on again and credited via citation. This is the point at which the process of designing metamorphoses into the universal library of knowledge, the repository of publicly declared knowledge, deeply interlinked by the practices of citation (Quirós and Martín 2009). At this point, the knowledge design becomes an ‘available design’, absorbed into the body of knowledge as raw materials for others in their designing processes.
The scholarly monograph
Along with the journal, the monograph or book is one of the two predominant media for the representation of academic knowledge.
So what is a book? Until recently, such a question would have seemed a good only for the kinds of epistemic games philosophers play. Unless this were a question intended to take us into some fraught metaphysical territory, the answer would have been a relatively simple and direct one— a volume of text, printed on 50 or more paper pages, bound between card covers, with certain generic features including a title page, contents, the sectioning of text around chapters, and the like. In this definition, the printed book is a tangible technological object, a means for rendering extended passages of text and images. It is the peculiar generic features of a book as an object that make it immediately distinguishable from other renderings of text or images, such as shopping lists or envelopes full of holiday snaps. And it is a technology that has proven especially helpful in the representation of academic knowledge, particularly in discipline areas which lend themselves to extended exegesis.
Technological developments since the beginning of the 1990s have thrown into considerable question traditional definitions of the book. Since then we have faced two powerful and seemingly contradictory lines of thought. Some commentators have predicted that the traditional form and function of books will be replaced by the internet and electronic reading devices. To some extent, current trends bear this out. Children writing school assignments used to have to borrow the relevant books from their school library. Now, they can get much of the information they need from the internet. More and more of the written material we need and want can be found on the internet. The direct competition between books and increasingly book-like internet-deliverable formats is manifest, notably the PDF. More recently, after a decade of promise, e-book readers seem to have taken off, notably Kindle, Nook and iPad. Some traditional forms of printed matter have been all but replaced by non-printed media. For instance, the encyclopedia and some technical manuals have virtually been replaced by electronic formats. As a technology, the internet has a number of distinct advantages over traditional books: all its available information is instantaneously available; it is more hugely expansive than any library or bookstore; it is readily searchable; it is mostly free or inexpensive; and it doesn’t require as a precondition the environmentally deleterious practice of turning trees into pulp for paper. Surely, say the pundits who predict the end of the book, these new media provide superior technology for the transmission of text and images?
However, in an alternative view, the book is now everywhere. Despite predictions of the imminent demise of the book given the rise of the internet and electronic book reading devices, the book is now ubiquitous. The book is everywhere in another pervasive sense: its textual forms and communicative apparatuses are to be found throughout the new electronic formats. Computer renditions of text and images are looking more and more like books. Contrast, for instance, older word-processing systems with newer ones, and HTML files in the first generation of internet development with the proliferation of web-accessible PDF files. Much of the on-screen rendering of text and images is based on systems of representation derived from the book, including ‘pages’ of text, headings, systems for listing contents (buttons and navigation menus), referencing (links), cross-referencing (hypertext) and indexing (search). The rendering systems of Kindle, Nook and iPad all reproduce the logic of the book. The technology may differ, but these basic structures and functions are derived from the book, and were developed within the technology of the book over a 500-year period.
So, what is a book? Our old definition was focused on an object. Our new definition needs to focus on a function. A book is no longer a physical thing. A book is what a book does. And what does a book do? A book is a structured rendition of text and possibly also images, which displays certain generic features: it is an extended text (of, say, more than 20,000 words, and/or more than 50 or so pages of images), whose size means that for practical purposes the text needs to be formed around generic features, principally including cover, blurb, title, author, copyright statement, ISBN, table of contents, chapter headings, body text and images, and also, sometimes, a referencing apparatus, index, acknowledgements, foreword, author bio-note and introduction. Such a thing is recognisable in the world of text as a book, either by official allocation of an ISBN and registration as a book, or by cataloguing in the e-commerce universe of electronically downloadable books and online library catalogues.
Books are recognisable as such because they share a characteristic textual, and thus communicative, structure. They have book-like functions because they are defined, registered and recognised as books. This means that when we need to ‘do books’, they can be found in bibliographical listings; they can be acquired through online or physical bookstores and libraries; and they can be referenced as books.
