Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (review)

Kathleen Fitzpatrick begins this valuable and engaging book by explaining how she came to write it as a result of the shock she experienced when her first scholarly monograph was rejected by a university press for marketing rather than editorial reasons. This prompted her, already involved in an exploration of obsolescence relating to cultural forms (as in the 'death of the book'), to reflect on how the fate of the scholarly monograph, especially a first book, exemplifies the 'zombie logic' of academic publishing in which such a form of writing may be seen as 'undead'—no longer economically viable as a mode of communication, yet still required by the academy for a scholar to gain tenure.

The main question she addresses in this new book is the obsolescence of the institutional, intellectual, and social practices that developed around the technology of print and that need to be changed if scholarly communication is to thrive in the new technological environment of the digital age. She begins by analysing how traditional peer review is inadequate to the needs of scholarship today, where cooperation plays a much greater role, facilitated by online networks that foster communication in many different ways and across many different types of groups. Here she draws on her experience with MediaCommons, a networked environment for scholarly communication about media studies that she helped launch and that was put to use in the evaluation of this book via open peer review before its publication.

Subsequent chapters explore how the focus of scholarly work should now be less on the book (or article) as final product than on the process of its creation and afterlife, how texts should be structured in a new publishing system so as to facilitate engagement and dialogue, and how such texts need to be curated and preserved in electronic space. Fitzgerald also explores the way in which new relationships should be formed among presses, libraries, information-technology centres, and academic departments so that the possibilities for a new type of scholarly communication system can be fully realized as we move further away from the print-based legacy publishing system.

There is much to like about this book. Its chapters are organized well to advance the argument in different ways from one chapter to the next, and the writing is always clear and blessedly free of jargon. The author succeeds in her aim of getting the reader to think about how to take advantage of new technology in order to open up exciting new opportunities for doing scholarly work in more collaborative ways that have a wider impact across the academic community and into society beyond. Such a change in how scholarly work is done could truly realize the potential for academic research to be viewed as a 'public good.'

The critique of traditional peer review in chapter 1 is especially thought-provoking. Fitzpatrick scores some solid hits against the kind of peer-review process that still dominates the evaluation of scholarship today. For instance, as she observes, when only one reviewer raises a criticism, one doesn't know whether this is representative of a general problem or merely reflects an idiosyncratic reaction of one reader. In sketching an alternative system for peer review, she emphasizes that its success depends on 'prioritizing members' work on behalf of the community' (43). Reputation in such a system requires some way of reviewing the reviewers. The ability to publish might therefore be based on measurements of how helpful a scholar is in participating in group discussion. A system like this will 'require a phenomenal amount of labor' as well as a new set of metrics for reviewing the reviewers, but if 'reviewing were a prerequisite for publishing, we'd likely see more scholars become better reviewers...