The Ed Techie

Why don't academic authors self-publish?

<Photo by MonsierLui http://www.flickr.com/photos/monsieurlui/316350341/>

I got an invite from Frank Rennie the other week to contribute a chapter to a book he is thinking of putting together around the subject of the mismatch (or distance) between academic thinking and the potential of new tools. Frank is a big fan of the self-publish sites and has suggested we eschew an academic publisher, and just publish ourselves via Lulu or Blurb.

This got me thinking as to why more academics don't do this, and still chase the book contract. It certainly isn't for the money, so it must be for the prestige. This can be broken down into personal and external I think. There is the personal prestige one feels in having a book accepted by a publisher and going through the actual process. One feels like a proper author. There are some practical advantages also - real deadlines to keep you motivated, professional copyediting and some promotion. But these practical advantages are often over-played, for example, as an author you have to suggest most of the avenues for publicity.

The external prestige is probably the greatest factor. This is strongly reinforced in the UK by the REF, which wouldn't really consider a self-published book, but also by promotion committees and just general esteem amongst colleagues. Self-publishing is seen as rather sordid and the last recourse for the demented author who couldn't get published anywhere else. It tended to smack of desperation somewhat. But that clearly isn't the case anymore (if it ever was), with the news that author Barry Eisler turned down a $500K contract to self-publish. Going it alone is seen as a sensible option.

Academic authors are not in the same position as Eisler, but they never were anyway. The return on most academic books won't buy you a yacht cap, let alone a yacht. But increasingly academics are developing what we might nauseatingly refer to as personal brand. That is they carry sufficient credibility and connections within their own networks to make self-publishing as viable as traditional publishing in terms of generating interest. Add to that they can be in charge of rights and make their books open access. So the question then is what is the aim of academic publishing? Is it to be as widely read as possible or to generate items for your CV?

So why did I go with a publisher? Well, they are doing open access so maybe, you can have a bit of both. And I don't think I've quite shaken that prestige thing.

A Couros birthday and user generated content

I'm sure many of you will have seen this, but it's worth showing again. Below is a video that Dean Shareski compiled for blogger Alec Couros's 40th Birthday (Dean describes the process here).

 

It's fun and heartwarming, but it's also a great example to show people about the power of the network. As I understand it someone suggested the idea on twitter, Dean then put together a Google Doc with the lyrics and contacted people in Alec's network to assign them lines. They then uploaded or emailed him the video clips, which he then compiled together.

Here's why I think it's interesting, beyond it being for Alec who's a great guy and featuring some of my favourite online people.

• It illustrates Clay Shirky's point about the cost of organisation collapsing. I'm sure it involved a good deal of effort on Dean's part to organise and compile, but imagine the effort it would have taken in a non-socially networked world.
• It demonstrates the reciprocity economy. Why did all these people contribute, many of whom (I'm guessing) Alec hasn't even met? Because he shares a lot of resources online, responds to people and is seen as a valuable member of many people's network. This was a way of saying thankyou.
• It shows the ease of production. As well as organisation being easy, this demonstrates how the production of multi-media artefacts is truly democratised now.
• YouTube isn't television. One of the complaints people such as Andrew Keen make about web 2.0 is that it's not professional. That isn't the point, this would never exist in a professional context, and yet it works very well as a piece of YouTube content.
• You can't predict what is learning content. This is part of my problem with OERs, they seem to predetermine what learning will take place. I have made many of the points above in various places, but I wouldn't have said 'what I need is a birthday video to demonstrate these'. 

Speaking of using the video to demonstrate points, I was part of the OU's annual LearnAbout Fair the other week, which is a well organised internal event, where people host different stalls demonstrating projects or technology. I was on the 'User generated content' stall, and put together a bunch of examples in a wiki, including Alec's birthday vid. I think people did really get it through these examples, perhaps more so than with the standard ones of Wikipedia, etc. Oh, and a belated happy 40th Alec.

A marathon not a sprint

So, yesterday, after talking about it for a few years, I finally got around to doing a marathon, over in Llanelli. It was a warm day, along the coastal path, with only about 600 runners. I've been following a training plan since the beginning of the year, so was reasonably confident.

I was aiming for a 4 hour finish, and was on target for this until mile 17 when I hit a bit of a psychological as well as physical wall. The route is two loops of a figure of eight and this was the furthest point out, and suddenly, the thought of having to come back all the way round again seemed too much, and before I knew it I was walking. I had to abandon my target then and refocus on simply finishing, and allowed my pace to drop significantly. I finished in 4 hours 11 minutes in the end.