However, unlike the traditional definition, a book in this sense does not have to be printed. It can be rendered in many ways, including electronic-visual and audio (talking books). A book is not a thing. It is a textual form, a way of communicating. A book is not a product. It is an information architecture.
What then do the revolutionary transitions in the production and delivery of books that are currently under way mean for the scholarly book publishing business? We want to argue that enormous possibilities present themselves, but not without working our way through an at times traumatic transition in business models. The counterpoint for analysing this transition is the scholarly book-publishing processes of our recent past. Here we highlight the deficiencies of the print-publishing system.
Deficiencies of the print-publishing system
For scholarly authors
It seems to be becoming increasingly difficult to get academic work published in book format—whether because publishers are restricting their output to fewer, low risk, high margin, long-run items, or because there are more titles out there, and more authors are wanting to be published. Even university presses with a not-for-profit charter favour books that may also reach a trade publishing market, short introductions or textbooks over works judged purely on their scholarly significance. Then there is the issue of the kinds of royalties publishers pay—rarely above 10 per cent, and in some cases nothing or virtually nothing for books sold at sometimes exorbitant prices, which individuals cannot afford, whose marketing is targetted almost exclusively to institutional libraries.
For publishers
Margins seem to be dropping, particularly for small publishers and university presses. Yet the risks are as high as ever—large up-front investment in working capital, high distribution costs and retailing margins, as well as the unpredictable element of luck with any title.
For bookstores
Today’s physical bookstores are the most capital intensive of all retail outlets, and this is particularly case for the spread of titles needed in a bookstore catering to an academic market. No other retail outlet would tolerate the amount of stock that is required, nor the average amount of time it sits on the shelf before it is sold. Even then, although the bookstore is a retail outlet, which works well for browsers, all but the very largest bookshops are notoriously frustrating places when you are looking for something specific. Even the largest bookstore can only stock a small fraction of books in print in a particular area of scholarly interest.
For readers
Academic books seem to be getting dearer all the time, and in a world which is fragmenting into ever more finely defined areas of knowledge focus the general academic bookstore is becoming less useful to its customers’ interests and needs.
These dimensions of the scholarly book trade add up to bad business. This also means that this is a business ripe for change. One term that is regularly used to describe the direction of change in the supply chain is disintermediation: the collapse of one or more elements of the process into each other. Where have the typesetters, lithographers and platemakers gone in the digital printing process? The answer is just that they’ve gone, never to return except in the dioramas of industrial history museums. But it’s not just a matter of collapsing some of the steps in the process; it’s also a matter of creating new kinds of work, doing new things, things that were inconceivable in the old ecology of book production.
Promises of the new world of digitally mediated book production
Following are some of the promises of the new world of digitally mediated book production. We describe these processes not in some cases as they exist today, but as we imagine they may exist in the not too distant future, which we have been addressing in a practical way through the development of Common Ground’s CGAuthor web environment.
For authors
Digital publishing ecologies are about content capture, in which the author does a greater proportion of the total work of the book production supply chain, yet does it with little additional effort. Authors do two main things—first, they typeset the text into fully designed book templates. This is not such a large request, as there is barely an author who does not work on a word processor these days. And second, through a series of online data capture mechanisms, they begin to build the metadata required for resource discovery on the internet and automatic insertion of the book into the world of digital books, so that once it is published it can be effortlessly ordered by any physical bookstore, and automatically put on sale in online bookstores.
Of course, publishers, reviewers and referees check and refine this metadata as well as the developing text, from proposal to final publication, but they do all of this online and while relating to a single, evolving source file stored on a webserver in a cloud computing environment. As the process is increasingly automated, productivity through the supply chain improves. The author becomes the primary risk taker (the largest investment in the whole process is the author’s time), and so a substantial slice of the rewards of automation will go to them, be these the symbolic rewards of visibility within a knowledge ecology, or in the case of works that happen to be sold and sell well, a larger share of the sale price in the form of royalties.
