JOSEPH GELFER

[A pre-print of my editorial for the next issue of Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality, offering a very basic introduction to independent book publishing.]

In a previous editorial (Gelfer, 2009), I wrote about the economics of open access journal publishing. Specifically, I noted how a particular viewpoint expressed by Conley and Wooders (2009) glossed over some of the skills involved in open access publishing, and how this resulted at once in a devaluation of the publishing profession, and the co-option of free labor from academics. The outcome of this combination is that open access publishing can be seen as the privilege of those who can afford to support a volunteer economy. However, I am still an advocate of alternative publishing models, as demonstrated by JMMS being an open access journal. In this editorial I want to assume that we have made peace with the nature of volunteer economics, and offer some further practical thoughts not in the domain of journals (because this has been done in many other places), but books. Further still, I want to talk not about open access books in the increasing number of institutionally-supported open access monograph initiatives (important though they are), but genuinely independent publishing that is delivered not just online as open access content, but also via other channels such as print and Kindle.

My thinking on this subject was encouraged by the idea of writing a non-academic book about masculinity that could be written exactly as I wanted (in other words, not mediated by what a publisher believed they could sell), and that I could give away online. I was interested in the kind of impact that such a book could potentially have more than the cultural and professional capital that could be derived from a traditionally published book (whether academic or trade). With this in mind I drew up a plan for a book called The Masculinity Conspiracy (Gelfer, 2011), which I intended to give away for free online, posting each chapter as it was written and soliciting comments along the way that could directly result in the text being revised and inform the chapters that had yet to been written.

I started by registering the domain name masculinityconspiracy.com with a small hosting package (which cost about $50 in total). After investigating several publishing platforms I settled on WordPress to deliver the content of the book. There are plenty of other possibilities, but I already used WordPress for a blog, so knew how it worked, and there are many people with WordPress accounts who could comment on the blog using their existing online identity. I posted the text of the first chapter online, breaking the text up across pages with somewhere between 500 and 700 words, so readers could comment on specific sections of the text rather than a whole chapter. I then went and let people know about the website, whether they be in my personal network, or by posting messages on subject-related discussion boards.

From the beginning the site received a modest but steady number or readers, some of whom left interesting comments which often took the text on unexpected tangents, and some directly went on to influence the text of later chapters. Indeed, for the first four chapters, everything went exactly as I would have hoped and expected. And then the site was hacked. I was unsure if this was a random occurrence, or something aimed specifically at me, but the text and comments were all deleted, leaving pictures of skulls and “got to hell” messages. My Internet Service Provider rolled the site back to a restore point before the hack, recovering the content, but claimed this was my problem (despite the fact that I was using the WordPress software they provided). One month later the site was hacked again, this time leaving messages in Arabic and pictures of Saddam Hussein. I took this hack more personally, as it was accompanied by emails questioning the size of my penis. Clearly, someone had taken significant offense to The Masculinity Conspiracy, which was at once most annoying in terms of the hack, but also rather exciting in terms of having clearly touched a nerve in the public domain in a way that is rarely achieved by orthodox academic publishing. As the ISP could not guarantee the hacking would be stopped, I moved the whole site over to the WordPress hosting service, which to date has remained untouched.

As I posted each chapter online, the trick seemed to be to continue letting people know about the site. For example, I was interested in engaging men’s rights advocates with the text, and posted news of each chapter on men’s rights websites: significant spikes of readership could be seen as a result in the WordPress statistics module. To give you some idea of the number of readers, in the past year the site has received about 20,000 page views, which is a small readership by popular standards, but good by academic standards.

Once the full text of the book had been posted online it became clear that despite the fact that is was being given away for free, not everyone was satisfied. Some of this was stylistic: some readers are happy with a dark background, others are not; some are happy with 500 word pages, others want the whole chapter on a single page. But also, some readers said they wanted wholly different formats, such as print or Kindle (and were willing to pay for these). So I investigated how this could be realized at little or no cost to me.

