a reader’s views about the idea of self-publishing everything other than books

The author of this letter is a Full Professor, and hence also past the tenure/promotion hurdles that often force academics to submit their work to “good” journals despite possible long delays and sometimes outrageous conditions. (Some of Springer’s conditions, in particular, are quite angering at times, and they control a good number of high-quality academic journals these days.)

“I have actually been thinking about this a lot too.

But there are still institutional issues (even though I am, like you a full Professor). If I publish stuff only on my own website (which, in fact, I have done — several times — when I had something written, and given as a talk, and no opportunity came up where somebody wanted to publish it) then I do not get official institutional credit for it, and though they cannot fire me, obviously, they can withhold raises, annoy me with reminders that I am not being ‘productive,’ etc.

The result is, on the other hand, that often I do not put up articles that I have finished writing, because somebody wants to publish it — even though it will take months (or sometimes years) for it to finally appear, as you know.

Sometimes, on the other hand, things I write get posted on open-access journals very quickly — but in this case, they are usually not-very-prestigious publications that are actually less widely read (despite being freely available) than my own blog is.

Also, if I write something and publish it online on my own website, can I still use it as a talk? Not sure about this one…

No conclusions here, just vague ruminations. I think in principle it would be best to put everything online right away (I am as impatient as you are about the delays that often characterize print publication); but as regards pragmatic considerations, things are still pretty murky & confusing.”

As for talks, I don’t know what the general sense of this is, but I would never give a talk that had already been published or posted somewhere. I’m not actually sure if it’s ethically wrong to do so (though the grant committees at my university sometimes seem to think so, and try to deny conference grants to people who are doing just that). All I know is that I’d worry about boring any audience members who might have read the published/posted version and who would then recognize it when hearing it.

My own policy is to do a fresh lecture every time, mostly because I like the challenge of having to rethink what I’m doing every time I get an invitation. There was only one time when I made an exception, on an occasion when I was doing keynotes on two different continents a couple of weeks apart and simply had no time to write two lectures, and was pretty sure there would be no audience overlap (and in fact there was no overlap).

As a graduate student I did once hear a big name in continental philosophy give the same lecture in 1992 or 1993 that I’d heard him give when I was an undergrad in 1987, and that was a disappointing sign of something I did not want to become in later life, even though there may have been nothing ethically wrong with it. (Again, I’m not really sure what the general industry view is about that. Seems to vary from person to person.) I can think of someone else in the field who was famous for giving the same lecture for every invitation, so the practice is not unknown– and again, I avoid doing it but do not feel in a position to condemn it.

As for the problem that even Full Professors can still be denied raises, can be harassed for lack of productivity, and so forth, this is true. What I was suggesting as my own strategy was to continue to publish books with full-blown publishers (it’s a pain to self-publish books, and always has the air of the vanity press about it, so I wouldn’t do that other than under exceptional circumstances), and possibly to avoid journals for the most part, simply publishing article-length texts myself as PDF’s. We have the advantage that continental philosophy isn’t really much of a journal culture anyway compared with most fields. We’re more of a book culture.

There will always be a tradeoff, and each individual case will be different, hinging heavily on one’s own institutional idiosyncracies. But at this point I think I’m more bothered by the long publication queues and high access costs of some journals than I am by the thought that some random university colleague on a committee might comically accuse me of lack of productivity.

At a certain point in the near future, the rules of the game will be completely different anyway. The proliferation of tablet computers is rapidly turning everyone into PDF readers first and foremost, and this is to some extent levelling the distinction between “real” journal articles and home-cooked PDF’s. Heck, sometimes I can’t even tell which is which when I’m watching someone read on their iPad. I can think of several fairly influential pieces of writing in our circles that have never actually been published, but are still widely circulated and read.