This is the commercial outcome: workflow and production efficiencies that make scholarly writing a better business. But there’s also a cultural outcome: that more people will be able to write—the Chinese poetry critic in Melbourne, Australia, writing in Chinese who knows there is a small market for her books not just in Melbourne but in Shanghai, Penang and San Diego; the academic educator writing about an obscure aspect of dyslexia, of enormous importance to the hundred or so academic experts in this field in the world; the Canadian indigenous elder who knows that the oral history of their community will become an important resource for the tourists of today and the scholars in the future. Call these niche markets if you like, but to get these works published will also be to create a more vibrant knowledge ecology, a healthy democracy and a place of more genuine cultural pluralism, and one that could never have been offered by the mass market.
For publishers
No prepayment for printing and no inventory—this is a publisher’s dream. If a book sells in the online environment, either in an electronic format, or as a one-at-a-time print-on-demand product, all the better. If it doesn’t, all that’s lost from the publisher’s point of view is the time they’ve spent reviewing, commenting and editing the author’s successive drafts of their metadata and text. Or in the case of scholarly publishing this work may devolve largely to the unpaid reciprocal obligation of peers. Once the publisher has pressed the ‘publish’ button, the rest simply happens— physical books get printed and dispatched as they are ordered, and electronic books are downloaded by purchasers. What they get back is instant payment, and instant market information. They are relieved of the burden of discounting, remaindering and dealing with returns. And so publishers can stick at what they are good at, their core business, which is the location of valuable knowledge and cultural contents. They can focus their energies on finding, refining and placing content, instead of having to spend valuable time and resources managing the back end of an old fashioned mass manufacturing and warehousing business.
This is particularly good for small publishers who don’t have the warehousing infrastructure and often pay 60 per cent or more of the book’s sale price to outsource distribution. Many more small publishers may emerge in this environment, as smaller print runs become more economical and the entry point to the industry in terms of working capital is reduced. In Jason Epstein’s words, book publishing ‘is by nature a cottage industry, decentralised, improvisational, personal’. It is ‘best performed by small groups of like-minded people, devoted to their craft, jealous of their autonomy’ (Epstein 2001). This is the old ideal of publishing, which aligns perfectly with the knowledge ecologies of academe. The nice irony is that the new technologies and business processes will allow this old ideal to be realised, and far more effectively than was ever the case in the past.
For bookstores
Until it entered the electronic book market with Kindle, Amazon.com was but a thin veneer on an old economy—an economy of large inventories, of moving products from printer to distribution warehouse to bookstore dispatch. The printed book part of Amazon’s business discounts to compete but has created few efficiencies in the supply chain. And even Kindle does not create efficiencies for the text-creation and knowledge ecologies, which still very inefficiently rely on a one-way file flow from word processor to desktop publisher, to print-alike PDF format, and then Amazon strips this back to its own, read-only proprietary format.
The fully digitised alternative is to build a back-end to Amazon, a book production process, which creates efficiencies, improves productivity, reduces costs and creates new products for new markets. So, where to, for that old and much loved institution, the physical bookstore? Are its days numbered? The answer is not necessarily. Bookstores of the future may provide consumers with a special experience, around a specialist area of knowledge, or the bookstore owner’s eccentric sense of taste and style. You will visit the bookstore not because it can ever pretend to be comprehensive, but because you want to enter a space where the bookstore’s selectivity has created a niche. Its range will be thorough for what it sets out to do, but with much less stock than the bookstores of the past. And its market will be the world, as the store’s stock is reproduced in its online bookstore, its value being in its selectivity and the kinds of readers who write reviews in that space.
For readers
The world of scholarly reading is also certain to change, and for the better. Some forms of print will disappear, such as hugely expensive scholarly encyclopedias in which there is too much to read ever to want the whole volume, and where there is simply no need to purchase in print entries that you may never need to read. Chapter-by-chapter electronic access is much more resource efficient.
The academic journal
Just as academic book publishing is on the cusp of enormous change, so the academic journal system seems ripe for change, too.
Whereas in the scholarly book business, publishers employ commissioning editors who use reviewers to confirm their decisions regarding their lists, journal editing is devolved to academics, who in turn manage a peer-review process in order to vet article content. This process has come in for much criticism for its various flaws as a knowledge system.
