Rogers, H
Academic Journals in the Digital Age: An Editor's Perspective
http://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/id/eprint/4195/
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Citation (please note it is advisable to refer to the publisher’s version if you
intend to cite from this work)
Rogers, H (2016) Academic Journals in the Digital Age: An Editor's
Perspective. JOURNAL OF VICTORIAN CULTURE, 21 (1). pp. 112-117. ISSN
1355-5502
LJMU Research Online
http://researchonline.ljmu.ac.uk/
mailto:researchonline@ljmu.ac.uk
Academic Journals in the Digital Age: An Editor’s Perspective
Helen Rogers
The place of academic journals in the scholarly eco-system has been radically
challenged since I became an editor of the Journal of Victorian Culture in 2008. It has
been an exciting time to be involved in curating an interdisciplinary periodical and
experimenting in ways the journal format can adapt to the changing landscape of
online publication, networking and communication. Yet though we now have a host
of new resources and tools at our fingertips, the content of scholarly journals and
articles – as James Mussell explains in this roundtable - remains remarkably similar
to their forebears in the pre-digital, pre-social media age.1 As I step down as editor,
here I reflect on what we could do differently and which features of traditional
publication we might wish to retain.
My initial thinking about the journal format was prompted by changes in my reading
practices and those of my students as, increasingly, we accessed single articles
online rather than in printed volumes stacked on library shelves.2 How could JVC
replicate the experience of dipping into an issue and browsing its back catalogue,
1 Dan Cohen, ‘The Ivory Tower and the Open Web: Introduction: Burritos, Browsers,
and Books [Draft]’, Dan Cohen (26 July 2011)
[accessed 11 May 2013].
2 For the pedagogical implications of this shift, see George Gosling, ‘Why Academic
Journals Still Matter’, Musings (26 October 2015)
and Katrina Navikas, ‘Does the form of traditional academic journals mean
anything to students in the age of online access?’, History and Today (12 October
2015) [both accessed 12 November 2015].
http://www.dancohen.org/2011/07/26/the-ivory-tower-and-the-open-web-introduction-burritos-browsers-and-books-draft/
http://www.dancohen.org/2011/07/26/the-ivory-tower-and-the-open-web-introduction-burritos-browsers-and-books-draft/
https://gcgosling.wordpress.com/2015/10/26/why-academic-journals-still-matter/
https://gcgosling.wordpress.com/2015/10/26/why-academic-journals-still-matter/
especially when publishers’ platforms are not easy to navigate? Journal archives on
these sites are still difficult to search using keywords and I frequently struggle to
identify content in JVC’s previous issues relating to a particular author or theme.
When I became an editor, I envied the visual appeal of the open access e-journal 19:
Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, founded in 2005.3 Its
content pages - with thumbnail images inviting clickbait by conveying, at a glance,
each article’s themes - are far more attractive than online platforms for traditional
journals. In setting up the Journal of Victorian Culture Online
in 2010, I hoped we could recreate the magazine feel
for JVC, tempting readers to view individual articles and browse across issues while
providing opportunities for interaction and discussion.
However, JVC Online, with its Facebook
and Twitter feeds, soon acquired its own
identity in bringing together an online community of Victorianists, under the
dynamic editorship of Lucinda Matthews-Jones. Allowing real-time engagement with
contemporary treatments of nineteenth-century culture - exhibitions,
dramatizations, the release of digital materials, and so on - it has become more than
a supplement. ‘Victorians beyond the Academy’, begun as an occasional feature in
the print journal in 2010, has effectively migrated to JVC Online where timely
coverage and interactive links have welcomed a diverse readership as well as critical
reflection on the public engagement agenda.
3 Launched and run by the Centre for Victorian Studies, Birkbeck College, University
of London, 19 is now hosted by the mega journal
platform, Open Library of Humanities .
http://blogs.tandf.co.uk/jvc/
https://www.facebook.com/JVConline/
https://twitter.com/jofvictculture
https://twitter.com/jofvictculture
http://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/
https://www.openlibhums.org/
Through our social media streams we have been able to interact - and share both
blog and journal content - with independent scholars, creative writers, popular
historians, curators and librarians who rarely have time or inclination to participate
in academic conferences and publications. In an online survey of JVC Online’s users
in 2013, nearly 20% of respondents defined themselves as independent scholars, a
much higher proportion than found at academic gatherings.4 Similarly, JVC Online
has brought into conversation a diverse cross-disciplinary community, from all age
groups. Though we expected postgraduates and early career researchers to feature
heavily in our survey, in fact the proportion aged 20-29 (24.75%) almost equaled that
between 40-49 (23.76%), and the largest group was aged 30-39 (37%). While literary
scholars predominate in the field’s publications and conferences, they formed just
over half our respondents (56%). Using the #twitterstorians hashtag has raised our
profile among historians, now reflected in our contributors, readers and altmetrics;
in 2014 JVC was ranked 7 in Thomson Reuter’s list of history journals.
