Digital Scholarship in the Tenure, Promotion, and Review Process (review)

This volume grew out of a survey of historians involving digital history in the tenure, promotion, and review (TPR) process; M.E. Sharpe encouraged its expansion into an edited volume that would examine digital scholarship as it functions (or not) in the TPR process across a variety of disciplines. Editor Deborah Lines Andersen is a librarian by training and a co-editor of the Journal of the Association for History and Computing, so it is no surprise that among the fifteen contributors to this collection of thirteen essays are nine librarians or professors of information science, three historians, and three specialists in instructional and research technology. What is surprising is that their vision of the present and future of digital scholarship in TPR is one in which publishers play a small role and from which university presses are all but absent from start to finish. In her general introduction, Andersen prefaces a complicated 'systems view of the academic universe' by asking, 'Who are the [relevant] players within the system of tenure, promotion, and review?' and goes on to enumerate them as digital scholars; departments and schools; universities; and academic communities such as professional associations and disciplinary email lists (17-18). In a closing essay entitled 'Stories of the Future,' historian David J. Staley imagines five very different scenarios for the role of digital scholarship, in which 'the variable that has been altered in each case is the degree to which the institutions of the academy - hiring and tenure committees, professional societies, the administrative bodies of the university - accept or reject digital scholarship' (238). In between, only three essays consider the role of the publisher in any depth, and in one of those 'publisher' is essentially shorthand for 'commercial publisher.' ¹ Perhaps the contributors share a collective blind spot; perhaps it's really true that the end result of computer networks is disintermediated publishing and the withering away of the traditional press; or perhaps it's simply the case that scholarly publishers have not done a good enough job of demonstrating that their contribution to the TPR process is not bounded by the print journals and monographs that have defined their role for the past century.

It doesn't help that definitions of 'digital scholarship' obscure the role of the publisher when they fall into one of two errors: (1) assuming that the current features of digital scholarship are constitutive and can be projected into the future and (2) confusing its medium of delivery with its distinguishing characteristics. As an example of the first, Kathleen Fountain examines the status in TPR of what she calls the 'World Wide Web project,' defined as a 'stand-alone, creative work published solely on the World Wide Web'; she notes that these are typically created at the sole discretion of faculty members, who retain control over design and content (that is, these projects are self-published), and that they do not undergo any sort of editorial or peer review ('To Web or Not to Web,' 44-45). In fact, this set of 'defining' features of Web projects is likely to change over the next decade. Institutions, professional societies, and university presses (including my own) are exploring new models for peer review and formal publication of Web-based scholarship; the increasing sophistication of search engines and XML technologies are making it easier to aggregate separate projects into large interoperational aggregations; and advances in Web programming languages and promulgation of standards are making the boundaries among browser, PDA, print, and other modes of presentation much more fluid as we learn how to 'repurpose content' to suit our needs.

The second problematic type of definition avoids the trap of overspecifity at the cost of being too general to be useful. For Rob Kling and Lisa B. Spector...