To take the discursive features of the journal peer-review process, these track the linearity and post-publication fixity of text manufacturing processes in the era of print. Peer review is at the pre-publication phase of the social process of text production, drawing a clear distinction of pre- and post-publication at the moment of commitment to print. Pre-publication processes are hidden in confidential spaces, leading to publication of a text in which readers are unable to uncover the intertextuality, and thus dialogue, that went into this aspect of the process of knowledge design. The happenings in this space remain invisible to public scrutiny and thus unaccountable. This is in most part for practical reasons—it would be cumbersome and expensive to make these processes public. In the digital era, however, the incidental recording of communicative interchanges of all sorts is pervasive and cheap, suggesting in cases of public interest (of which knowledge making would surely be one) that these be made part of the public record or at least an independently auditable confidential record.
Then, in the post-publication phase, there is very little chance for dialogue that can have an impact on the statement of record, the printed article, beyond subsequent publication of errata. Reviews, citations and subsequent articles may reinforce, revise or repudiate the content of the publication of record, but these are all new publications equally the products of a linear textual workflow. Moving to PDF as a digital analogue of print does very little to change this mode of textual and knowledge production.
Key flaws in this knowledge system are the lack of transparency in pre-publication processes, lack of metamoderation or audit of referee reports or editor–referee deliberations, and the relative closure of a one step, one way publication process (Whitworth and Friedman 2009a, 2009b). If we posit that greater reflexivity and dialogue will make for more powerful, effective and responsive knowledge processes, then we have to say that we have yet barely exploited the affordances of digital media. Sosteric discusses Habermas’ ideal speech situation in which both interlocutors have equal opportunity to initiate speech, there is mutual understanding, there is space for clarification, interlocutors can use any speech act and there is equal power over the exchange (Sosteric 1996). In each of these respects the journal peer-review process is less than ideal as a discursive framework. There are power asymmetries, identities are not revealed, dialogue between referee and author is prevented, the arbiter–editor is unaccountable, consensus is not necessarily reached, and none of these processes are open to scrutiny on the public record.
We can see some of what may be possible in the ways in which the new media integrally incorporate continuous review in their ranking and sorting mechanisms—from the simple ranking and viewing metrics of YouTube to more sophisticated moderation and metamoderation methods at web publishing sites such as the web-based IT news publication Slashdot (http://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml). Social evaluations of text that were practically impossible for print are now easy to carry out in the digital media. Is it just habits of knowledge-making practice that prevent us moving in these directions? What about setting up a more dialogical relation between authors and referees? Let the author speak to referee and editor, with or without identities revealed: How useful did you find this review? If you did, perhaps you might acknowledge a specific debt? Or do you think the reviewer’s judgement might have been clouded by ideological or paradigmatic antipathy?
Such dialogues are much of the time closed by the current peer-review system, and at best the author takes on board some of the reviewer’s suggestions in the rewriting process, unacknowledged. Tentative experiments in open peer review, not too unlike post-publication review in a traditional publishing workflow, have been designed to grant greater recognition to the role of referees and create greater transparency, to discourage abusive reviews and to reduce the chances of ideas being stolen by anonymous reviewers before they can be published (Rowland 2002). Why should referees be less honest in their assessments when their identities are revealed? They may be just as honest. In fact, the cloak of anonymity has its own discursive dangers including nondisclosure of interests, unfairly motivated criticisms and theft of ideas.
In the new media, too, reviewers can be ranked by people whose work has been reviewed, and their reviews in turn ranked and weighted for their credibility in subsequent reviews. This is roughly how trusted super-author reviewers emerge in Wikipedia. There could also be multiple points of review, blurring the pre- and post-publication distinction. Initial texts can be published earlier, and re-versioning can occur indefinitely. In this way, published texts need not ossify, and the lines of their development could be traced because changes are disclosed in the public record of versions. These are some of the discursive possibilities that the digital allows, all of which may make for more open, dynamic and responsive knowledge dialogue, where the speed of the dialogue is not slowed down by the media through which it is carried.