For a print edition I settled on the services of CreateSpace, an Amazon company. CreateSpace offers print-on-demand services that can produce and sell books one unit at a time, at no cost to authors. There are other companies that provide similar services. All that is required is to populate a Word document template with your text, adjust the formatting until it is satisfactory, fill in some information for a cover template (or design your own), upload the document as a PDF file, and away you go. CreateSpace provides an ISBN and barcode for the book. You can set your cover price within a certain range and earn a royalty on every copy sold via the CreateSpace website (a royalty significantly higher than a traditional publisher), or pay a modest fee and also make the book available for sale in all the usual online places. You can also then take that same document used for the print edition and upload it to Kindle Direct Publishing (another Amazon company), which will automatically convert the document to Kindle format within a few minutes and allow you to sell it via the global Amazon network within 24 hours (again, paying a decent royalty on sales). Both the print and Kindle editions can be created at no cost with a skill set comparable to using Facebook.

Between the ability to write exactly what you want to write, receive immediate feedback from a variety of readers during the writing process, and being able to make the text available almost immediately in both print and Kindle formats, the whole idea of publishing with a traditional publisher becomes rather puzzling. Of course, there are other variables at play. First, not everyone is capable of producing a clean text without the input of a professional editor, so you will need to be honest about the quality of your writing skills. Second, the whole “build it and they will come” mantra that underpins much open access ideology simply does not work. Once you have built it, you must then let any- and everyone know about it. The key to success in such endeavors ultimately comes down to self-promotion. You have to be comfortable planting links to the website wherever possible, and finding creative ways to start conversations about the work (this is also true for promoting traditionally-published books), such as co-opting a journal editorial. I even have a masculinityconspiracy.com t-shirt that I wear to conferences, on airplanes, at school fairs and any other place where there are potential conversation captives: you’d be surprised at its effectiveness. Third, even if you manage to cause a flurry in the blogosphere with such an initiative, you will not be able to leverage it for a job promotion or grant application: it will not be taken seriously as a “real” publication.

In short, with current technologies it is possible to independently and at almost no financial cost deliver to the world a book-length text with great speed and the ability to genuinely respond to readers. It requires sacrificing some professional capital, but has the potential to generate new capital outside of the profession. I am not suggesting the traditional publishing process should be abandoned in favor of this independent publishing process, but it nevertheless offers a compelling complement that is worthy of serious consideration.

References

Conley, J. P. & Wooders, M. (2009). But what have you done for me lately? Commercial publishing, scholarly communication, and open-access. Economic Analysis & Policy, (39)1, 71–87. Retrieved from: http://www.eap-journal.com/download.php?file=692.

Gelfer, J. (2009). Open access economics. Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality, 3(2), 97-99. Retrieved from: http://www.jmmsweb.org/issues/volume3/number2/pp97-99.

Gelfer, J. (2011). The masculinity conspiracy. Charleston, SC: CreateSpace. Retrieved from: http://masculinityconspiracy.com.

The Boer’s Nuts: Concerning the Testicular Logic of Peer Review

Overseeing the peer review process is almost certainly the most challenging aspect of editing an academic journal. The real dark art is not just the whip-cracking that is necessary in order to get reviews back within (hopefully) a couple of months, but selecting the right reviewers in the first place. In my time in academic publishing I have seen some startlingly inappropriate decisions by editors when selecting reviewers, who are often wildly unqualified for the article in question (a certain breed of editor is too timid to aim for the very best reviewers, opting instead to mine their personal network, which is a one-way ticket to mediocre reviews, and also eventually alienating colleagues). I’m sure, too, anyone who regularly submits journal articles has received reviews from one of these folks: I remember receiving a rejection from one religious studies journal where a review started with the words, “As an urban designer I am not ideally suited to reviewing this paper, but…” I kid you not. The skill in selecting the right reviewer comes down to finding somebody who is at once knowledgeable of the subject matter, sympathetic to the worldview and methodologies of the author, yet also capable of suggesting improvements appropriate to the aims of the article.

