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Abstract
How can a journal of media practice ever hope to be disruptive if it remains behind a paywall? Who has access to the disruption, and how might it be disseminated? It seems all this disruption would be, is a sidestep, a small gap for one issue, within this outdated and dying practice of large-publisher supported academic journals. There is a palpable tension between production of knowledge-media and the traditional academic journal media distribution system itself. This tension rises from the disruption of knowledge's own goal through the distribution system: limiting the distribution of knowledge meant for free dissemination. By situating the academic journal publishing model within the understanding of un(der)paid labour (or sometimes as pay-to-play) and against the embedded ethic of knowledge-media and its transmission, particularly digital transmission, this paper pushes forward a discussion of scholarly publishing from questions of politics and economics, information labour, access, and alienation. In the end, the digital transforms not only the ability to disrupt standard publishing practices but instead it has already disrupted and continues to break these practices open for consideration and transformation.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This article is the result of years of working with excellent advocates for Open Access scholarly publications, but in particular the author would like to thank Charlotte Roh at the University of San Francisco for her conversations and contributions to the research. Additionally, this article was the product of open peer review, and the author would like to thank the contributors on hypothes.is for the feedback and suggestions received. The notes from these conversations are openly available.
Notes
1 This piece, written on a Wordpress installation, is fluid and editable. The hypothes.is feedback provides a level of intersectional identity for the pieces written. The potential of discussion, of publicness, of openness to reform, as well as the speed at which this can happen, are all facets of this still emerging manner of media(tion).
2 I would like to note that the term ‘ink-printed’ is used here instead of ‘physical’ because digital documents, despite their imperceptible physical constitution, remain physical. The often-heard argument that digital artefacts are ‘immaterial’ is flawed, and defending the notion that paper is ‘physical’ and that digital is not, is doubly so. There are numerous places to take this argument, whether with Kittler's ‘There is no Software’ (1995) or simply by recognising that bits and bytes are made of matter, and take up physical space next to having (atomic) weight. They are all physical material, and all have material effects.
3 This piece focuses on the tradition of academic ‘journal’ publishing as it continues to ‘count’ more for academic labour than most other academic activities. This does not mean it should count more or that there are not numerous alternatives to journal publishing, but instead this focus serves to pick apart this particular media practice and to illustrate what can be said about this tradition in a time of radical digital transformation. It is my opinion that journal publishing remains valuable for knowledge production and dissemination, and will remain so alongside other forms of knowledge production; however, it will not survive unchecked and undisrupted.
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