Conventional Scholarship as "Legacy System" and Open Access as "Middleware"

A "legacy system" in the world of computing provides a useful analogy for understanding the precarious state of contemporary academic publishing. This comparison might also keep us from stepping backward in the very act of stepping forward in promoting Open Access publishing and Institutional Repositories. I will argue that, vital as it is, the Open Access movement should really be seen in its current manifestation as academic "middleware" servicing the "legacy system" of old-school scholarship.

Those who have followed my various posts relating to academic publishing know that I am a big proponent of Open Access scholarship. This is a vital movement requiring persistent effort to clear the many political and commercial impediments to the free circulation of scholarly knowledge that still persist. Accompanying the call for Open Access is that for Institutional Repositories, those archives that will appropriately package scholarship with metadata and permanently host scholarly works (as well as teaching media and born-digital scholarship, as I've discussed before).

These are vital principles and practices and I do not mean to undermine them at all, but these must be seen as accommodations for "legacy scholarship," analogous to "legacy" software or hardware. In other words, it is good business to sustain access to a prior system. At the same time, it is good business not to stay trapped within an expiring paradigm as we do so.

We all know the dizzying pace of technological change and have largely made our peace with the perennial upgrades to our hardware and software. It is unusual for someone to be using the same computer five years later, or the same cell phone even two years down the road. But not everyone can or will update right away, and this leaves manufacturers and developers in the curious (and inefficient) position of supporting not just the latest and greatest, but also the various "legacy systems" still in use. An easy example is Windows Vista, not widely adopted due to bugs and bad press, leaving many using Windows XP or even earlier Windows versions. Sometimes there are really good reasons not to upgrade (as many believed regarding Vista). Being first with technology can be risky. The second mouse, they say, gets the cheese. But what about the third or the fourth mouse? Well, they just don't get it.

Businesses will keep using legacy systems because of the cost or risk of replacement or redesign--and this despite an old system's poor competitiveness or compatibility with modern equivalents. Why? Well, the existing system is large, monolithic and difficult to modify (adapted from Free Online Dictionary of Computing).

This perfectly describes the reigning system of academic publishing: its competitiveness is poor in relationship to knowledge systems that are more agile and open. However, the established system is indeed so monolithic that it proves difficult to modify. You see, academia's knowledge economy is so symbiotically connected to for-profit (toll-access) publishing at this point in time that academics, ostensibly devoted to open inquiry and the pursuit of knowledge for social good, can be profoundly closed-minded about Open Access publishing or any method of distribution if it varies from the tried and true, even if those methods far exceed the reach and impact of traditional print publishing.

Witness, for example, the article from the March 23rd Chronicle of Higher Education ("Humanities Journals Know Not What the Future Holds") in which editors of humanities journals complained that the journal issue is now a kind of threatened species because the article is becoming a more primary unit (either compiled in collected print volumes or placed independently online). This sort of balkanizing apparently erodes the relationship among articles whose coherence is physically obvious within the binding of a printed issue; it sacrifices the disciplinary organization of knowledge that editors work hard to provide in their careful assembly of related works. Those are some interesting arguments, though they ignore the ways the semantic web and social filters can organize knowledge in more flexible ways than any given issue of a given journal. Of course such considerations of technology providing a superior avenue to disciplinary knowledge is a hard sell to those not very immersed in digital culture. You can sense that in remarks like the one by an editor in the same article who called journals "slow cooked food in a fast food culture." This was in fact a potshot taken at the emerging platform of microblogging. You can picture the tweed jackets around the water cooler chortling to one another reassuringly, "To think that any substantial human thought could occur in 140 characters or less!"

Though I poke fun at such willful ignorance of a most significant new mode of communication, I hasten to add that I believe in the sort of slow-cooked, sustained intellectual analysis that is the hallmark of traditional scholarship. And many modern tools, including Twitter, have yet to prove themselves academically. But holding onto the journal issue as a kind of sacred species is comparable to holding on tightly to scrolls of medieval florilegia (another era's version of compiled knowledge) to spite the emergence of encyclopedias in the Enlightenment (a true breakthrough in their day).

Sometimes a change in degree becomes a change in kind. Computers that ran a database program on your desktop were not the same as the ones that just made typing easier via word processing. Computers connected to the Internet and providing email were substantially different machines than those that had no such communication enabled. Broadband connections and encoding algorithms making possible the quick transfer of sound, image, and video make our computers substantially different devices than those Internet connections that just got your Eudora mail going.

But across all those very substantial leaps forward in computing and communication, academic publishing has treated the new tools as simple efficiency engines aiding the same kind of scholarly communication that Henry Oldenberg began in the 1660s with Philosophical Transactions: the restricted-access print journal. Despite going electronic, the contemporary academic journal remains largely unmediated in the ways that popular communication now is by default. A few more pictures, perhaps, but the genres of academic publication resist all the ways in which knowledge today is now rapidly interconnected. Hyperlinks are superior to traditional scholarly citations, but even links that are cited in scholarly publications get fossilized as footnotes rather than being living links. And worst of all, academic publishing remains quarantined behind commercial barriers. In a world in which there are now four billion near-instantaneous delivery devices (mobile phones), professors are content to have their best thinking enter a distribution stream that guarantees their work will be limited to as few as several hundred potential users. At some point it will be impossible to refer to such limited distribution as publication at all. Access is everything.

