Broadly, peer review is the set of mechanisms that enable scholars to have reliable access to the informed opinions of other scholars, in a way that allows that those informed opinions themselves to be subject to similar vetting.

Scholarship requires reliable and robust peer review, and the academy engages in peer review in a variety of ways, both direct and indirect. Peer reviewed publication is one method, and a fairly powerful one at that. If you read a paper in (for my field) Econometrica or the Journal of Political of Economy, you are reasonably confident that accomplished scholars in the field have made a judgment that the paper is of high technical quality and worth reading, and that experienced scholars have made a judgment that the paper is of interest beyond its narrow subfield. Those are valuable pieces of news as one is looking for a way to spend some time, and they also tell you something about the likely quality and accessibility of papers outside of one’s specialty, should one be branching out or needing some background information or trying to figure out who to consider for an open position in the department.

Similarly, the appearance of an article in a leading specialized journal, or of a monograph in a prestigious series published by a scholarly press, conveys valuable information (at least to the cognoscenti in the field) about the quality of the book or paper.

The peers who undertake the reviews are genuine peers. They are scholars whose judgment is trusted by experienced members of editorial boards, who are themselves generally senior scholars in the relevant field(s). Such people engage in peer review pretty much all the time. They go to seminars and talks, read draft manuscripts from students and colleagues, near and far, review grant proposals, engage in workshops, and vet tenure and promotion files. In short, the peers doing the reviews are active scholars engaged in active scholarship. (Sometimes they even spend some time writing their own stuff.) They could no more NOT provide “peer review” then they could give up reading and writing. Peer review is part and parcel of what serious scholars do.

I’d guess (and I would love to see a serious study) that the fraction of time that scholars spend engaged in formal peer review of publications – journal articles and monographs — is less than half of the time they spend on peer review in total. Moreover, the work that has traditionally been done under the aegis of publishers is increasingly being done in other settings. In fields where it is customary to post working papers on the web, interesting papers generate a good deal of peer review in the form of commentary from peers. Given that it takes essentially no time to move from word-processor to web posting, and that it often takes years to get from submission to a journal or scholarly press to formal publication, it’s not surprising that informal peer review is becoming more common. This is good news. Scholarship advances more rapidly if work can be widely shared relatively quickly and easily. Given that publication in the literal sense (making public) is now easy and cheap in the technical sense, it seems almost certain that informal review will grow relative to formal review.

For several years, I was the chief academic officer of the University of Michigan, and I have been involved in the review of tenure cases, grant proposals, journal articles and book manuscripts for more than 30 years. The most interesting and important of these activities are reviews associated with tenure and hiring. It is often argued (quite explicitly so by some) that without the reviews associated with publishing, the academy would be at a loss in making judgments about the quality and productivity of scholars. To be sure, for reasons adduced above, a record of publication in strong peer-reviewed settings conveys valuable information to tenure and search committees, chairs, deans, and provosts. But the fact of the matter is that we pay equal attention to other reviews, including (for some fields) those required to obtain research grants, and (for some fields) post-publication reviews that appear in journals and other venues. We also take very seriously the opinions of ad hoc reviewers, inside and outside of our institutions, who prepare and evaluate the case for promotion and hiring. Take away the information conveyed by publication venue, and these tasks become more difficult, to be sure, but by no means impossible. And the essential part – close reading of the work by peer reviewers – remains intact.

Just as it pays for almost all of the content that goes into scholarly publication, so too does the academy – colleges, universities, research centers, and the entitites that fund them – pay almost all of the costs of peer review.

Publishers provide many useful services, but they do not provide peer review. It is the peers themselves who do that essential work.

