* a collaborative subject-specific Custom Search Engine

* simple “plain english” summaries of all articles (not the same thing as abstracts)

* a parallel curated and themed “overlay” ejournal, linking to free repository content

* Amazon pages for all monographs

* a concerted campaign to get backlinks to your website

* consider purchasing a good $50 template for the journal (it’s not just about the frequency of updating, but about how stylish it feels)

* really good photography of the participants

Backlinks are particularly important. For instance, the journal Quaderno which I found for JURN a few days ago. It’s six full issues of a free full-text academic journal from a reputable university, on interesting aspects of early American history, in a country that’s seemingly teeming with re-enactors and amateur historians. Yet, according to Google, it has not a single inbound link — not even from other academic sites. It’s been online since 2004.

It’s nice to see someone discussing the issue of accessibility and the relationship between academic and popular publishing. For my own part, I have concerns about how academic publishing tends to hide behind walls (both subscription and social) and what impact this has on the wider question of the role of intellectual (ie – not “expert”) thinking in society. In that vein, I support any effort to try and bring academic thinking back into the public sphere.

This often resolves into a fight over whether or not academics should be “relevant”, which is usually assumed to mean that they must make specific policy recommendations and only talk about things powerful people want to know right now. That is, of course, not the kind of relevance I’m interested in. But it does trouble me that few academics seem interested in whether or not a general audience understands or even knows about their findings. In other words, there doesn’t seem to be much passion behind the work these days (an odd bit of colloquialism thrown in there, since I wouldn’t really know any other days), though there is plenty of petty positioning.

Now to the question of open access and social media that you’ve raised here. I think that by linking them you’re taking a few risks. The first objection you raise refers to the fear that opening access will reduce the quality of the content, and you counter that by saying that open access doesn’t necessarily refer to opening up the rigor of the source. But the previous section listed five best practices from social media to encourage broader readership. By virtue of their demand for more frequent and less rigorous content, the first three (journals and reader interaction, recordings of events, and blogs) necessarily entail a change in the quality of the content (“quality’s” dual meaning as both good-ness and kind is apt).

Now, I don’t think this is sufficient reason to abandon your suggestions. But I think an attempt will need to be made to find ways of either making clear distinctions between the character of the content provided or drawing on the social media elements precisely to discuss the kinds of questions that ought to be (but usually aren’t) addressed when dealing with content from less rigorous media.

Regarding the latter, perhaps the review process could be opened up, with articles published alongside the reviewer’s comments. More far-reaching changes could see articles go through open access review processes (something akin to CTLab’s symposiums? http://www.terraplexic.org/research-roundtable) as a pre-requisite to publishing.

The central problem that I think will be faced is the tension between the SENSE OF egalitarianism in social media and elitism in academic publishing (the sense is not entirely accurate of course). I’m not suggesting egalitarianism is always good and elitism always bad. On the contrary, I think academic writing’s value often lies precisely in the gap between the two. But if publishers are going to move forward at all, they’ll have to assess how much control to give up and on what terms they want to give it up. Wikipedia is a good example of this (though not a model for academia). Far from being a place where anyone can put anything they want up (though technically true), it’s actually governed by a few simple rules about how content is arranged and on what basis it is accepted. If academic journals are going to move into the social media frontier, they’re going to have to grapple with what kind of rules they set up.

Some places haven’t done this well. I was surprised to see Foreign Policy cited as a best practice model. I appreciate that it was more about the model than the content, but I think they’re a good example of how the two aren’t so easily separated. The kind of crap that FP puts out is ridiculous (their top 10s? http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/08/04/the_worlds_worst_daughters) and is clearly designed to be as hyperbolic and attention-grabbing as possible, often without much substance. I appreciate that they have some big-hitters blogging for them, but no one is that consistently interesting or insightful.

But what is a site supposed to do if it must come up with content, day in and day out?

The other issue that you guys haven’t addressed, but that I think perhaps ought to be addressed is that the accessibility of academic publishing is not just about the technical capacity for readers to access the writing. There’s also the accessibility barrier that arises from the isolation of academia itself. Labyrinthine prose and inward-looking old-boys clubs that develop around a set of analytical tools (biopolitics anyone?) make most academic writing downright hostile (some can be excused as just poor writing skills, but much is deliberately hostile or cliquey).

If academic publishing is to reach a wider audience, it will need to do more than simply adopt the technical apparatuses of social media. It will need to aggressively assert the importance of long-form thinking and writing, of critical and considered discussion, of all the elitist values of academia that provide it with its bit of value. In this respect, it will be fighting the tide of web publishing.

And what this means, I guess, is that academic publishing won’t be able to make much headway without the cooperation of evangelist academics who are pushing themselves to be relevant to a wider audience without dumbing- and shortening-down the engagement.

Anyway, as we say here in the intarweb, sorry for the long post. Semi-colon right parenthesis. Ell Oh Ell.