Underlying the status of online publication as an inferior medium is probably the concern on the part of potential contributors that appearance in electronic media is not as highly regarded by the gatekeepers of tenure and promotion as the traditional hard-bound book and the article offprint, at least in the humanities.

As a doctoral student, I can say that Raben is right on target with this assumption. When graduate advisors provide advice to their unpublished students on how and where to seek publication and presentation, they often provide one very simplistic piece of advice. As emerging scholars, we should seek out publication anywhere we think we have a chance. We should consider the fact that it takes approximately three presentations (preferably at a regional or national conference) to equal one good publication. Now, advisors are clear that “good” publications come in the form of journals that are tangible to the reader (PMLA, for example). We are frequently steered away from the digital publications because they are “too new” and are considered “dangerous” or “careless publications.” Why? Well, as Raben puts it, they don’t know how to measure digital publications:

Books and print articles have been the stairs leading to the tenure, promotion, higher salaries and reduced teaching loads that are the system’s rewards for scholarly industry. When deans and even chairs are incapable of evaluating the content of such publications, they have been able to rely on the number of a candidate’s publications, their substance, the prestige of their publishers and (to a limited extent in the humanities) the number of times they are cited elsewhere.

Now, if the equation that I was provided for measuring publication (1 journal publication = 3 conference presentations) holds true, it seems that this formula becomes complicated if my vitae includes digital publications (x digital publications = 1 journal publication = 3 conference presentations). Unfortunately, nobody has given a value for “x,” so the equation remains unsolved. Unfortunately, this places tomorrow’s tenured faculty in a serious conundrum.

If, as graduate students, we steer clear of digital publications, strive for regional and national conferences, and desperately attempt to publish in PMLA, we will be considered successful in today’s tenure guidelines. However, we are not seeking tenure today; we are seeking tenure in the next decade. By then, I think that it is safe to say, digital journals will have a more solid standpoint in the vitae world. At the very least, tenure and promotion committees wil have the chance to fill in the missing value of “x” in their equation.

So, this leaves those of us with sparse publications in a catch-22. We can continue to follow the advice our advisors are providing and avoid digital publications, or we can make an attempt at this medium while it is in its infancy. We, as the future tenured professors of the world, have the chance to begin making a difference in the acceptability of digital media by submitting to these journals in their infancy. Now, the way I see it in the next decade, when we’re coming up for tenure, we have the chance to look like those who broke the mold, or we have the chance to look like those who follow the pack. Personally, I want to be a mold-breaker. The way I see it, we have guidelines for evaluating e-journals–we teach these evaluative criteria to our students–and we can use these criteria to determine exactly which journals we submit to. Is it really that hard to tell which journals will be seen as the ones with credibility? I don’t think so. It just requires us to keep up with a few of the issues and look at what they publish and who they choose to peer-review the journal. Don’t we do that with the print publications we submit to? I know I’m not sending an article on blogging in First Year Composition to Glamour, so why would I send it to the e-version of Glamour?

All in all, it comes down to us having the ability to use our own judgment to determine what and when we submit to. When it comes down to print vs. digital journals, I still believe that the number of print publications should outweigh the number of digital publications, but that does not mean we should simply ignore the idea of digital publications.

Let me leave you with a potential formula for the tenure committees to consider:

3 digital publications = 1 print publication = 3 conferences.

After all, are we not trying for each of these various forms of publication? While we should not have a vitae full of digital journals, we can have a few listed in our publications. We have years to go before tenure anyway.

When Jerome Mc Gann wrote that scholars no longer need to be limited to using “books to study books” he was already ahead of his time. As scholars, we now have access to materials that could often only be obtained in the past with a lengthy sabbatical, passport, and our life savings. Okay, so that is the worst case scenario, but the best case would have been a sympathetic librarian in charge of interlibrary loan. Today, we can access a majority of the material we need for research online: many books have been created in e-text format, journal articles can be accessed through online archives, and many other resources are available through similar resources. In addition, scholars now have the ability to publish their own webpages allowing scholars more resources for finding exactly what we need. No longer do we need to rely soley on a musty, moth-eaten copy of a book that may or may not be found in its place in the library stacks. We’ve come a long way, baby!

But I don’t think we’ve come to the end of the road. With the more recent emergence of wikis and collaborative websites, I think we will be able to see more of a dialogue between scholars than we have in the past. This will ultimately lead to more timely dialogues; no longer will we need to wait months (or years) for a scholar’s rebuttal to an article to appear, we’ll be able to access it as soon as it’s available. When we want to examine draft changes within a text, we’ll be able to access various versions of the text through PDF or GIF files from our desktop. While this feature is already available for authors of incredible notoriety who lived centuries ago, we’ll be able to see more current authors. For example, if a student was working on a paper based on J.K. Rowling’s novels, there would be more of a chance that Rowling had made these changes available online.

Another advantage we have that continues to grow is the ability to contact the author via email. In the past, this has been an availability since the beginning of email. However, authors are becoming more receptive to speaking via email with an individual working with their text. (I support this fact with the recent comments made on my student blogs by the author of one of the articles they are currently blogging on.) Now, authors have the ability to Google themselves, see what is being written on their work and reply as they see fit. This has the potential to lead to diret dialogue between author and scholar, between writer and student.

For teachers, this ability to present such broad means of readily available research to students provides us with a chance to expand their horizons while also teaching them about the importance of judging what they read or hear so that it meets or exceeds their own standards. In addition, as teachers, we can require more sophisticated research and refuse to accept the highly popular “they didn’t have a book on that in the library.” At the same time, if we are receptive to the “tools” of our students’ world, we will be able to enhance the tools of our own scholarship.