Publishing Library Research

Journal of English for research publication purposes, 2022

Looking back on the trajectory of the journal since its initiation in 2020, we need to acknowledge the encouragement and support of our academic discourse community, both as contributors and reviewers. This issue also follows the first Special Issue of the journal titled The Dynamics of Academic Knowledge Production: Text Histories and Text Trajectories, guest-edited by Theresa Lillis and Mary Jane Curry, which we believe makes an important theoretical and methodological contribution to the field of writing for scholarly publication. We would also like to share the news that in order to take a small step towards social equity, justice, and the democratization of knowledge, we have made arrangements with our publisher, John Benjamins, to make the editorials of all past and future issues available to those interested, free of charge. We would also like to believe that this young journal has played a small but important role in establishing the new, yet fast-expanding field of English for research publication purposes (ERPP), and has attracted scholarly attention to issues and concerns in the production and circulation of knowledge at both local and global scales. With that in mind, there is work to be done to shed light on issues related to writing for scholarly publication that have emerged out of the new dynamics and developments in other aspects of our social life. One of those issues is the everincreasing role that technology is and will be playing in our social being and our scholarly publication practices. This role became more clear during the Covid-19 pandemic and has already changed many aspects of our social life. There is no doubt that the digitalization of research, writing, and publishing provides academics with various affordances in terms of data harvesting and management, innovative and alternative genres that can materialize disciplinary discourses, and the ways in which scholarship can be promoted, publicized, adjudicated, and distributed. A significant part of the scholarship in ERPP has approached these issues from a non-technological perspective. This approach creates a gap in such scholarship and requires that ERPP scholars and practitioners critically examine the

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2015

he modes of traditional long-form print scholarship primarily encompass the monograph, scholarly book, critical edition, textbook, and the edited collection. In some quarters a sharp distinction is made between the monograph and the scholarly or trade book because of the differences in their respective audiences and sales figures. The historian and former provost of the University of Pennsylvania Stanley Chodorow makes this distinction by describing the monograph as a "specialized work of scholarship that provides a detailed treatment of a narrow topic within its field" that is also "the product of a large project usually carried out by an individual scholar," while the scholarly book "is aimed at the broadest possible audience within a field and deals with general theoretical issues or offers a general explanation of a general question." 1 For many outside the community encompassing colleges, universities, research libraries, university presses, and learned societies, the distinction between these types of books is "academic." For those in the humanities and humanistic social sciences the monograph is the most important format of scholarly communication, yet many argue that its existence has grown increasingly endangered over the past two decades, prompting cycles of analysis, reaction, and frustration. Sometimes referred to as "the book that won't sell," 2 monographs stimulate debates about the need to reach a larger audience (to sell more copies) and revise the peer-review process to increase use (and sales), and spark fears of further declines in print runs and the number of manuscripts accepted for publication, leading to experiments in electronic books and digital presses, and proposals for alternative forms of economic support, especially of the first-books of early-career scholars. In America both university presses and the monograph date back to the last quarter of the 19th century, although the latter has only gained prominence over the past few decades as it began to figure more heavily into the professional certification and assessment of humanities scholars. 3 The form of the specialized scholarly monograph derives "inspiration from the German universities, where strong emphasis was placed on research and publication," 4 according to Joanna Hitchcock, but this form also tends to restrict its readership and limit sales because it does not usually appeal to a general audience. Yet this form of scholarship has become the gold standard for humanities scholars in the promotion and tenure process, and is sometimes considered in hiring decisions. Douglas Armato, director of the University of Minnesota Press, points out that questions about whether the monograph is overproduced, overly specialized, and has too limited an audience go back to at least the late 1920s. Yet its format was not designed to be profitable and instead relied on the "gift-economy" system of the "free" labor of scholars, Sometimes referred to as "the book that won't sell," monographs stimulate debates about the need to reach a larger audience (to sell more copies) and revise the peer-review process to increase use (and sales), and spark fears of further declines in print runs and the number of manuscripts accepted for publication, leading to experiments in electronic books and digital presses, and proposals for alternative forms of economic support, especially of the first-books of early-career scholars.

The aim of this paper is to highlight and discuss the complexities of scholarly publishing being a practice closely relating to two different systems, the system of academic merit and the system of scholarly communication, by showing how the two systems work on different sets of logic and therefore needs to be analyzed in different ways and using different kinds of data. These complexities are discussed by looking at the ISI databases by Thomson Reuters, information searching and use among scholars and recent attempts at assessing research by using quantitative indicators; and are viewed in part through the recent development of the digitization of the scholarly communication process; and to a larger extent by relating the issues discussed to two models for understanding how academic research is organized.

This chapter begins by reinforcing the integral role of writing and dissemination in the research process, while acknowledging that writing and dissemination practices vary from discipline to discipline, field to field. Despite these differences, there are characteristics and processes that most research writing and dissemination have in common, and these are discussed here. From the general structure of a research report to the importance of writing throughout the research process, key aspects of research writing are addressed after which dissemination and publishing are defined and major and emerging forms of publication are described. The chapter concludes with a discussion of peer review and the ethics of authorship.

Publications

The first academic periodical was the Journal des Sçavans, which first appeared in January 1665. It was followed two months later by the Philosophical Transactions. The Journal des Sçavans was sponsored by the state and was made up mainly of book reviews and covered all the known disciplines of the time. The Philosophical Transactions was a private venture based on Oldenburg's correspondence and was restricted to science and technology. Scientific writers were motivated by personal reputation, the desire to improve the human condition, and, sometimes, priority. The "publish or perish" syndrome is a recent development. Among the factors that have influenced it are the increasing professionalization of science, the development of the peer-review system, and, towards the end of the twentieth century, a desire for rapid publication. The fact that English has (recently) become the lingua franca of scientific publishing creates additional difficulties for non-Anglophone scientists, which their Anglophone colleagues do not have to face. Scientific language, similar to all languages, evolves constantly. One area that seems to be changing at the moment is that of passive use, which is the subject of ongoing research. Cultural differences may also have a role to play. For example, French scientists may have to overcome a basically Cartesian education.