Re: local/distributed vs global/unified archives

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

Presumably, universities that set up their own IRs think they are 
going to gain some kind of additional prestige or score 
additional credit with the public by posting their faculty's work 
as soon as it is written, or at least as soon as it is peer 
reviewed. But consider what it is that is actually being posted: 
work that has not been copyedited.

No one seems to place much importance on copyediting these days, 
but in my experience as a copyeditor early in my publishing 
career and as witness to plenty of poor writing as an acquiring 
editor over a nearly forty-year period, I am baffled by the 
eagerness of universities, like Harvard most recently, to show 
off such poor writing.

Let me refer this list to an article titled "Sinners Well Edited" 
in the latest issue of the Journal of Scholarly Publishing, vol. 
39, no. 2 (January 2008), pp. 168-173. The author, Adam A.J. 
Deville, is an academic himself, but has spent much of his career 
editing "monograph, anthologies of articles, and thousands of 
pages of articles" for a journal in the humanities. Here is his 
verdict based on this experience: "Too much academic prose 
is...barbaric."

He elaborates: "Senior academics, long tenured at major 
universities, regularly submit papers that I would never have 
dared to submit in an undergraduate course, much less a graduate 
course, and still less to a juried journal of my peers. Too many 
papers--including, most egregiously those from authors educated 
or teaching at Oxbridge or Ivy League schools--are rambling, 
repetitive, insufficiently researched, and badly argued. They 
ignore basic stylistic guidelines with an impunity that can only 
be regarded as arrogant. Basic punctuation can be used or 
withheld at will and whim.  Footnotes can be subject to gross 
abuses--left insouciantly incomplete, used ostentatiously to 
demonstrate how much reading one has done on irrelevant topics, 
rendered according to no known style sheet (or a mishmash of 
several), or containing sources conjured out of thin air. Vast 
swaths of blatantly relevant literature...are regularly 
overlooked. Precious jargon and abstruse theory are preferred to 
clear and straightforward exposition....Sentences of Germanic 
length give rise to conglomerate paragraphs spasmodically 
swallowing several topics and running breathlessly on for two or 
more entire pages. Extraneous tangents destroy any sense of a 
paper's direction. Scholarly passion can be abruptly set aside 
for vengeful bouts of puerile point scoring and polemics, then 
just as abruptly resumed again."

I can vouch for the accuracy of this description from my own 
copyediting experience, which included massively correcting the 
footnotes of at least one Harvard senior scholar. I can also 
testify that a Pulitzer Prize was won by one book through the 
heroic efforts of another copyeditor on the staff, who did so 
much as to deserve credit as co-author.

So, why does a Harvard, or any university for that matter, want 
to expose such poor prose to the world at large, including the 
public? Among the latter might be, for example, state legislators 
asked to provide funding for the university, potential donors to 
capital campaigns, and high school seniors thinking about where 
to apply to college. Surely, revealing this dirty laundry is not 
going to help raise the university's esteem in anyone's eyes. Is 
the imperative to spread knowledge quickly so overwhelming, 
especially in the humanities, as to outweigh the potential 
damage--nay, even ridicule--that such exposure could bring? I 
could see Congress awarding a new "Golden Fleece" prize to the 
worst of such writing posted in IRs, and it would be subject to 
endless jibes from our late night show hosts and other satirists 
like Jon Stewart.

To avoid this consequence, universities like Harvard will need to 
consider investing substantial money to have the work of its 
faculty edited before posting. Are they prepared to step up to 
the plate in that way? Have they even thought about this? I doubt 
it.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn Stte University Press

> Atanu Garai poses an interesting question.  Essentially, I
> believe he is asking why the industry is pursuing institutional
> repositories when subject-matter repositories and consortial
> repositories may have greater upside.  Discipline-based
> approaches should resonate with the researchers, as their first
> loyalty is to the field.  Consortial-approaches should resonate
> with the sponsoring bodies, as they distribute costs.
>
> Why, then, have institutional repositories initiatives have
> gotten the lion's share of attention/money/effort/publicity?
>
> Primarily because they are far easier to get up and running.
> Repository advocates within a single school should have a good
> sense of their institution's idiosyncratic bureaucracy and
> decision-making structure.  They are also likely to have a basic
> understanding of how to secure the resources (funds, staffing,
> hardware, etc.) to get an IR launched.  Extrapolating that
> knowledge beyond the school's boundaries is a challenge.  Who
> does what work to support a discipline-based repository?  How are
> expenses fairly distributed among the partners of a consortial
> approach?  In either instance, how is the free-rider problem
> minimized?
>
> This is but a quick observation on the subject.  There are
> obvious examples of both subject-matter (obligatory arXiv
> reference here) and consortial (CDL) successes.  The bottom line,
> however, is that launching an IR is a more straightforward and
> capturable task for most institutions.
>
> --
> Greg Tananbaum
> Consulting Services at the Intersection of Technology, Content, & Academia
> (510) 295-7504
> gtananbaum@gmail.com
> http://www.scholarnext.com