The restricted-knowledge model, inherited from print, affects not just the distribution of knowledge, but the nature and quality of its creation. Modern popular knowledge has been socialized through commenting and recommendation systems that academic knowledge has kept itself immune from behind its ivory curtain. And there is strong motivation for it to resist current communications. If academic publishing stays within its established genres and persists in the gateway model of peer review, it can continue to pretend to fixed and certain authority, as though knowledge is a commodity (as indeed, it is within the academic reward system). This is understandable given tradition, but it is inconsistent with the open and ongoing review of knowledge that is the new paradigm of communication and knowledge production. Ultimately, traditional academic publishing will prove to be inferior knowledge of diminishing significance (largely due to its own self silencing and its voluntary withdrawal from persistent social knowledge systems).

It is within this light that the Open Access movement should be considered, as well as the efforts to institutionalize OA through academic policies and online archives. Most of the Open Access movement is taking place in terms of accommodating Scholarship 1.0. Almost all the discussion regarding Open Access takes as a given the persistence of the traditional genres of academic knowledge (especially the journal article, but also the monograph, the dissertation, the thesis, etc.), and the persistence of the single-instance, gateway model of peer review. (It is still rare to hear OA advocates speak about born-digital scholarship, teaching media, or student-generated work--all of which should be captured and maintained in such repositories, as I've argued elsewhere).

I'm not saying that the current focus on traditional scholarship within Open Access efforts is wrong; I'm simply observing that this is "middleware." The term "middleware" has been coined within technology to name the necessary bridge that often needs to be made between generations of software or hardware. Such technology is created to sustain the life of legacy systems. And that is very, very important. In the cascade of innovation that we are all party to, we can get caught in a doppler effect of change, our data stranded on a hard drive unable to be read by the latest version of whatever software. This is a serious issue in its own right, and frankly, some of the staid principles of established scholarship could prove a nice corrective to the slash-and-burn innovation that too often does strand good knowledge or good tools in that mad dash for the Next Electronic Tool. Permanence is quite important, and once in awhile it is good to remember that a nicely printed book will outlive generations of your gadgets and software.

Nevertheless, the digital world is the world we must plan for. Academic publishing is going to evolve. Already the case has been made that scholarship can consist of creating tools that advance the "cyberinfrastructure" -- such as creating a computer program or posting a complete data set properly formatted for reuse by future scholars. Journal articles are going to be versioned one day just as Wikipedia pages, collaboratively created and mediated with sound and image as never before. Tagging and linking will be as critical, as required to substantiate knowledge, as peer review and documentation conventions are now. Scholarly social networks are emerging whose value will outstrip the greatest collections of fossilized knowledge.

Open Access is the front door, for its core principles embrace the whole range of changes that are upon us as we anticipate the broad dissemination and creation of knowledge. But it should swing forward more than backward. An Institutional Repository will hopefully contain all the intellectual output of a given university or discipline, permanently and openly connecting this data to all other open knowledge portals worldwide. But if such a repository is imagined simply as a collection of digitized texts--print monographs or PDF versions of articles that look and act like print, disconnected from the various media and socializing conventions of the digital knowledge paradigm--then these nerve centers for the future risk becoming monuments to the past. Enough college campuses are already going to serve that memorial function as location becomes less critical to knowledge-generating activities. Our precious databases upon which to build a bright future should not be just the "middleware" to the Second Middle Ages--what we may one day term those print-bound centuries preceding the Digital Renaissance we now enter.

Comments

[Bradly]

It seems to me that scholars should naturally be more aware of the implications of closed vs. open publishing, given the current academic interest in social justice and the politics of reading. http://www.mediafiretorrent.com

[Gardner Campbell]

A wonderful post; thank you. Your thoughts resonate well with Clay Shirky's ideas in his recent "thinking the unthinkable," and they're also aligned with efforts like umwblogs.org and others.

I discovered your post through a tweet, naturally.

Again, my thanks.

[Bryan Bibb]

Thank you for this interesting blog! Often scholars talk about technological issues as if they were value-neutral. In fact, the system of learning, teaching, and communication that we construct actually shapes the knowledge that is created and shared. It seems to me that scholars should naturally be more aware of the implications of closed vs. open publishing, given the current academic interest in social justice and the politics of reading.

I have written about some of the same issues on my blog. http://hevel.org/category/open-access-scholarship/ Here is a link to a presentation I gave that is consonant with your approach as well: http://hevel.org/2009/03/open-access-journals-and-the-future-of-the-scholarly-community/

Thanks again.