Anyhow, here is my letter:
In today’s (Feb. 15) Times, you credit Senator Clinton with having won primaries in Michigan and Florida. Well, yes, but those primaries were essentially uncontested, because the Democratic National Committee, in an effort to prevent large and diverse states from voting before Feb. 5, ruled that delegates from Michigan and Florida would not be seated and candidates who campaigned actively would be punished. (Obama and Edwards were not on the ballot in Michigan, and the Party did not even count write-in votes.) It is bad enough to have been deprived of my franchise. The Times should not compound the insult by mischaracterizing the event. I don’t know if your delegate counts include Michigan and Florida. If they do, the counts are corrupt. In any case, Michigan and Florida should be marked on your map as “no contest and no delegates” rather than as victories for Senator Clinton.

Paul N. Courant

In 2005, when the Motion Picture Association of America stepped up its campaign against college movie pirates, officials with the trade group said that 44 percent of the film industry’s domestic losses were the result of illegal downloads on campus networks.

That statistic — which came from a report by a research firm called L.E.K. — was certainly striking. But it was also wrong, MPAA officials now say. According to the Associated Press, a “human error” compromised the study: In fact, the MPAA says, just 15 percent of the movie industry’s domestic losses can be attributed to campus piracy.

Like most humans, I am overwhelmingly sympathetic to human error. I am less sympathetic to using data that are subject to error to push people around and to lobby for draconian legislation, while refusing to make the underlying data available for study and examination. The University of Michigan asked the MPAA for their study years ago, and has also asked the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) to provide the data upon which they base their own remarkable claims about the prevalence of file sharing of copyrighted materials on college campuses. This university, and many others, have great expertise in the analysis of such data. In an important sense, it’s what we do. We also have a culture of openness, in which we allow others to examine and criticize our work.

The MPAA reports that it is going to have an independent third party check the original study and report on it. Here’s an idea: Why don’t they simply make the study public and let the world have at it?

Partly as a result of the deeply flawed MPAA study, Congress asked the University of Michigan to respond to questions about file sharing. We post such things, of course, and the questions and answers are available on our copyright website under “House Judiciary Committee Survey of University Network and Data Integrity Practices”.

And, as long I’m talking about our friends in the big media companies, it’s worth noting that AOL, a much bigger Internet Service Provider than all of the colleges and universities put together, is owned by Time Warner, which in turn is a member of both the RIAA and the MPAA. Surely a great deal of illegal filesharing is undertaken by AOL users. It is puzzling that RIAA and MPAA want colleges and universities to employ mechanical measures that would restrict what their students can do, but they have not pressed AOL to impose the same restrictions. (Actually, it’s not puzzling at all, but it ought to be.)

The Kindle is plainly many wonderful things, and does many wonderful things, and, for most purposes, is a pretty poor substitute for a book. (At the same time, for some purposes, such as carrying a substantial library on a long trip, or augmenting that library at 4AM from a hotel room in a strange land, or getting the best price on some content from Amazon, it’s much better than a book.)

I acquired a Sony Reader about a year ago, and I like it just fine, although if I have time, space, and carrying capacity, I invariably prefer a book. When I first played with the Sony I thought that pretty soon now, there would be readers that would make e-books very good substitutes for p-books. A year or two and lots of development costs later, I’m not so sure. Put simply, what is most striking about the buzz around the Kindle is that (almost) no one is saying that it is a revolutionary, next generation improvement over its predecessor. It’s better at some things, has a much better interface for actually acquiring content, and so on. It’s wow, but not “WOW, I’m going to throw away my library and convert the space into a billiard room.”

Here’s an instructive contrast – JSTOR. When JSTOR made the back issues of the leading economics journals available digitally, I did throw away part of my library and repurpose the space. JSTOR made it possible for me to skim and read any article in the relevant journals. Of course, even then if I was really going to read the article, I would print it out, the better for carrying around and making marginal notes.

As we all know, electronic versions of academic journals have been very successful, and most academic libraries are now choosing the electronic form in preference to print for a large fraction of their serials. How do faculty and students use these resources? They search them on the screen, and often skim them on the screen, and if they want to read them carefully they print them out and carry them around. Thus, I claim that the great success of e-journals can be attributed in no small part to the fact that their content comes in easy, print-sized chunks.

