Peer-Review and Publication of Unprintable Materials

The following were my remarks at given at the American Musicological Society meeting in Louisville, November 2015, as part of the discussion "Beyond the Printed Page: Electronic Publishing and its Implications for Musicology," sponsored by the Committee on Career-Related Issues, the Committee on Technology, and the Committee on Publications, organized by James V. Maiello.

In thinking about the future, I find it’s always helpful to reconsider the past.  What were the roles of publishing in the age of print and print only? Why was it important to have ideas published? [Back then], only publishers could get an idea out to a large audience that would want to read it. Publishers had distribution networks that could take it from a single location (the city that we still cite in footnotes) and make it available throughout the world. The publishers took on financial risk in printing and distributing material: if they did not print ideas that were worth reading, scholars and librarians would stop subscribing to journals or purchasing books, leaving them unsold inventory in the present and less influence in the future. The publishers’ sense of the market would give an idea of how much interest there would be in the idea while peer review would ensure the quality of that idea. Initially, the reputation of a journal or publisher would determine how many people purchased and read it. Later, public review would help individuals and libraries decide which material to pick up after the initial sales.

While people sometimes speak of electronic publishing, particularly open access publishing, as changing everything, some of the prior paradigms remain and some disappear. Costs in production have certainly changed: The costs of an online publication (rights, editing, hosting) are basically the same whether its distributed to one reader or a million. Access, in the case of OA publishing, has absolutely changed. I doubt there is a single person on earth who has access to a print journal such as Acta musicologica who doesn’t also have access to the Internet.

What hasn’t changed at all though is the mark of quality and reputation that one journal or press has over another. Perceived differences in reputation or importance for online vs. paper has largely to do with the newness of most online journals. If the Journal of the American Musicological Society or Oxford University Press started publishing exclusively online, I doubt they’d take any hit to their reputation. It’s the name and the history that determines the importance of what is published, not the method of distribution. This authority—bound to decades of (mostly) good decisions about what to publish—is what is generally lost with electronic publishing.

If this hypothesis be true, then one need ask how can journals and publishers use their authority and reputation to advance scholarship better through digital publishing. I’d like to call on journals and the Society to be more open to peer-reviewing and “publishing” born digital materials, especially data collections, such as image archives, score collections, and spreadsheets that are of particular value to the scholarly community. Such publications used to be common in Anglo-American scholarship and particularly on the European continent. Here’s an example of what used to be published: An article by Gilbert Reaney in Musica Disciplina, where the text is largely introduction and connecting tissue around the main contribution of the article: pages and pages of charts describing the actual contents of some new finds. 

Or this contribution by Claude Palisca to JAMS in the 1950s, whose second part largely consists of organized musical examples of a surprising nature extracted from a large counterpoint treatise.  

Yes, both articles have text, but what mainly was peer-reviewed and published was data and a short justification for the significance of this data.

You won’t find many articles like these published today. In part there’s been a backlash against perceived empiricism without theoretical reflection, a new direction for scholarship, and so on, but this is not all of it. A larger reason is that our data has gotten too big to publish on paper, economically.  The best theoretically grounded article still would never appear in a major journal if it included a 300-page chart. Relatively forward-thinking journals have started to sometimes offer these tables, etc. as digital appendices. That may be fine for some people, but sometimes the table is not the appendix: it’s the article; if anything, it’s the introductory text that’s the appendix. The tables, hopefully in an original layout, sortable, filterable, and in original formats, can be the main text.

There are other important contributions to scholarship that are not included in peer-reviewed publication not because of their lengths but their formats: video, interactive explorations, computer software, or raw music notation files (such a curated collection of all the parallel perfect consonances in Bach chorales).

JAMS has begun to open one part of the publishing process to digital projects: the public peer review. The “digital and multimedia scholarship” section since 2014 has reviewed scholarly contributions that have already been released publicly on the internet or through other means.  It is a valuable part of e-publishing, validating, though after the fact, scholarship in non-traditional forms; Ian Quinn’s review of my music21 toolkit helped my tenure committee understand it as a book-equivalent project. (Dmitri Tymoczko's review in Music Theory Online had a similar impact for the theory world). But not all digital projects are book-length and thus subject to public review. And many projects would benefit from the process of peer-review earlier. It may seem odd at first to open an issue of JAMS and see nothing but a title, author, one or two page introduction and a web link to the materiel of the publication, but it is a necessary step towards using publication to even out the playing field between traditional and newer forms of scholarship.

Given the sponsor of the session, and the importance of teaching in our careers, I’d like to end with an appeal to pedagogy. We try to teach our students to distinguish between good information and less reputable. Articles appearing in JSTOR tend to be pretty good; random websites turning up from a google search are more problematic. Yet, if there are whole classes of scholarship: digital projects, data sets, videos, that cannot be recommended due to lack of peer review, lack of a press or journal name attached to them, we are shutting out our students to many of the top fruits of our scholarly labor. I hope we can change that.