Another major flaw in the traditional peer-review process, and a flaw that need not exist in the world of digital media, is in the textual form of the article itself. Here is a central contradiction in its mode of textuality: the canonical scholarly article speaks in a voice of empirical transparency, paradigmatic definitiveness and rhetorical neutrality—this last oxymoron capturing precisely a core contradiction, epistemic hypocrisy even. For the textual form of the article abstracts knowledge away from its reference points. The article does not contain the data; rather it refers to the data or suggests how the author’s results could be replicated. The article is not the knowledge, or even the direct representation of knowledge—it is a rhetorical representation of knowledge.
This practically has to be the case for print and print look-alikes. But in the digital world there is no cost in presenting full datasets along with their interpretation, a complete record of the observations in point alongside replicable steps in observation, the archive itself alongside its exegesis. Referees, in other words, in the era of digital recording could not only review the knowledge representation, but come a good deal closer to the world to which those representations point in the form of immediate recordings of that world. This can occur multimodally through the amalgamation of datasets, still image, moving image and sound with text—along with captions, tags and exegeses.
Moreover, there are no page constraints (shape and textual form) or page limits (size and extent) in the digital record. This brings the reviewer into a different relation to the knowledge itself, more able to judge the relations between the purported knowledge and its textual forms, and for this reason also more able to make a contribution to its shaping as represented knowledge. This would also allow a greater deal of transparency in the dialectics of the empirical record and its interpretation. It may also lead to a more honest separation of represented data from the interpretative voice of the author, thus creating a more open and plausible environment for empirical work. In a provocative article, John Ioannidis argues that ‘most published research findings are false’ (Ioannidis 2005). Exposing data would invite critical reinterpretation of represented results and reduce the rates and margins of error in the published knowledge record.
Future knowledge systems
If today’s knowledge systems are broken in places and on the verge of breaking in others, what, then, is to be done? Following is an agenda for the making of future knowledge systems that may optimise the affordances of the new, digital media.
Digital technologies and new media cultures suggest a number of possibilities for renovation of the knowledge system of the scholarly journal. Open peer review where authors and referees know each other’s identities, or blind reviews that are made public, may well produce greater accountability on the part of editors and referees, and provide evidence of and credit the contribution a referee has made to the reconstruction of a text (Quirós and Martín 2009). Reviews could be dialogical, with or without the reviewer’s identity declared, instead of the unidirectional finality of an accept, reject or rewrite judgement. The referee could be reviewed—by authors, moderators or other third party referees—and their reviews weighted for their accumulated, community-ascribed value as a referee. And whether review texts and decision dialogues are on the public record or not, they should be open to independent audit for abuses of positional power.
Then, instead of a lock-step march to a single point of publication, followed by an irrevocable fixity to the published record, a more incremental process of knowledge recording and refinement is straightforwardly possible. This could even end the distinction between pre-publication refereeing and post-publication review. Re-versioning would allow initial, pre-refereeing formulations to be made visible, as well as the dialogue that contributed to rewriting for publication. As further commentary and reviews come in, the author could correct and reformulate, thus opening the published text to continuous improvement.
One consequence of this shift will be that, rather than have the heroic author shepherding a text to a singular moment of publication, the ‘social web’ and interactive potentials intrinsic to the new media point to more broadly distributed, more collaborative knowledge futures. What has been called Web 2.0 (Hannay 2007), or the more interactive and extensively sociable application of the internet, points to wider networks of participation, greater responsiveness to commentary, more deeply integrated bodies of knowledge and more dynamic, responsive and faster moving knowledge cultures.
The effect of a more open system would be to allow entry points into the republic of scholarly knowledge for people currently outside the self-enclosing circles of prestigious research institutions and highly ranked journals. Make scholarly knowledge affordable to people without access through libraries to expensive institutional journal subscriptions, make the knowledge criteria explicit, add more accountability to the review process, allow all-comers to get started in the process of the incremental refinement of rigorously validated knowledge, and you’ll find new knowledge—some adjudged to be manifestly sound and some not—emerging from industrial plants, schools, hospitals, government agencies, lawyer’s offices, hobbyist organisations, business consultants and voluntary groups. Digital media infrastructures make this a viable possibility.