I’m betting that something similar will be true of e-books. They will really take off when their publishers admit that on-screen (in either computer or reader) is not the best medium for serious and sustained reading, and develop and use technical and rights environments that allow cheap and convenient print on demand. It’s wonderful to be able to search and to skim on screen, but when you want to read, there is nothing like a book or a printed article. The Kindle and the Reader are great; I wouldn’t leave home without one. But, like almost everyone, I do most of my reading at or near home.

It’s not that I hate the practice, which I view as a pinnacle of human achievement, without which the life and work of many (including me) would be meaningless. It’s that the phrase itself connotes a mechanical process, rather than the transcendent purpose that underlies the activity itself.

Decoding the term “scholarly communication” requires us to consider other adjectives as applied to communication. Not all that many are in common use, and most that are refer to technology or to style, e.g. “terse communication,” “telephonic communication” (an archaic usage that is not all that old), “written communication,” “verbal communication.” None of these is properly parallel with “scholarly communication,” where the modifier of “communication” signifies a type of work. If we look at other lines of work that involve communicating we find no good linguistic parallels. I, at least, have never heard of “journalistic communication,” “artistic communication,” “filmic (?) communication,” “photographic communication,” “dramatic communication,” or the like. Rather one speaks of journalism, art, film, photography, etc.

The obvious parallel to all of these noble lines of work is simply “scholarship,” and indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, scholarship without communication isn’t well defined, because an essential part of scholarship is making one’s work public by contributing one’s thoughts and knowledge to the scholarly literature. (Note, by the way, that we have many modifiers of the word “literature” that are fully parallel to this usage.) Moreover, an extremely important part of the practice of scholarship, namely private communication between and among scholars, is NOT included in the conventional meaning of the term “scholarly communication.” That’s because what we really mean to be talking about when we say “scholarly communication” is scholarly publication, by which I mean the set of mechanisms (and associated rules and practices) by which scholarship is made public. The mechanisms include traditional and less traditional methods of publication (inter alia , monographs, blogs, simple postings on websites) plus traditional and nontraditional methods of presentation, including lectures, YouTube clips and podcasts, plus the zillions of ways that these and other technologies of communication can be combined.

I think that what we are usually talking about when we use the term “scholarly communication” is the business of making scholarly things public, including, of course, the economic viability of academic journals and academic presses, as well as the copyright and other legal and regulatory regimes that affect the business of making scholarship public. (For continuing valuable treatment of these subjects, see Scholarly Communications@Duke, a fine blog in everything but name.)

So, we are looking for a phrase that means something like, “the physical and economic mechanisms used to make scholarship public.” As I have implicitly suggested above, there is a perfectly good phrase to describe this, right out of the dictionary. The OED defines “publishing” as “the act of making something publicly known,” which is exactly the notion that we are looking for. If we want to distinguish between scholarly publishing generally and the particular activities and vicissitudes of university presses, we could speak specifically of “academic press publishing,” and also of “academic publishing,” which would connote a part of the publishing business aimed at the academy, parallel to trade publishing, or mass-market publishing. As in the commercial cases, many media would be included in addition to print books and print journals.

In the end, my point is simple: We seek to understand and improve the mechanisms used to make scholarly work public, and we would like a word or phrase to describe the object of our study. The terms “publishing” and “publication” connote our interest precisely, whereas “communication” does not. Indeed, much communication has nothing to do with making things public. (Consider “confidential communication,” which is commonplace, in juxtaposition to “confidential publication,” which is simply bizarre.)

Of course, I have no realistic hope of changing the words that we use to discuss these important matters. Once a term of art gets entrenched in the academy, it is rarely dislodged, and “scholarly publishing” has come to mean “what academic presses do,” while “scholarly communication” has come to mean what I said at the top of the previous paragraph. So I expect that this amiable rant will have no effect, but the tradition of amiable ranting is well established in both scholarship and blogging, and one can always hope for miracles.