It is customary for me to make some tenuous connection to learning when I do running posts, by way of allowing myself the indulgence on an ed tech blog of boring everyone with running. But it's not that difficult to make, and the following were all genuine thoughts that occurred to me yesterday:

1) You can make it achievable and manageable, but you can never make it easy. Even if you have the best trainer in the world, and support teams, dieticians, and the ability to give up work and train full time, you, and only you, still have to do it. Privilege or money may gain you some advantage but ultimately it comes down to individuals. 

2) It's worth doing because it is tough. Related to the above point, if you could make it easy, there would be no point. There were a couple of times when I was running on my own and could easily have taken a shortcut where the route doubled back on itself, but really, what would be the point?

3) The long haul is rewarding. I've done lots of shorter races, but doing a long distance has a different aspect to it. As we move to increasingly shorter chunks of learning, it's worth remembering that prolonged endurance has its own qualities.

4) Experience pays off. I was struck by how many elderly runners finished ahead of me, and how many younger runners were behind. A lot of the veterans had a pace they stuck to, and they had the reassurance of knowing they can do this distance. 

5) Never say never. I have already begun to experience 'forgetting the pain of childbirth' syndrome, as when I finished I vowed never to do another one, and I'm already thinking 'perhaps if I planned it differently next time'. You will hear many people who complete a study programme say the same.

6) Formal structure is essential for motivation. If something is tough then you really need to be forced to do it. I could have just run my own marathon, so why pay to go to an event? Because it is a definite goal that becomes difficult to justify giving up on. For all the wonders of informal, DIY learning, the formal course provides this same legitimising and motivating structure.

7) Social pressure is also a strong completion factor. I told everyone, plus I had very generous sponsorship from a wide range of people, so I had a strong social element to keep going (a very big thankyou to all those who sponsored me). This was particularly useful in training, when the question of 'why am I doing this?' came to me more than once. In education then establishing these social connections for students (eg through Facebook) is more than a nice to have but a key factor in success.

8) Within the same framework there is a lot of variation. Everyone is doing the same basic thing - running 26.2 miles but the variety of strategies and styles is fascinating. Some people run in pairs, others walk every 5 miles, some have music, some have a shuffling gait, others long bounding strides. This probably says something about not being too restrictive, and providing a general structure within which there is room for individuality.

9) You get to drink guilt-free beer afterwards.

A quick and dirty REF

I am currently engaged with working on the REF submission for my Institute. I fully understand why we do this, in cash strapped time in particular, research money will make a big difference. It is also almost impossible not to play the game if you want to be recognised as a research institution and attract staff.

But it is a horrible, pernicious process that seems deliberately designed to kill innovation, perpetuate existing models, waste time, focus energy on gaming the system and keep publishers happy. If you wanted to design a process with the sole aim of restricting the adoption of new methods and technology, then you could do a lot worse that the REF.

Not every country has an equivalent of the REF, so we shouldn't view it as a necessary evil. But, let's say that for whatever reason, something like it is going to persist. Two questions then arise: can it be better and can it be easier?

I'm not going to answer the first of these questions. It would take too long, and I've covered it lots of times before. But in a conversation with Tony the other day we pondered how the REF might be made easier and a hell of a lot cheaper. The total (estimated) cost of the 2008 RAE in England was £56.7 million, which compares with the £1.5 billion of QR research funding. They estimate costs for the REF will be similar. My guess is this figure is low, and may not take into account all of the meeting and individual time associated with the process, and probably not opportunity costs also. In a review of the 2001 RAE, for more teaching oriented institutions it was found that the "RAE is over 16 times less efficient than the norm". I don't think the REF can be argued to be more efficient as it largely follows the same methodology.

So here is my (well Tony's mainly) proposal for a quick and dirty REF:

• Research councils monitor where money goes and evaluate research projects
• Publishers have databases of authors and citations

The REF then centrally datawarehouses these sources, adds in various weighting factors, creating a score for individuals, which is aggregated for the institution to give their REF evaluation (maybe by subject or maybe across a whole institution).

It uses proxies for research quality, and is focused on research funding and formal publications, but hey, so is the current REF. If we're going to be forced to play that game, then couldn't we at least do it in an efficient manner? It would at least free up a lot of time to you know, actually do research.

It would at least be worth doing a pilot based on this to see how far it differs from the very labour intensive system we have currently, don't you think?