The possibility would also arise for more globally distributed sites of knowledge production, validation and dissemination. Approximately onequarter of the world’s universities are in the Anglophone world. However, the vast majority of the world’s academic journal articles are from academics working in Anglophone countries. A more comprehensive and equitable global knowledge system would reduce this systemic bias. Openings in the new media include developments in machine translation and the role of knowledge schemas, semantic markup and tagging to assist discovery and access across different languages. They also speak to a greater tolerance for ‘accented’ writing in English as a non-native language.
In 1965 J.C.R. Linklider wrote of the deficiencies of the book as a source of knowledge, and imagined a future of ‘procognitive systems’ (Linklider 1965). He was, in fact, anticipating a completely new knowledge system. That system is not with us yet. In the words of Jean-Claude Guédon, we are still in the era of digital incunabula (Guédon 2001).
Escaping the confines of print look-alike formats, however, expansive possibilities present themselves. With semantic markup, large corpora of text might be opened up to data mining and cybermashups (Cope and Kalantzis 2004; Sompel and Lagoze 2007; Wilbanks 2007). Knowledge representations can present more of the world in less mediated form in datasets, images, videos and sound recordings (Fink and Bourne 2007; Lynch 2007). Whole disciplines traditionally represented only by textual exegesis, such as the arts, media and design, might be formally brought into academic knowledge systems in the actual modalities of their practice (Jakubowicz 2009). New units of knowledge may be created, at levels of granularity other than the singular article of today’s journals system—fragments of evidence and ideas contributed by an author within an article (Campbell 2008), and curated collections and mashups above the level of an article, with sources duly credited by virtue of electronically tagged tracings of textual and data provenance.
Emerging knowledge ecologies: an agenda for transformation
What kinds of renewal do our academic knowledge systems require in order to improve their quality, effectiveness and value as an integral part of the research and knowledge building infrastructure of a peculiarly ‘knowledge society’? The following ten points represent an agenda for further research. They are also a practical development agenda, suggesting that academic publishing, and the knowledge ecology which it supports, has a long way to go before it fully exploits the affordances of the internet. From the more specific to the more general, the key questions we propose towards the development of future knowledge systems are as follows.
Pre-publication knowledge validation
Whether it is commercial publishing or open access, the peer-review system is not working as well as it might. Peer review is not universal and it is not always clear which journals and book manuscripts are peer reviewed and which are not. In fact, the shift to digital repositories and rapid publication may be reducing the proportion of peer-reviewed academic articles and books. In open access and commercial models, however, commissioning editors in publishing houses and journal editors in universities have disproportionate influence, which may at times affect the quality of the knowledge systems they sustain: choosing reviewers who are likely to be sympathetic or unsympathetic to a particular work; general lack of a systematic, consistent and criterion-referenced review process; and an absence of reflexivity now characteristic of online ‘social networking’ environments—who reviews the reviewers (metamoderation) and how does the author enter dialogue with the reviewer? The key point here is that the current peer-review system has a tendency at times to conserve the boundaries of closed knowledge networks and to create an intellectual inertia which works against the publication of cross-disciplinary, substantially innovative or potentially paradigm-altering thinking. How, then, do we develop publication and knowledge systems which are more open and reflexive? What can be learnt from the logics of the ‘social web’?
Post-publication knowledge validation
Today’s systems of bibliometrics and impact assessment tend to favour traditional publishing models. Current validation processes (e.g. ISI or Web of Knowledge) are neither transparent nor reliable. They have notable and well-documented flaws (Lazaroiu 2009, pp. 62ff). The system neglects books and other media. Rejection rates are an arbitrary relation to the number of articles a journal publishes per year and the generality of its scope. Knowledge is measured by a form of ‘popularity’ rating, which works against small, specialised and emerging fields. Models of ‘webometrics’ are now appearing, but they are still crude. We need to investigate and develop more reliable ways of assessing the quality and impact of published knowledge. Furthermore, post publication, there is little opportunity for new and revised editions of articles to be published based on the ongoing dialogue of post-publication review. Postpublication knowledge validation needs to become more reflexive so that qualitative impact assessment feeds back into the knowledge system. (At the moment the main function it serves is as a career performance indicator.) Through an iterative process, readers could become more closely involved in the creation and refinement of knowledge.