This is no easy task at the best of times, but sometimes submissions come along that make things that bit more challenging, such as this issue’s first paper from Roland Boer, The Patriarch’s Nuts: Concerning the Testicular Logic of Biblical Hebrew. I knew about this article before it crossed my desk because Roland was having a fun time with it, and others, on his blog. Roland was sending salaciously entertaining articles with titles such as the bestiality- and necrophilia-inspired Hittites, Horses and Corpses to conservative journals in order to see how they went about rejecting them: he would then report back to his readers the content of the reviews and his sometimes amusing–sometimes cutting replies to the editors. Now I enjoy Roland’s writing, and have published two of his previous papers in JMMS, Skin Gods: Circumcising the Built Male Body (which brings a surprising amount of visitors to the journal via “body builder penis” Google searches) and Of Fine Wine, Incense and Spices: The Unstable Masculine Hegemony of the Books of Chronicles. But as these amusing posts were unfolding I knew the inevitable conclusion: I’m eventually going to get one of these tricky articles as a JMMS submission and have to deal with it fairly, and hopefully not be exposed in a blog post along the way as having—in the spirit of the article—no balls.

And so it was that I found myself trying to find reviewers that would be sympathetic to the article, yet offer some rigorous analysis. The first challenge was the pretense of anonymity: most people qualified to comment on the article knew about Roland’s pranks; so the concept of double blind review had to go out of the window, even if one reviewer preferred to entertain a little game of anonymity, suggesting, “let’s call the author Roland Barthes.” But careful choice of reviewers results in orthodox reviews for even the most unorthodox of articles. The first reviewer, for example, started her review with:

I like it, it is fascinating material, a new view and it’s humorous. The author sets out the lines of thoughts clearly, as well as the semantic scope, and the words themselves. The yarekh part I found most convincing.

This comment highlights a particular challenge for some reviewers: humor. From previous JMMS reviews, it seems most reviewers will accommodate all manner of positions communicated in the text—the more horrific or marginalized the better—but having a chuckle is most definitely frowned upon. Humor, it seems, is one of the last transgressive academic tools left to us. The second reviewer saw the value of this at the beginning of his review:

The article is clearly humorous but there is a serious point underlying it. I think at the very least the case has been made to re-evaluate the conventional translations which, as is pointed out, are quaint and at times just ludicrous. Time will tell if there needs to be a wholesale change in translation but I think the case needs to be taken seriously.

And so too the third reviewer who, despite offering extensive critical queries in the original manuscript via the Track Changes function, saw the humor to be its most redeeming aspect, concluding:

I think you have a clear choice. On the one hand, the submission is lively, provocative and well-written. On the other, it is not going to convince any biblical scholars, and certainly did not convince me.  The sole argument for identifying halatsayim and motnayim with the testicles is the dual form, which could equally apply to hips or to the abs (also plural), or be idiomatic, referring to the symmetry of the body. On this something of a mountain is built … So, publish it as a lively contribution to the discourse of the Bible, masculinity and sexuality, but don’t expect anyone to agree with it.

The serious point is not just that it is tricky to find genuinely suitable reviewers, but that unorthodox articles swiftly expose the knowledge regulation that goes on within journal publishing, specifically the self-regulation of journal editors. It doesn’t take too much deviance from the norm for people to throw their hands up in the air and claim, “this is not academic writing!” And even when one does not hold this opinion personally, one feels the pressure to conform to the norm—to play the game—in order not to be expelled from the academic club. It is the peer review process that is usually leveraged to provide the regulatory function: editors who succumb to such pressures usually refrain from the honest reply to the author of “I don’t want to publish this kind of article” and will instead select reviewers they know will reject the article without meeting it fairly on its own terms (wasting everyone’s time in the process).

It is rather depressing that I perceive it necessary to be ballsy in order to publish articles that are academically-rigorous-yet-transgressive, as one would think/hope that is the very business of a certain type of academic writing (in the humanities–social sciences space, at least). And, furthermore, if we cannot do this in an open access journal that does not answer to subscribers or advertisers, we are truly lost.

So to all authors of academically-rigorous-yet-transgressive articles: JMMS is the place for you. I promise that if you send me your work I will find reviewers that will give it a fair go. I will send you reviews that offer constructive comments, and will listen carefully if you provide a compelling argument to counter those comments. And together we’ll publish some interesting work, and modestly change the world for the better.

I have a new article out called LOHAS and the Indigo Dollar: Growing the Spiritual Economy in the new issue of New Proposals: Journal of Marxism and Interdisciplinary Inquiry.

The article abstract is as follows:

It is well documented that alternative spiritualities can be commercialised and commodified. My aim in this paper is to extend this further by identifying how LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability), which describes a multi-billion dollar marketplace in the United States, seeks to consciously grow the spiritual economy to unprecedented levels. I then provide an example of how this consumer-focused logic is expressed by integral theorist Ken Wilber, resulting in what might be called the “indigo dollar.”

