Notes from the AAUP annual meeting by Peter Froehlich. Originally posted at scrutanda.blogspot.com:
After describing how we might go about keeping an open mind to enhance our collective lateral thinking and improve commercial outcomes, using our inherent and abundant pattern recognition abilities to imagine new organizational structures, new entrepreneurial opportunities, new poly-valent business models, and new modes of enabling the scholarly discussion, Monsieur McCracken went one step further to imagine one such way we might reshape what we do: by our dropping peer review.
Now before it gets ugly, let me say why I think this improved takeaways from the meeting. [insert: humorous anecdote about recovering from knee surgery, where I call Tony the physiotherapist Torquemada, repeatedly, cursing his house and questioning his parentage and mental health, but end up being able to ski again.] It just goes to show that sometimes we need to be pushed into uncomfortable positions to re-achieve our full strength and potential range of motion. Note to self—possible book idea: It Takes a Sadist.
McCracken held our editors’ pattern recognition skills apart from the peer review process, as value-added in and of themselves. Specifically, what he said was, what if we stop at our editors’ assessment of X and go to press with it, sans costs associated with too much design and copyediting, in order to field “well-written essays, or topical cultural worth, for popular consumption.” Might there be something in this that could enable the scholarly discussion and further support our other publishing efforts? (His question to us.)
It's a bit of an uncomfortable stretch to imagine our fielding anything perfectly disintermediated; we edit grocery lists before shopping. But, after a good long Wait what? and taking our editorial nature as read (not going to go anywhere anytime soon), what might be made of this suggestion?
Trying my best to employ the Wait what?, I came up with two possible products in the would-be category:
1. An AAUP zine like Giant Robot or Bust; for the sake of discussion, let’s call it the “U Press Forum”—not invested in the name; we can no doubt find a suitable one, if we are pressed.
2. A suite of AAUP-wide, print-only, subscription-based publications by discipline, per McCracken illustrative example of Surveillance; for sake of discussion, “[Insert Discipline Name Here] Surveillance”—clearly ducking any name calling.
1. U Press Forum—We already have an example of a zine comprising “well-written essays for popular consumption” that also happen to support/parallel other publishing: a little outfit called Harper’s Magazine. As Harper’s has new pubs covered, an AAUP zine could focus on headline news and areas of topical interest, supporting our Books for Understanding program.
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