Re: puzzled by self-archiving thread

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

My thanks to Charles, David, and Jim for enlightening me on some 
of the subtleties of journal cancellation. I imagine it must get 
pretty complicated when, as the "twigging phenomenon" keeps 
producing more and more specialized journals for smaller and 
smaller groups of scholars, the use per journal must inevitably 
decline. But then how, exactly, does one weight a specialist's 
intense need for a very specialized journal against the less 
intense need of a broader group of scientists for a journal that 
spans a wider set of subject matters, with the accompanying 
differences in "use"? I suppose one could say the same about 
specialists in the humanities. We publish several journals 
focused on individual writers-Chaucer, Nietzsche, and Shaw--as 
well as some with much broader coverage, like Comparative 
Literature Studies and the Journal of Speculative Philosophy (the 
latter serving as the journal for the Society for the Advancement 
of American Philosophy). For a Chaucer specialist, The Chaucer 
Review is a must to read, while that specialist might have 
occasion to consult Comparative Literature Studies just once in a 
while. Suppose that, since there are fewer Chaucer scholars in 
toto than there are comp lit professors, the uses for the former 
are much fewer overall than for the latter; but those uses are 
absolutely central for the Chaucer specialist. One could make the 
same comparison between the Journal of Nietzsche Studies and JSP, 
where an occasional article on Nietzsche appears. The journals 
cost roughly the same, so that couldn't be a deciding factor. 
No doubt what is most determinative, then, is whether the English 
Department at your university actually has a Chaucer specialist, 
or whether there are courses on Chaucer taught. Of course, if the 
journal is so crucial to the Chaucer specialist, presumably that 
scholar would have a personal subscription, thus relieving the 
library of the need to do so. Decisions based on use that have to 
decide which is the more valuable journal-the very specialized 
one crucial for the researcher in that field or the more general 
one likely to be used by a larger number of people but perhaps 
not crucial to any of them in the same way-must be easy to make 
only if one does not take account of that "weighting" factor.

I go back to my experience as a publisher. We publish a series 
called "Re-reading the Canon" edited by Nancy Tuana that offers 
edited volumes focused on feminist interpretations of individual 
philosophers. It has been very highly regarded overall in the 
field. A review earlier this year in Signs covered all 24 volumes 
issued to date. It was most critical of the volume devoted to Ayn 
Rand. But that volume is far and away the best seller in the 
series, undoubtedly because Ayn Rand has appeal to a much wider 
audience than Hegel, Kant, etc. If "use" alone were a criterion 
of merit, then that volume should be considered the most 
successful, right?

Or, to take another example in the realm of journals, the issue 
of Social Text that carried Alan Sokal's phoney article must have 
received a huge number of hits. Would one therefore conclude that 
this was a journal worth continuing to subscribe to? The whole 
point of Sokal's spoof, of course, was to raise this very 
question about the merits of the scholarship appearing in this 
journal. It would be a joke on him if its heightened usage 
managed to rescue the journal from cancellation!

So, I still have doubts about what "use" actually tells us. 
Popularity isn't everything. If some major authorities on a 
subject tell me that a monograph we are considering is absolutely 
first-rate, I am going to want to publish it and will consider it 
a service to scholarship even if it is not widely reviewed or 
does not sell many copies or is not checked out of the library 
many times. It may ultimately influence only a very small handful 
of people, but it may be critical to those scholars' development 
of their own ideas, which may go on to have much wider 
circulation. Similarly, a journal could be targeted at a 
relatively small number of experts, and hence have few recorded 
uses, but nevertheless have an overwhelmingly important impact on 
those few readers.

I would hope that some way to evaluate journals could be found 
that actually could focus on the merits of the content, and not 
just use a proxy like usage-just as the new MLA Report calls on 
promotion and tenure committees actually to do the hard work of 
evaluating the content of the junior faculty member's 
publications, rather than rely on the proxies of "prestige" 
rankings of the book publishers and journals where the writings 
appeared.

--Sandy Thatcher
Penn State Press