Our activity on social media has also nurtured the growth of blogs in our field, which,
few and far between in 2009, are now a vital part research culture. By 2013, 40% of
our survey respondents had blogged on their own site or on a collaborative blog. As
Lucinda Matthews-Jones discusses in this roundtable, blogging can provide
4 Helen Rogers and Lucinda Matthews-Jones, Journal of Victorian Culture Survey
[accessed 12 November
2015].
postgraduates and emerging scholars with an introduction to writing for a broad,
public audience rather than exclusively for specialists in their field. However, to
realize the potential of blogging for scholars at every career stage, we might think
more inventively about how interactive media can help us reshape traditional
scholarship, including the journal article, which has changed remarkably little in
appearance.5
The stasis of article publication is highlighted in the apparent reluctance of authors
to engage explicitly with digital scholarship. In 2008 we aimed to kick-start regular
discussion of the digital in Victorian studies with a special issue on ‘Searching
Questions’.6 Under James Mussell’s editorship, the Digital Forum has become one of
the most significant arenas for reviewing digital resources and approaches outside
dedicated digital humanities publications. While the forum has nurtured digital
conversations in our field – also evident in well-attended conference panels – it is
striking how few of our article submissions foreground active use of digital materials
and practices. ‘Searching Questions’ was preceded by a call for articles that were
fundamentally concerned with digital concepts and methodologies or where the
research had been ‘born digital’. We looked forward to working with authors and
our publisher to accommodate the interactive features of such scholarship within
the journal, online and in print. But we received just one submission: Matthew
5 For examples of creative approaches to scholarly blogging, see Helen Rogers,
‘Blogging Our Criminal Past: Public History, Social Media and Creative History’, Law,
Crime and History 5.1 (2015): 54-76,
http://www.pbs.plymouth.ac.uk/solon/journal/vol.5%...
6 Helen Rogers, Editorial, ‘Searching Questions: Digital Research and Victorian
Culture’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 13.1 (2008), pp. 56-7 <
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3366/E1355550208000076>
http://www.pbs.plymouth.ac.uk/solon/journal/vol.5%20issue1%202015/Rogers.pdf
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3366/E1355550208000076
Rubery’s insightful article on the history of audio books.7 Subsequent articles that
are immersed in the digital can be counted on one hand.8
While it is often claimed that editors exert a conservative hold over academic
scholarship, our experience at JVC points to a wider diffidence in the field in
confronting the digital. At the very least, we should all highlight rather than disguise
our use of online resources (including digitized books), by providing digital citations
and links, and by acknowledging the search process (including keywords) and its
limitations when discussing methodology. Editors may have to be more pro-active in
encouraging experimentation if we are to radically re-imagine the digital article. For
this reason, we plan to launch an annual competition to promote digital resources
7 Matthew Rubery, ‘Play It Again, Sam Weller: New Digital Audiobooks and Old Ways
of Reading’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 13. 1 (2008), pp. 58-79
8 Bob Nicholson, ‘“You Kick the Bucket; We Do the Rest!”: Jokes and the Culture of
Reprinting in the Transatlantic Press’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 17. 3 (2012), pp.
273-86 ;
Andrew Hobbs, ‘The Deleterious Dominance of The Times in Nineteenth-Century
Scholarship’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 18. 4 (2013), pp. 472-97 <
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13555502.2013.854519>; Kelly J.
Mays, ‘How the Victorians Un-Invented Themselves: Architecture, the Battle of the
Styles, and the History of the Term Victorian’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 19. 1
(2014), pp. 1-23<
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13555502.2014.889425>; Sally M.
Foster, Alice Blackwell, Martin Goldberg, ‘The Legacy of Nineteenth-century Replicas
for Object Cultural Biographies: Lessons in Duplication from 1830s Fife’, Journal of
Victorian Culture, 19. 2 (2014), pp. 137-160
;
Christopher Donaldson, Ian N. Gregory, Patricia Murrieta-Flores, ‘Mapping
“Wordsworthshire”: A GIS Study of Literary Tourism in Victorian Lakeland’, Journal of
Victorian Culture, 20. 3 (2015), pp. 287-307
.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3366/E1355550208000088
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13555502.2012.702664
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13555502.2014.889425
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13555502.2014.919079
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13555502.2015.1058089
and essays, individual and collaborative blogs, as dynamic elements of contemporary
research culture.
