by Prof. Monica Berger
For Open Access Week 2015, we highlighted City Tech’s own Open Access journal, NANO: New American Notes Online http://www.nanocrit.com/. NANO‘s mission is to “invigorate humanities discourse by publishing brief, peer-reviewed reports with a fast turnaround enabled by new technologies.” Issues are themed and articles often incorporate multimedia. Sean Scanlan, English Department, is NANO‘s founder and editor. We recently asked Sean to tell us more about NANO.
Monica Berger: Why specifically did you choose to make NANO an open access journal? I read your Open Access Statement, but please tell us more about how you and others involved in the creation of the journal reached this place.
Sean Scanlan: Thank you for inviting me to share my ideas on Open Access and academic journals. My journal was conceived to be Open Access from the beginning and I’d like to tell that story now.
In 1997, when I was getting my Master’s degree in English at the University of Missouri St. Louis, I applied to go to a critical theory conference at Cornell University. I met people from all over the world, and one of my friends, Thomas, was from Kerala, India, and he was the most excited person I’ve ever met to be at a literary conference. The reason that he was so excited was that his travels and commitment to come to New York relied upon a funding operation that exceeded the usual travel funds of his university by an enormous factor. Simply put: everybody he knew had contributed to his arrival at Cornell.
But I didn’t understand the core issue of what scholarly access meant until Thomas and I talked about libraries. During our down time, we often visited the main library at Cornell. It was a thing to marvel at—nearly 8 million volumes. Many times he said to me: there is nothing I could not accomplish with such a library at my home institution. And now, after seeing this, I feel that there is nothing I can accomplish back in Kerala.
“Why is that?” I asked.
“Because I have to compete to get my work published in US journals against scholars who have access to all this.”
Even though I was in the US, it hit me that my small state university had a small fraction of Cornell’s holdings, and so I too would face such access problems. I’ve talked to many colleagues who have shared a story or two about not getting at a vital piece of research due to access. I realized that the institution of the academy, an institution that I thought was ethical and open to all had a dirty secret: it had good qualities but it was grossly unequal. Scholars should not be limited to their small research holdings, they should not be constrained even by small consortiums of libraries, they should be able to access world-class holdings.
In addition to Thomas’s story, I want to add an idea I gleaned from the legal scholar Eben Moglen, who has written about intellectual property and sharing. He argues that potential Shakespeares and Einsteins of the world should not suffer because of a lack of scholarly resources—but as of now, they do. Why? Because rules that protect intellectual property have been contorted to protect not the thinker, but the employer of the thinker. Intellectual property rights now are ways to provide funding streams to publishers who want to not only cover their costs, but also provide shareholder returns. If universities were selling sneakers, then perhaps such a profit model would be ethical, but education is not sneaker selling, especially not public university education.
In fact, the public university has an ethical obligation to make, at the very least, some of the research it produces available for no cost to the public. This is not only ethical, it will help bring in new students, new teachers, and even more funding. Sharing scholarly information is the way that new scholarship is enabled, and the result of newest, best ideas will be growth in a following of eager students and eager faculty. And following them will be increased resources. This happens all the time, look at those research institutions that have promoted cognitive neuroscience or digital humanities.
Open Access is an idea accelerator and impact accelerator, thus, it is resource generator, only certain factions cannot see this very positive event horizon.
The last part of this longish answer borrows from a blog post by Daniel Cohen who writes about Digital Humanities and the cost of publishing online. He says the Social Contract of Scholarly Publishing is what happens between authors, editors, and readers. This contract says that readers will read published work if they know that the manuscript has minimal errors, that the footnotes are accurate, that the fonts and navigation systems are clear and high quality. But does it matter if it is printed on paper, if the book is hardcover, if the imprint has grudging respect? I want to propose the idea of the Public University Social Contract. Such a contract improves the supply side of Cohen’s metaphor by putting more into the editing and less into the prestige of paper and bindings, more into the fast turnaround of publishing—and less into the cues of name-brands. The Public University Social Contract would state that publishing means sharing above all else—not as money-loser, but the complete opposite: as a way to enhance the missions of educate and improve knowledge, validate, build-upon, and propagate conversations and collegial bonds: in short to build trust among a vastly larger network of scholars, thereby gaining the respect of the world, so that Thomas can cite a vast number of articles and books, and so that Thomas’s work can, in turn, get cited by scholars at City Tech and beyond.
MB: Can you tell us more about the platform you are using for NANO and if there any plans to change in the near future?
SS: Two constraints have influenced my need to use Concrete5 as my publishing platform. First, I wanted to publish articles that used images, film, and sound as an integral element of the author’s argument. Many online platforms can’t support such multimodal articles—especially those of some prestige university presses. And this finding helped me decide to use an open source content management system (CMS). Second, I wanted to be able maintain the journal’s design and look behind the curtain—meaning that I wanted to avoid having to call a webmaster to make small or large changes to the journal. I tried Drupal and WordPress, but I found that Concrete5 was the most stable, most customizable, and their customer service was quick when glitches did happen (and glitches always happen, so it’s important to know what to do when they do). Concrete5 is a free, open-source PHP-based CMS that has easy to use model-viewer-control architecture which means that I can make design changes with ease—even though I do not know how to program in either HTML or PHP (I’ve taught myself how to code font and color changes though). I’ve been with Concrete5 for about 5 years now, and I’m happy for now.