The journal is open access, so you can read the final published version right here.

A classic take on the peer review process, with a swipe at Open Access at the end:

Wearing my publisher’s hat, I’ll be presenting a poster at this year’s eResearch Australasia conference in Sydney, 9-13 November.

Journals Unbound: e-Infrastructure for Small and Medium-Sized Journals

In recent years there has been a massive worldwide development of e-infrastructure for academic journals. From a top-down perspective, journal databases and aggregators of various stripes have enabled the delivery of journals directly to anyone with an internet connection and subscription. From a bottom-up perspective, a variety of Open Access publishing and repository platforms have enabled researchers to share their research on the internet with minimal effort and cost. Both these aspects of e-infrastructure are important, but do not provide a complete solution. If print journals partner with an aggregator to scan their journals there remain a number of problems: quality of scanning; imperfect optical character recognition software reducing search efficiency; lack of e-infrastructure tools such as DOIs which need to be implemented at the publishing rather than aggregating stage. Online journals also often lack certain e-infrastructure tools and, along with print journals, face the challenge of complementing the quality of the research they carry with a professionally typeset and distributed published product of comparable quality, and of discoverability. RMIT Publishing has developed an xml-based workflow solution which can convert articles from a single Microsoft Word document to a professionally-typeset pdf file, html page or other pre-defined output. Each article can then be assigned a DOI for resolving via CrossRef, as well as benefiting from the search functionality and wider research context of the Informit platform. This process can work solely with provided content, or with the added value of editorial management. In short, the RMIT Publishing solution can turn a manuscript on an editor’s desk into a high-quality published product with a full suite of e-infrastructure tools at relatively low cost and high speed.

[A pre-print of my editorial for the next Journal of Men, Masculinities and Spirituality.]

Like most humanists I spend my free time browsing the pages of economic journals, and it was with particular interest that I read a recent issue of Economic Analysis & Policy which featured articles focusing on the economics of open access (OA) publishing. JMMS is happy to have been publishing on an OA basis now for three years, so I am always on the lookout for further developments. I firmly believe in the ideal of OA: of making scholarly communication as widely accessible as possible and bypassing the rapacious profiteering of some of the large commercial journal publishers. That said, I have an unusual insight into this debate because while I am an advocate for OA (as JMMS attests), I also spend a good deal of my working week managing other academic journals which operate on a subscriber or toll access (TA) model. As a result, I’ve come to see the weaknesses that sometimes occur in the OA position. Reading the recent issue of Economic Analysis & Policy highlighted some of these weaknesses.

John P. Conley and Myrna Wooders’ (2009) article, But what have you done for me lately? Commercial Publishing, Scholarly Communication, and Open-Access is a classic example of the ideal of OA being somewhat at odds with the reality of journal publishing. The article describes the authors’ experiences establishing Journal of Public Economic Theory with a commercial publisher and, later, Economics Bulletin on an OA basis, from which they conclude that commercial publishers provide little of value and that OA is the obvious choice: “we have come to the view that commercial publishers as they currently operate, whether papyrocentric or electronic, do more to hinder than facilitate the process of scholarly communication” (p. 74). I agree with some of their arguments about predatory pricing, but they, along with a number of OA advocates, underplay the key value of the publishing process: editorial.

Conley and Wooders suggest that the publishers’ value-add of typesetting is essentially redundant, that “almost all economists are able to produce their own very high quality manuscripts” and that “there may be a minor advantage in having all papers formatted similarly but this is largely an aesthetic one” (p. 74). Coupling editing with typesetting as another publishers’ service that can be bypassed, they note “moreover, there are on-line professional editing services” (p. 74) if, presumably, needs be. Maybe economists are special cases, but hardly ever does a paper cross my desk that is publishable without a thorough copyedit of the text and/or referencing. I am left assuming one of two possibilities from their statement: either I am very unlucky with the manuscripts that are submitted to me or, more likely, we are reading of a lack of understanding and devaluing of the editorial process. I believe most academics would soon get tired of reading journal articles with a hodge-podge of typographical errors, inconsistent formatting and incomplete citation and referencing. Some academics are capable of good copyediting (of their own and others’ work), but most are not. It is one of the key problems with OA journals (specifically those which run on no/low revenue business models): being able to publish your own material is one thing, but the editorial standard of that material is quite another. An OA journal is going to struggle with editorial standards unless it has a budget to pay for a copyeditor, or is lucky enough to have an academic onboard who has both editorial skills and the willingness to volunteer them. And here is the second significant problem with OA journals: the economics of volunteering.