To embrace fully the interactive potential of hypertext and the new media, however,
we may have to give up the printed journal, while continuing to give readers the
option to download and print on demand. Sadly, this would deprive the falling
number of individual subscribers of the pleasures, attested by some readers, of
receiving and handling a print issue, but it would have numerous advantages. Fixed
page budgets mean most academic journals operate tight word limits. Few accept
articles over 10,000 words while others allow as little as 6,000. Word limits
encourage authors to be concise but can prohibit essays drawing on extensive
archival research or interweaving several scholarly debates; precisely the reasons we
consider longer article submissions at JVC.
Released from the tyranny of print, however, articles could range in length from
short, pithy interventions to heavily documented research essays, of the kind E.P.
Thompson would now struggle to place. As more museums, galleries and libraries
open their digital content, authors could display images in addition to embedding
links; engage more closely with visual and material culture; and use illustrations to
reinforce analysis while making the reading experience more stimulating and
pleasurable. Authors could experiment with different lines of enquiry and modes of
argument, offering readers alternative routes through their essay rather than always
following a linear direction to a single point of conclusion.9
The advantages of online publication have been championed by the open access
movement, which has mounted a trenchant, though by no means unified, critique of
academic journals and publishers. In some quarters this has been coupled with calls
for traditional (usually blind) peer review mechanisms to be replaced by open peer
review. In this model, authors publish scholarship on an online platform where
essays are open for comment and evaluation by self-selecting reviewers. The open
comments system means the review process is transparent and the once hidden
labour of anonymous reviewers is recorded and credited. Subsequent readers can
trace how an article has evolved through each re-draft and assess the author’s
responses to readers’ recommendations. Once peer review is crowd-sourced by the
online community, editors would no longer intervene significantly in the writing
process but instead select and ‘badge’ articles for their journal, which could operate
without the costs and overheads of traditional publishing.10 But would this not make
9 See for example, William G. Thomas, III, ‘Writing A Digital History Journal Article
from Scratch: An Account’, available DH Project (2007)
[accessed 12 November
2015]. The essays recounts the experiment in creating a digital article based on the
Valleys of the Shadows project as an interactive / 300 page article. See William G.
Thomas, III, and Edward L. Ayers, ‘An Overview: The Differences Slavery Made: A
Close Analysis of Two American Communities’, American Historical Review, 108
(2003), pp. 1299-1307 and
The Differences Slavery Made: A Close Analysis of Two American Communities (2003)
10 Jo Guldi, ‘Reinventing the Academic Journal’, Hacking the Academy: New
Approaches to Scholarship and Teaching from Digital Humanities, ed. by Daniel J.
Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt (Michigan: Michigan University Press, 2013)
http://digitalhistory.unl.edu/essays/thomasessay.php
http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/AHR
file:///C:/Users/mcchroge/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/Temporary%20Internet%20Files/Content.Outlook/BP4XGF7H/ahr.oxfordjournals.org/content/108/5/1299.full.pdf
http://www2.vcdh.virginia.edu/AHR/
editors more akin to research assessors and journals little more than a ranking
platform?
There are a few notable examples of crowd-sourced, pre-publication peer-reviewed
journal issues, edited collections and monographs but it is notable that attempts to
generalize the model, at least in the humanities, have not yet proved successful.11 As
two of its pioneers, Katherine Rowe and Kathleen Fitzpatrick acknowledge, open
peer review depends on a ‘community of trust’ that takes time and care to build.12 It
is also notable that online journals with comment facilities receive very few
comments from readers. Similarly, as Lucinda Matthews-Jones points out in this
roundtable, time-pressed readers are much more likely to interact with blogs and
articles with ‘thumbs-up tweets’ or in ephemeral exchanges on their own Facebook
timeline, rather than in sustained discussion in comment sections. But if the
academy is not yet geared up for open peer review, there are also positive aspects of
traditional editorial practice and peer review that we might be well-advised to
retain.
; Tim Hitchcock and Jason M.
Kelley, ‘Reinventing the Academic Journal: The “Digital Turn”, Open Access, & Peer
Review’, History Workshop Online (22 April 2013)
[accessed 2 May 2013].
11 Hitchcock and Kelly launched an Open Scholarship Project (described in
‘Reinventing the Academic Journal’), but few articles received comments and the site
is no longer available.