Errata: 2015-11-20: The original version of this post mistakenly identified the third committee sponsoring the session. It is the Committee on Publications. It also referred to a slide of parallel perfect consonances in Bach chorales that was not included. The text has been adjusted.

Conference/Journal Convergence

The latest issue of Journal of Musicology just appeared (in virtual form) for me today, and I've been reading through the fascinating articles by Karol Berger and Michael Gallope this morning (I omit Peter Schmelz's contribution not because I don't think it's fascinating, but simply because I haven't gotten to it at the time of writing). On broad topics cutting across decades and centuries, these are the types of articles that I wish appeared more often in my field. The arrival of this issue has made me set aside (again in a metaphorical sense) the journal that I had been reading through with interest, Gamut, a recently reestablished and exciting music theory journals that publishes entirely online.

Unifying the issues of these two quite different journals, and many of the other publications I've read recently, is that the articles selected for publication came not through open calls for submissions but as proceedings of conferences or as designed Festschriften for a major figure (well, important man, to be technical) in the field.

Yard from Dguendel/WP (CC:BY) 
Sign from arkadin55(CC:BY-NC-SA)

The JM issue comprises papers from the 2012 conference in honor of Richard Taruskin, "After the End of Music History," which included talks by so many of the brightest stars in the musicological firmament and which was covered in the New York Times. James Steichen's introduction to this and the following issue, which will contain more papers from the same conference, helps those of us who were not there feel the energy of the weekend: the dual performances of a lost Eugene Onegin, the premiere of a new work, the evenings on at a club at Princeton.

Beyond placing these articles together within the cultural context that produced them, what musicologists usually aspire to do with their writings on musical works, there is much that is gained from publishing articles from a single conference together. Responses from the audience or the dedicatee can be transcribed, edited, and included (the old IMS reports are fascinating in this regard). Interconnections among papers can be made by the writers themselves. And there is the opportunity, which Karol Berger takes, to keep articles shorter, nearer the length of the original presentation. This facet alone makes publication of conference proceedings and Festschriften in journals worth advocating. Too many of our journals contain articles that are far too long for their topics or narrow audiences. Whether encouraging such length is the editors' intent, or indeed even if they continue to publicly solicit shorter articles, those students and scholars who want to be published look at the tomes that do get accepted and are smart enough to know what to do.

Conferences as journal issues mitigate against this trend. They also help scholars, especially the untenured or underemployed, stay active in the vital intellectual life of the field by attending meetings and not needing to decide whether they will contribute their work to a special conference proceeding book, which will likely count less for tenure no matter how selective the press or how strong the process of peer review, or go out on their own in search of a peer reviewed journal.

Yet I am uneasy about the implications as more and more space in journals, especially at the top journals, becomes devoted to conference papers, or to colloquies, symposia, and round tables (common now in the Journal of the American Musicological Society). Conferences turn into journal issues either by the editors of the journal seeking out conferences or selected papers from conferences to publish or by the organizers of the conference proposing their papers (or, again, a subset) as ripe fruit for an issue. In either case, the scholars who are or could be included come from the group of people invited to present at the conference. Many conferences begin with an open call for papers, but these are rarely the conferences that turn into journal issues. Journal paper selection moves from selecting articles from the broad scholarly public to the group of people who were invited to prestigious conferences. And these invitations rarely, if ever, go out on the basis of the work to be spoken of at the conference--which is almost never written at the time of the invitation--but on the basis of past work.

This development does not harm me personally. I am now at a stage of my career where I receive more invitations to speak at important meetings in traditional and computational musicology than I could attend, let alone write new contributions for. And my newly tenured state enables me to publish more in fora that seem appropriate (even blog posts) than worry about what a promotion committee will think of the surrounding context of my thoughts. The change to conferences as journals does, however, have the potential, especially if it becomes more common, to exclude from publishing those who are less well-connected, who are not invited to be in colloquies or symposia, but who have thought-provoking and well researched ideas. The organizers of "Taruskinfest" and the JM editors are to be commended (and nothing here is directly specifically against them) for including younger scholars in their celebration and publications, but not every conference journal issue, especially Festschrift contributions, are so thoughtful.

The change also has the effect of squeezing out space for ideas and areas of work that are at present too obscure or new to be the subject of a conference or for interpretations that go sharply against those of the senior scholars who are in the position to convene these events. Musicology, and I suspect many other humanistic disciplines, is not yet at a post-publication, post-peer-reviewed-journal state; any changes that may make it harder for the brightest and newest of ideas to be shared in our journals should proceed cautiously and under the scrutiny of the field.