I hate the phrase, “scholarly communication.”
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.
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[…] Why I hate the phrase “Scholarly Communication” (tags: scholarship publishing academia social-norms community communication pedagogy collaboration journals modes models) […]
November 25, 2007 @ 1:19 am
[…] (and formerly Provost) at the University of Michigan, posted a thoughtful blog entry on “Why I hate the phrase scholarly communications.” He is kind enough to say some nice things about this blog in his post, for which we are […]
November 26, 2007 @ 12:54 pm
I do not think the issue is all that important, but it must be noted that in the history of science and the history of ideas more generally, the modalities of communication have been largely neglected until recently. Elizabeth Eisenstein began to attract our attention to the ways in which people communicated through her important analysis of print and her introduction of the notion of “print culture”. Adrian Johns, as we all know, has completed and corrected her theses on a number of points, as has Roger Chartier.
I cannot agree with simply using the term “scholarship” however. While scholarship includes communication, it also includes many other tasks and, as a result, it misses the precise target that “scholarly communication” strives to define.
“Scholarly publishing” is much closer to the mark but it may be too loaded down with its long-standing relationship with print. The denotation is right, but the connotation may get in the way.
If we look at the terms used by Paul Courant to make fun of “scholarly communication”, it is easy to see that they actually fall under two different categories. On the one hand, they refer to communities of practices (to use currently fashionable jargon) – e.g. journalistic, artistic -, and on the other hand they refer to various media – e.g. filmic, photographic. The term “scholarly communication, I believe, is tied to a certain set of communities (scholarly and scientific) and not to media. In fact, it tries to intimate that it is not tied to any medium in general and print in particular. It strives to move beyond a particular medium (print). It tacitly opens up to the new digital media.
Once again, “publishing” would be fine if it were not so closely tied to printing. Very few people, for example, think of television as a publishing medium, exactly as very few people think of “publicity” as the act of making something public. The public sphere is made up of many elements. These terms have been long been used in a very particular way and it is hard to extract them from their connotative burden, so to speak.
As a consequence, “scholarly communication” has emerged as the way to cover a ground that is still uncertain in its extensions and consequences. I agree that it is not entirely felicitous and the noun “communication” suffers from its own connotative burden. Perhaps we should strive to replace it by scholarly publishing. However, there may be more pressing battles to engage with.
November 27, 2007 @ 10:07 am
One of the differences between scholarly communication and scholarly publishing surely has to do with intent, a difference of goals. To communicate scholarship is to share it within the academy, within the research community, within the bounds of one’s discipline or sub-discipline. Scholarly communication is an act between scholars.
Scholarly publishing is a business. A business sees itself as reaching a market, not a discipline. Its reach is defined by that part of the public willing to buy or otherwise consume its products, not by the membership of an academic discipline. Publishers are always projecting themselves and their products into the public sphere, not only into the academic sphere. (That’s what makes a blog publishing, not scholarly communication.) Reaching a public is part of what publishers do–with greater or lesser success. There are risks and rewards in doing that–the aims of scholarship can suffer in the attempt to reach a public and if there is a monetary cost attached to the acquisition of information.
It seems to me that you can hate the phrase “scholarly communication” only as long as you are willing to accept that once you start “publishing” you have engaged that part of the world where markets, profit and loss, and the return on an investment of time and money are an inescapable part of your actions. If not, don’t kid yourself.
November 30, 2007 @ 8:55 am
In many ways, the term “publishing” was changed to “communication” to obviate the role of publishers and presses in the process. Librarians, under the auspices of SPARC, wanted to recreate the rhetoric to make everyone a publisher–communicator. There was an ease in looking at the process without understanding the functions involved. Communication became a rubric under which all scholarship could be housed without concern for quality. Unfortunately, publishing, or making public, and those in the business know that the authorization and formatting of content, i.e. the steps to make the material perpetually usable, are key components in an age of ever-increasing information sources.
November 30, 2007 @ 9:13 am
I think Paul appears to make a small point here that reveals a much larger and more significant cultural shift; one clearly not lost on him. Recognizing and understanding the nascent days of change is like trying to grasp the wind. It’s hard to judge where it’s coming from, where it’s going, if it will sustain, and what effect—if any—it might have. To Paul’s point about labels, are we sensing a breeze, a gust, or the first minutes of an imminent typhoon? As Bob Dylan put it, “…something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you Mr. Jones.” If we don’t know what “it” is, we’re not likely to be very clear or clever in giving “it” a name; social change, by definition, is ineffable.
As Paul and some of the previous commenters note, the word “publishing” may mean “to make public” in concept, but it also connotes an evolved social institution with reified patterns, norms, values and social relations being acted out by real people operating in real spaces. Some of these real people—let’s call them publishers—have new ideas by the day and are seeking to change or expand the institutional norms from within. Others with a stake (authors, author wannabes, readers, librarians, retailers, online retailers, jobbers, scholars, informed citizens, university administrators, et al.) perhaps can’t see the energy for change from within publishing, or perhaps don’t think such efforts will take hold, and may seek to foment change from without—to build one or several new institutions to satisfy the need for “scholarly communication.” Is that realistic? Could any of it stick? Will “publishing” (think Fleet Street, S.I. Newhouse and Pat Schroeder) be upended from without by new and more effective means to facilitate communication across space and time (think Valley of the Shadow, Wikipedia, or arXiv.org)? Or, will the institution of publshing reform itself and evolve as it has for centuries by responding to changes in technology and cultural preferences? Stay tuned, story at 11:00.
So, back to the question of language (and have I mentioned how much I hate William Safire?). We’re struggling in all aspects of library life to come to grips with how to label the changing nature of our work and environment. We’ve dabbled with the idea of calling ourselves “cybrarians, trained in “schools of information” (who likes that?), and working in a “knowledge commons” or “idea store.” The lines between “publishers,” “vendors,” and “aggregators,” have become murkier by the day as each jostle to assume new roles and prominence in a rapidly changing market space. We have “books” and “ebooks,” the latter still variously spelled and applied to myriad instantiations—as if the Eskimos had only one word for snow. Others can add examples to this, but my point when I started was to reinforce Paul’s point that imprecise and clumsy language and labels is probably indicative of important underlying changes in society that haven’t congealed to the point that we can capture them appropriately. I think that’s the case with “scholarly communication,” and by the very squishiness of this term, I’m hopeful it signals a mighty wind that we’re just beginning to sense and measure.
December 6, 2007 @ 6:22 am
Regarding Dean’s comment, I completely agree that the distinction between communication and publishing turns on intent — communication being aimed at the process of scholarship itself and publishing having to do with making things public for any and all audiences. The act of making things public is not always about profit, loss and business, although it often is.
Of course, as an economist, I think that return on investment, profit and loss are parts of almost everything we do, whether or not our activities are undertaken in markets with consequences that are directly monetized.
With all of that, I’ll stick to my position, namely that the thing that we call “scholarly communication” is really about the set of activities involved in making scholarly work public, independent of the commercial nature of the mechanisms that we use. So we could talk of “public communication of scholarship,” but I still prefer “scholarly publishing,” coupled with open recognition that publishers are not the only actors in the industry.
December 29, 2007 @ 1:45 pm
I agree with almost everything that Jean-Claude says, including his observation that there are more pressing battles.
That said, the proposition that words and phrases ought to mean what they say, although hopelessly prepostmodern, is worth holding dear, at least for me. And, in any case, it is both fun and instructive to ask ourselves why and how we use the words that we do.
Happy New Year to all.
December 29, 2007 @ 1:48 pm