12 Katherine Rowe and Kathleen Fitzpatrick, ‘Keywords for Open Peer Review’, Logos:
The Journal of the World Book Community, 21.3-4 (2010): 249-257.
http://www.digitalculture.org/books/hacking-the-academy-new-approaches-to-scholarship-and-teaching-from-digital-humanities/
http://www.digitalculture.org/books/hacking-the-academy-new-approaches-to-scholarship-and-teaching-from-digital-humanities/
http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/reinventing-the-academic-journal-the-digital-turn-open-access-peer-review/
http://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/reinventing-the-academic-journal-the-digital-turn-open-access-peer-review/
Reviewers tend to report on specialist aspects of essays under consideration. Part of
the editor’s role, however, is to ensure articles work not just as stand-alone pieces
but speak to the journal’s wider readership. JVC’s editors work hard to encourage
authors to show how their research can interest a broad and interdisciplinary
readership in order to maximize its influence. This involves helping authors highlight
their central claims, flag their argument and extend its significance beyond their
specialist concerns. It also means encouraging them to write clearly and
economically for an audience including students as well as experts in their field.
Almost all of us benefit from this kind of editorial intervention – I certainly do – but it
is labour that is probably done most constructively ‘behind the scenes’.
While the merits of traditional peer review may outweigh the largely unproven
claims of open review, JVC has welcomed the move towards open scholarship.
However, the mixed economy of open access that currently operates – at least in the
UK – has important consequences for the status and reach of our contributors’
research. Mandates by HEFCE and the Research Councils now ensure that ‘publically
funded’ scholarship is made either ‘gold’ open access (instant OA paid for by Author
Processing Charges) or ‘green’ open access (either made OA on publication with no
charge; or the pre-print version, made OA through a repository of some kind, usually
after an 18 months embargo). This means readers can have very different levels of
access to articles in a single issue. RCUK awards cover Article Processing Charges for
its funded researchers, though only a tiny proportion of our authors receive such
funding. Articles supported by these grants have been among our most downloaded
essays and consequently are likely to be more cited. In view of the increasing use of
altmetrics by funders, employers and recruitment panels, there is a danger we
create a virtuous circle where funded open access leads to more citations which
leads to further funding and career enhancement.
While we encourage our publisher to make other articles open access for short
periods of time, we need the help of our authors and readers to maximize the
circulation of all scholarship in our field and ensure continuing conversations.
Through social media we currently promote articles when they are published on our
journal platform, when the print issue is released, and again when authors post a
blog about their article at JVC Online. But as Lucinda Matthews-Jones points out,
authors could give their articles another lease of life when they come out of the
embargo period. In addition, our authors and readers could write blogs to coincide
with upcoming anniversaries and events when relevant articles from our archives
could be made open access. Similarly, readers could offer to edit, with a published
introduction, ‘virtual issues’ comprising archived articles on a particular topic or
shared agenda.13
It seems likely that academic journals will keep evolving as reading and online habits
continue to change. Recent years have seen considerable debate over academic
journals in which editors tend to be cast as gatekeepers. Less attention has been
13 See for example, the virtual issue on ‘Folklore and Anthropology’ at Past and
Present, with articles open access until the end of 2015, edited with a new
introduction by William Pooley, ‘Native to the Past: History, Anthropology, and
Folklore’, Past and Present (2015)
.
http://past.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/09/29/pastj.gtv038.full
http://past.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2015/09/29/pastj.gtv038.full
http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/past/anthropology_folklore.html
given to the constructive ways in which editorial boards have been involved in
making journals focal points for scholarly communities, dialogue and
experimentation. If the current mixed market for academic publication is to
continue, commercial publishers and academic presses will have to play a much
larger part in promoting journal content (and at a fair price) rather than leaving it to
the unpaid labour of authors and editors. But academics too will need to take
responsibility for sharing online the work of their peers and introducing students to
the new forms and forums of scholarly communication. The alternative is that
universities will stop investing in scholarly publication. Our research will be directed
to institutional repositories, where it will disappear into impersonal silos,
discoverable only via research management sites. That will be no place for
conversation or creativity.
Keywords: academic article; academic journal; altmetrics; blogging; digital
scholarship; editorship; electronic publication; open access; peer review; public
engagement; print publication; social media; readership; referencing; virtual issue
Abstract: This article provides an editor’s perspective on academic journals in the
transition from print to online publication and the move towards open access. It
considers the challenges facing scholarly publication but contends the new media
and social networking provide opportunities for radically rethinking what constitutes
an academic article and a scholarly journal. While editors and publishers are
frequently charged with acting as ‘gatekeepers’, the article argues that resistance to
change has also come from authors, particularly evident in the failure to reference
their use of digital resources. Above all, it claims, experimentation is inhibited by
journals retaining the traditional parameters of the printed issue, with their
restrictions on length and use of multimedia. Journals, it proposes, can become a
focal point for academic communities, dialogue and experimentation, but this
requires all scholars to be pro-active in sharing online the work of their peers and
introducing students to the new forms of scholarly communication.