metascience

Anthropologies is an online project organized by Ryan Anderson that brings together voices reflecting the state of the discipline today. The current volume has the theme, "Anthropology with purpose". My essay has riled a lot of people already: "What's wrong with anthropology?"

Academic anthropology in America is complacent, at a time when budgets are falling, academic departments are being closed, and a larger and larger number of people have become skeptical of the value of science. It's time for an intervention.

We must change not only for practical reasons but for moral reasons as well. Anthropological research depends on the cooperation, interest and goodwill of many communities, both today and in the past. People do not donate their cooperation lightly. Wherever anthropologists do their work, they are lucky to have the help of these communities of people. Whether biological, archaeological, or cultural, our research relies on unique resources that in many cases cannot be duplicated. We bring these things to light, for the broader appreciation and education of the rest of humanity.

Having our work read by twenty people is an not acceptable communication strategy. Failure to share results broadly betrays the cooperation of the communities who enable our research.

I argue for three strategies:

1. Embrace new forms: use technology to change the way we publish our work.

2. Defend good science, acknowledging anthropology's unique place.

3. Empower our students: leverage the incredible value of fieldwork by requiring translational work from the beginning.

A section from this last:

Making our students more competitive for non-academic careers does not mean turning our back on what we already do well. Our students learn how to think in ways that other students don't. Fieldwork gives our students tremendous advantages that most industry professionals can only look on with envy.

We should reinforce those essential experiences and make them greater opportunities for engagement. Why are anthropology students going into the field without contracts to write weekly or monthly about their work? Why do our professional associations do not support themselves by becoming clearinghouses for ongoing field reports? Where are the workshops and press kits that will enable our young researchers to build ties to media and communities outside their institutions?

I've served up some real red meat in this one, and I've been so heartened to see the growing comment stream. A sample:

I did an honors thesis on applying an empirical methodology to an ethnographically documented phenomenon that won a university-wide social science prize. I was the kind of promising student which anthropology as a field should be trying to retain – someone with ideas, creativity, and able to produce original research early. While an undergrad, I had every intention of continuing on in anthropology. However, after graduating and sitting down to figure out where to apply to graduate school, I discovered that getting a degree in cognitive anthropology would be a pretty horrible life plan if I wanted to have a career based on my graduate training ... From what is now an outsider perspective, the AAA ditching science in its mission statement suggests to me that I made the right decision. Anthropology has already lost intellectual territory to other disciplines, seemingly without a fight.

Some great names have already chimed in, and I hope that many more will take the opportunity to join the conversation.

Inside Higher Ed reviews and interviews an author who argues that the scholarly monograph shackles academics to an obsolete model of communication:

So it is strategic that Kathleen Fitzpatrick, director of scholarly communication at the Modern Language Association and a professor of media studies at Pomona College, invokes the living dead early to illustrate her argument in Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy (NYU Press). The scholarly press book, she writes, “is no longer a viable mode of communication … [yet] it is, in many fields, still required in order to get tenure. If anything, the scholarly monograph isn’t dead; it is undead."

I agree with this thesis in part. Sixty-dollar monographs are going the way of the thylacine. Locking scholarly content in the tall stacks of university libraries doesn't disseminate it. Peer review no longer improves work to the extent that it's worth locking it up in response. It is ridiculous for anyone to judge the quality of a young scholar's work by the imprint of a "prestigious" academic press. Tenure committees have simply delegated their responsibilities to editors, and the editors do a poor job.

But I disagree that the scholarly monograph is dead. Personally, I expect monographs to undergo a renaissance as more academics adopt e-publishing. Academic presses affiliated with universities should be going all-digital, and should start massively promoting their back catalogs as e-books at fire-sale prices. The smart ones will take the opportunity to change their agenda, competing to publish new books by a new generation of scholars who are building a broad readership both inside and outside academia. There's no reason why we need to constrain our scholarship to books so boring that nobody wants to read them. Tomorrow's scholars should be engaging with a much broader public than university presses have historically cultivated.

The stumbling block is that these books still must serve as a guide to the academic quality of young scholars' work. On this count, Fitzpatrick provides some useful ideas about how to build quality scholarship under a more collaborative model:

The way to make this work, Fitzpatrick says, is to change the currency of scholarly communications from paper to credit. Instead of rewarding faculty for getting a lot of paper published, universities should consider how helpful tenure candidates have been in parsing other people’s articles written and helping others refine their ideas, she says. Journals could help out with this by creating “trust metrics” that cede more weight to academics who consistently give constructive feedback. They could also encourage frequent, thoughtful reviews by making them prerequisites for publishing one’s own work — thus attracting the sort of critical mass of reviewers that Fitzpatrick argues is necessary for successful peer-to-peer review (and which some previous high-profile experiments with the model failed to get).

Under such a system, faculty members could glide to tenure on the wings of their reputations as positive contributors to the advancement of knowledge in their field — a metric the current “publish-or-perish” model does not adequately represent, Fitzpatrick says. “Little in graduate school or on the tenure track inculcates helpfulness,” she writes, “and in fact much militates against it.”

Obviously I think this model would be better than our current one. Still, I worry about the actual assignment of credit. Quite frankly, all my writing here has done wonders for my influence, but has had a substantial drawback: Many of my ideas are used by other scholars without credit or citation. We compete for research support, and in that competition I get no credit or acknowledgement whatsoever for any contributions I make. That's a cost I've been willing to pay for what I do, but if we expect more young academics to share their ideas broadly, we're going to need to change the culture of research funding to recognize their contributions appropriately.

My favorite part of the interview is the last question, which asked Fitzpatrick to give advice about new models of publication to a junior faculty member, librarian, and university provost, respectively.

Finally, to the provost: understand that scholarly communication is a core responsibility of the university – so fundamental to the university mission, in fact, that it must be thought of as part of the institution’s infrastructure, not as a revenue center. And every university must develop some kind of plan for scholarly communication. If you leave disseminating the work of your faculty exclusively to corporate publishers, corporations will profit from it at your institution’s expense. Instead, invest in the structures that will get your faculty’s work into broader circulation – not least because those structures will help you make clear to the concerned public why the university continues to matter today.

I'm going to append to this post the first link to my entry in the Anthropologies project: "What's wrong with anthropology?" where I discuss my own perspective on these problems. Needless to say, I think things need to change. I expect the change in scholarly communication to be highly specific to each academic field, as what works for cultural anthropology will not be the same as what works for genetics or English. But new approaches will be digital, and that means a university may find much more ability to support multiple approaches than is possible with print. The tools to support varied forms are already available, if universities would support and extend them, they could capture much of the need for academic communication.