Sustainability
Beyond the open access–commercial publishing dichotomy there is a question of resourcing models and sustainability. Academics’ time is not best spent as amateur publishers. The main research question here is how does one build sustainable resourcing models which require neither cross-subsidy of academics’ time, nor the unjustifiable and unsustainable costing and pricing structures of the big publishers? The key challenge is to develop new business models.
Intellectual property
How does one balance academics’ and universities’ interest in intellectual property with the public knowledge interest? At times, the ‘gift economy’ underwrites a ‘theft economy’ in which private companies profit from the supply content provided at no charge. Such companies copy content without permission or payment, and make money from advertising alongside this content. The key question here is how does one establish an intellectual property regime that sustains intellectual autonomy, rather than a ‘give away’ economy which may at times undervalue the work of the academy? When and to what extent are open access and ‘commons’ approaches to intellectual property appropriate and functional to creating socially productive knowledge systems? When are conventional licences appropriate?
Distributed knowledge
How do we open out academic knowledge systems so they can incorporate knowledge produced in other institutional sites—in hospitals, schools, industrial plants, government and the like? How can this knowledge be incorporated into meta-analyses by means of semantic publishing markup, tagging and data mining?
Disciplinarity and interdisciplinarity
How does publishing in different discipline areas reflect varied epistemological modes—from the social practices of citation and prepublication review to post-publication circulation? How is intellectual community created? We need to focus on lessons that may be learnt across disciplines for the creation of more resilient forms of knowledge, and to examine how new and cross-disciplinary knowledge systems emerge.
Modes of representation and signification
The digital media present new potentials for knowledge representation. Conventional scholarly publishing has not yet fully realised the multimodal affordances of the new media. What places do websites, video and datasets have in the new media? How might disciplinary practices traditionally represented only by second order exegesis, such as the arts, media, communications, design and architecture, be formally brought in less mediated ways into academic knowledge systems? How might they use forms of representation which are closer to their core professional and disciplinary practices?
Globalism
The key question here is how to achieve a more equitable global balance in scholarly publishing without prejudice to intellectual quality. There are also questions about how a more closely integrated global knowledge system would work. The answers lie in examination of the role of English as a lingua franca including articles written with a second language speaker’s ‘accent’; developments in machine translation; and the role of knowledge schemas, semantic markup and tagging to assist discovery and access across different languages.
Reconfiguring the role of the university
Underlying these research considerations is a larger question of the changing role of the university, from a place that supports a relatively closed knowledge system to one that serves more open knowledge architectures. How might a more participatory and inclusive knowledge culture be created, in which universities assume an integrating rather than exclusionary role?
Conditions of knowledge making for a ‘knowledge economy’
Finally, there is an even larger question: how might renewed academic knowledge systems support a broader social agenda of intellectual risk taking, creativity and innovation? How is renovation of our academic knowledge systems a crucial aspect of meeting the heightened expectations of a ‘knowledge society’? And what are the affordances of the digital media which may support reform?
Conclusions
Whatever the models of sustainability that emerge, knowledge systems of the near future could and should be very different from those of our recent past. The sites of formal knowledge validation and documentation will be more dispersed. They will be more global, in the lingua franca of English and also, as machine translation improves, not necessarily so. The knowledge processes they use will be more reflexive and so more thorough and reliable. Knowledge will be published more quickly. Through semantic publishing it will be more discoverable and open to aggregation and reinterpretation. There will be much more of it, but it will be much easier to navigate. The internet provides us these affordances. It is our task as knowledge workers to realise the promise of the internet and to create more responsive, equitable and powerful knowledge ecologies.
An information revolution has accompanied the digitisation of text, image and sound and the rapid emergence of the internet as a universal conduit for digital content. But the information revolution does not in itself bring about change of social or epistemic significance. Academic publishing is a case in point. The internet-accessible PDF file makes journal articles widely and cheaply available, but its form simply replicates the production processes and social relations of the print journal: a one-way production line which ends in the creation of a static, stable text restricted to text and still image. This change is not enough to warrant the descriptor ‘disruptive’. The technological shift, large as it is, does not produce a change in the social processes and relations of knowledge production.