Conley and Wooders state, “the basic idea is that it is somehow very expensive to publish a journal. We argue this is a misconception” (p. 82). Certainly it is true that it is not as expensive to publish a journal as some of the commercial journal pricing strategies suggest. However, the volunteer labor on which many OA journals (such as JMMS) are based hides the true cost of doing business. One would expect an economist to make more of this analysis, but the fact that $0 is spent on editing an OA journal does not result in zero cost. Costs come in many shapes and forms: that hour of volunteer copyediting from our editorially skilled and willing academic comes at the cost of their employer, or family, or an hour of leisure activity. Those hours and in-kind costs soon build up, and if you were to map them over to a copyeditor who has bills and a mortgage to pay (think $50 per hour for every 1000 words), and then the typesetter, the editorial management, the technical upkeep… Soon the actual dollar costs of publishing a journal are quite sizable. Also, running an OA journal largely with volunteer labor leaves a journal’s future rather uncertain. This point is made well in the same issue of Economic Analysis & Policy by Cavaleri, Keren, Ramello and Valli (2009) who write of their experience running a journal on a shoestring budget. Cavaleri et al. conclude that because of their lack of funds and organizational backing, their journal “depends on the labor of four individuals” and “the long-term existence of the journal cannot be assured” (p. 100). Certainly, the long-term existence of any journal cannot be assured, but having the funds not to have to rely on volunteer labor and having organizational support beyond the main editors (whether an association or a publisher) is certainly beneficial.

Furthermore, there’s something about all this volunteer labor that strikes me as slightly questionable. As an old Leftist I tend to view things with a healthy dose of paranoia. And as a neo-Deleuzian (i.e. someone who has only read a little bit of Deleuze) I can’t help but think of the debate in terms of smooth and striated space, where OA is smooth and TA striated. Deleuze tells us that “one of the fundamental tasks of the State is to striate the space over which it reigns, or to utilize smooth spaces as a means of communication in the service of striated space” (Deleuze & Guattarri, 1987, p. 385). What does this mean? Many OA advocates (myself included), will often frame OA as an almost Socialist ideal: free information for the masses, or at least for those free thinkers who wish to consume it. But we cannot forget that we operate within an academy that has an unnerving habit of co-opting labor in a rather unsavory fashion, as seen in Mark Bousquet’s (2008) blistering How the University Works. There is a danger that the ideals of OA can be utilized by a corporate ideology which seeks to further co-opt unpaid academic labor, as well as making professional editing redundant (in much the same way as teaching by tenured PhDs is replaced by the contingent labor of graduate students). Mandated requirements for OA by universities and government agencies certainly have the potential to unbind scholarly communication from the economically privileged. However, when such mandates rely on unpaid labor, they also have the potential to erase the skills of academics and publishing professionals who may otherwise reasonably demand an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work. With this is mind, it is rather dishonest to frame publishers’ TA arguments about the real costs of production as simply a corporate apologetic: indeed, the glossing over of economic realities does no service to OA’s moral high-ground, rather it echoes a certain bourgeois embarrassment in the face of real labor and the privilege of those who can afford the time to volunteer.

Of course, I say this as provocateur, but it is always prudent to examine the economic motivation behind all modes of production and to acknowledge that in the OA debate, like all things, there is no black and white, rather many shades of grey.

References

Bousquet, M. (2008). How the university works. (New York: New York University Press).

Cavaleri, P., Keren, M., Ramello, G. B., & Valli, V. (2009). Publishing an e-journal on a shoe string: Is it a sustainable project? Economic Analysis & Policy, (39)1, 89–101.

Conley, J. P. & Wooders, M. (2009). But what have you done for me lately? Commercial publishing, scholarly communication, and open-access. Economic Analysis & Policy, (39)1, 71–87.

Deleuze, G. & Guattarri, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia, B. Massumi trans. (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press).