Scholarly Communication and Electronic Publication: Implications for Research, Advancement, and Promotion

In this paper I look at the issue of how scholarly publishing in electronic forums affects the academic tenure process. My primary focus is the points of view of two power structures in society: the publishing community and the university community. Currently, scholarly publication as it relates to the merit and promotion process is generally defined as publication in refereed journals or as publishing scholarly books. This definition, implying a fixed language-based text and an identifiable author (or attributable contributions from multiple authors) is beginning to be questioned in theory and in practice. For example, individuals and collaborative groups now create information to be distributed in various modes of electronic publishing, such as multimedia cd-rom and the World Wide Web.

At least two diverging views of cyberspace contribute to such a discussion. A utopian view claims that the new technology (as epitomized by the Internet, and specifically the World Wide Web) will transform society for the better by allowing people to seek out information, communicate, and widely disseminate knowledge at a cost low enough to allow anyone to do so. In contrast, a more dystopic view points to political and economic issues that serve to disempower people through commercialization and monopolization of information channels, electronic surveillance, job dislocation, and the social and ecological implications of computer technology.

These viewpoints appear to arise from various modernist and post-structuralist positions. Implications for faculty members going through the tenure process, and thus for academic libraries and for librarians, who work to be integral players in the university community, will depend to what extent post-structuralist theoretical positions are put into practice, whether as radical change or as assimilated into current historico-modernist traditions of the advancement and promotion process.