There is no deterministic relationship, in other words, between technology and social change. New technologies can be used to do old things. In fact, in their initial phases new technologies more often than not are simply put to work do old things—albeit, perhaps, more efficiently. At most, the technological opens out social affordances, frequently in ways not anticipated by the designers of those technologies. So what is the range of affordances in digital technologies that open new possibilities for knowledge making? We can see glimpses of possibility of new and more dynamic knowledge systems, but not yet captured in the mainstream academic journal or book publishing systems. For instance, in contrast to texts that replicate print and are structured around typographic markup, we can envisage more readily searchable and data mineable texts structured around semantic markup. In contrast to knowledge production processes, which force us to represent knowledge on the page, restricting us to text and still image, we can envision a broader, multimodal body of publishable knowledge which would represent objects of knowledge that could not have been so readily captured in print or its digital analogue: datasets, video, dynamic models and multimedia displays. The stuff that was formerly represented as the external stuff of knowledge can now be represented and incorporated within the knowledge. And in contrast to linear, lock-step modes of dissemination of knowledge, we can see signs of possibility for scholarly knowledge in the more collaborative, dialogical and recursive forms of knowledge making already to be found in less formal digital media spaces such as wikis, blogs and other readily accessible website content self-management systems. Even when it has moved to PDF or e-book reader formats, most book and journal content is still bound to the world of print-look-alike knowledge representation. However, a reading of technological affordances tells us that we don’t have to be using digital technologies to replicate traditional processes of knowledge representation.
If trends can be read into the broader shifts in the new, digital media, they stand to transform the characteristic epistemic mode of authoritativeness of the heritage scholarly publishing. The historical dichotomy of author and reader, creator and consumer is everywhere being blurred. Authors blog, readers talk back, bloggers respond; wiki users read, and intervene to change the text if and when needs be; game players become participants in narratives; iPod users create their own playlists; digital TV viewers create their own viewing sequences. These are aspects of a general and symptomatic shift in the balance of agency, where a flat world of users replaces a hierarchical world of culture and knowledge in which a few producers create content to transmit to a mass of receivers (Cope and Kalantzis 2007).
What will academic publishing be like once it escapes its heritage constraints? There will be more knowledge collaborations between knowledge creators and knowledge users, in which user commentary perhaps can become part of the knowledge itself. Knowledge making will escape its linear, lock-step, beginning-to-end process. The end point will not be a singular version of record—it will be something that can be re-versioned as much as needed. Knowledge making will be more recursive, responsive, dynamic and, above all, more collaborative and social rather than it was in an earlier modernity, which paid greater obeisance to the voice of the heroically original author.
These, then, are some of the potentially profound shifts that may occur in the knowledge regime reflected in the representational processes of today’s academic publishing. They could portend nothing less than a revolution in the shape and form of academic knowledge ecologies.
If it is the role of the scholarly knowledge system to produce deeper, broader and more reliable knowledge than is possible in everyday, casual experience, what do we need to do to deepen this tradition rather than allow it to break, falling victim to the disruptive forces of the new media? The answer will not just be to create new publishing processes. It will entail the building of new knowledge systems.
This inevitably leads us to an even larger question: how might renewed scholarly knowledge systems support a broader social agenda of intellectual risk taking, creativity and innovation? How is renovation of our academic knowledge systems a way to address the heightened expectations of a ‘knowledge society’? And what are the affordances of the digital media which may support reform?
Whatever the models that emerge, the knowledge systems of the near future could and should be very different from those of our recent past. The sites of formal knowledge validation and documentation will be more dispersed across varied social sites. They will be more global. The knowledge processes they use will be more reflexive and so more thorough and reliable. Knowledge will be made available faster. Through semantic publishing, knowledge will be more discoverable and open to disaggregation, reaggregation and reinterpretation. There will be much more of it, but it will be much easier to navigate. The internet provides us these affordances. It will allow us to define and apply new epistemic virtues. It is our task as knowledge workers to realise the promise of our times and to create more responsive, equitable and powerful knowledge ecologies.
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