A short piece I wrote for the journal Text and Performance Quarterly (TPQ) has just been published. It’s called “Performing Scholarly Communication,” and it’s included in a special section on “The Performative Possibilities of New Media” edited by the wonderful Desireé Rowe and Benjamin Myers. The section includes contributions by Michael LeVan and Marcyrose Chvasta, Jonathan M. Gray, and Craig-Gingrich Philbrook, along with an introduction by and a formal contribution from Desireé and Ben. You can peruse the complete contents here.

My essay is a companion to another short piece I published (and blogged about) last year called “The Visible College.” “The Visible College” focuses on how journal publications hide much of the labor that goes into their production. It then goes on to make a case for how we might re-engineer academic serials to better account for that work. “Performing Scholarly Communication” reflects on one specific publishing experiment I’ve run over on my project site, The Differences and Repetitions Wiki, in which I basically opened the door for anyone to co-write an essay with me. Both pieces also talk about the history of scholarly journal publishing at some length, mostly in an effort to think through where our present-day journal publishing practices, or performances, come from. One issue I keep coming back to here is scarcity, or rather how scholars, journal editors, and publishers operate today as if the material relations of journal production typical of the 18th and 19th centuries still straightforwardly applied.

I’ve mentioned before that Desireé and Ben host a wonderful weekly podcast called the The Critical Lede. Last week’s show focused on the TPQ forum and gathered together all of the contributors to discuss it. I draw attention to this not only because I really admire Desireé and Ben’s podcast but also because it fulfills an important scholarly function as well. You may not know this, but the publisher of TPQ, Taylor & Francis, routinely “embargoes” work published in this and many other of its journals. The embargo stipulates that authors are barred from making any version of their work available on a public website for 18 months from the date of publication. I’d be less concerned about this stipulation if more libraries and institutions had access to TPQ and journals like it, but alas, they do not. In other words, if you cannot access TPQ, at least you can get a flavor of the research published in the forum by listening to me and my fellow contributors dish about it over on The Critical Lede.

I should add that the Taylor & Francis publication embargo hit close to home for me. Almost a year and a half ago I posted a draft of “Performing Scholarly Communication” to The Differences and Repetitions Wiki and invited people to comment on it. The response was amazing, and the work improved significantly as a result of the feedback I received there. The problem is, I had to “disappear” the draft or pre-print version once my piece was accepted for publication in TPQ. You can still read the commentary, which T&F does not own, but that’s almost like reading marginalia absent the text to which the notes refer!

Here’s the good news, though: if you’d like a copy of “Performing Scholarly Communication” for professional purposes, you can email me to request a free PDF copy. And with that let me say that I do indeed appreciate how Taylor & Francis does support this type of limited distribution of one’s work, even as I wish the company would do much better in terms of supporting open access to scholarly research.