Recently though, I have felt the need to make the journal mobile and tablet responsive, and that has forced me to take on a Concrete5 webmaster to help steer this major redesign. We will roll out Issue 8—a special issue on corporations and culture—in November, and it will utilize the new design. My hope is that readers will appreciate an academic journal that is less cluttered, less New York Times—print version, and more New York Times mobile version. The new version will emphasize image and film while maintaining readability and ease of navigation. That said, it will definitely encourage readers to explore the journal. I don’t know of another online humanities journal that will be able to touch NANO’s new design; I hope it will be a game-changer.
MB: You are able to provide faster peer-review than traditional journals. Tell us more about NANO’s peer-review process.
SS: Well, we try to be faster, but as any editor can tell you, it is very tough unless you have very deep pockets so you can pay a large staff. Sometimes I wonder what I could do with NANO if I had Buzzfeed money. Although I mention Buzzfeed partly in jest, that leads me to think about quality. Unlike Buzzfeed, or perhaps a better example is The Atlantic, we cannot just pay somebody to do the scholarly work of peer reviewing, editing, proofing, or citation checking. Only editors, assistant editors (NANO’s assistant editors are Rebecca Devers and Ruth Garcia), editorial board members, and outside peer reviewers can do that work. And, except for the rare elite university press that employs some PhDs to do this work, teaching faculty do not get compensated for this type of work. And yet the humanities are foundationally based on peer-reviewed scholarship. But back to timing.
Initially, I wanted to publish four times a year, but that was impossible without a long train of submissions already in the pipeline. So, I went to two, but even that was difficulty until I had special issue Calls-for-Papers in the works. One important part of NANO’s ethos is a very short maximum length. Our maximum is 3,500 words, which is at the short end for most humanities journal, and of course this short length is tethered to our name: NANO does mean very small or very short in duration. Shorter articles have helped our journal develop a reputation for a certain type of single-argument article, rather than a bloated, tangential article that covers every base in a Whac-a-mole fashion. Shorter articles make it easier for our reviewers to quicken turn-around time to four weeks. So, we have been able to go from initial CFP to submission to review to publication in about twelve months. Some journals I know say that they try respond to a submission within six months, but that they may take longer. How does six months help anybody? An additional way our publishing is accelerated is due to a peer review process supported by a large, active, and generous editorial board that takes on a lot of reviewing.
More specifically, our peer review process runs like this: first, all three NANO editors (and the guest editors) assess each submission for fit and appropriate specialization. Second, submissions that pass this initial reading are sent to NANO‘s editorial board and/or outside specialists for blind review. NANO‘s goal is to provide at least two detailed reports for each submission that reaches the anonymous review stage, thereby emphasizing scholarly conversation and exchange. Once reviews are complete, the editorial team, including guest editors and assistant editors, negotiates acceptances and then works closely with authors to revise according to NANO’s style sheet and secure permissions for images or film. The final layout and publishing falls to me, and that can be a crazy week, but seeing a new issue up provides me with the greatest academic satisfaction that I’ve ever felt, its like academic ambrosia! There is nothing like creating a special issue that brings together writers and editors from all over: community, new ideas, sharing of work and commitments—it’s what I’ve always thought scholarship should be…and do.
MB: Tell us more about articles you’ve published that incorporate multimedia and other elements that traditional publishing would not accommodate. Have you faced any challenges dealing with non-traditional content?
SS: I have had extremely good luck in the types of files and platforms that I’ve decided to use. Concrete5 has a very easy to use image-processing add-on that enables all sorts of manipulation to get things to look right. And you can see that I’ve gotten better at image manipulation if you compare Issue 1: Navigation to Issue 7: The Aesthetics of Trash. For film, we use a Vimeo Pro account. And I’ve liked working with Soundcloud for sound files. The new design will enhance these sub-platforms and make them more visually and aurally appealing. Since we ask potential authors to secure permission, we have not had too much trouble with copyright. Luckily, no author has wanted to use, say, an image from MoMA—that would not be easy. We are currently working with some professional photographers for more images to enhance each special issue. NANO wants original images, not reproductions. So, that is a new problem on the horizon: how can I help scholars who may not know how to get the right images or sounds for their work in touch with artists who might be able to provide the exact thing they need? That is one of several questions that keep me up at night.
MB: Can you share your thoughts about how NANO can partner with the library?
SS: The City Tech Library has already been very helpful to NANO in terms of information and guidance as I try to get the journal indexed and more visible. To that end, I think that the library’s excellent new website seems amenable to displaying, perhaps showcasing, City Tech journals on a rotating basis. But having NANO’s link and logo on the library’s site is not the only thing that I would like to see. I think that faculty and students would benefit from knowing more about how journals work and using them for classroom or outside research. I can foresee library seminars for faculty and students to learn more about the journals that are being made right here, right now.
