Consider the following scenarios:
You are an undergraduate student writing a research paper. You want to locate scholarly research pertaining to your chosen topic, so you start by doing a search on your collegeâs library webpage. You find an article that seems perfect, but youâre having trouble figuring out how to access it. Your libraryâs database lists the title, but indicates that the institution does not subscribe to the full text version of the journal. You spend five minutes clicking all the links on the page, hoping that the article might manifest. Frustrated, you decide to just Google your topic and hope for the best.
You are a graduate student. You have been told that publishing in a peer-reviewed edited collection will significantly improve your chances of securing a tenure-track job. You submit to a call-for-papers because the subject area matches your research interests. The editors publish your research as a chapter in the collection, but you learn that the full text costs $180. The publisher provides no complementary print copies to contributors. You cannot afford to purchase your own research.
You are an early-career scholar. Your work has just been accepted to an innovative refereed journal that publishes research as digital, hypermediated webtexts. Although you feel confident with the text-based elements of your work, you also must use hypertext markup language (HTML) and cascading style sheets (CSS) to code your webtext. You give it your best shot (this is your first time trying something like this), but your peer reviewers are not enthusiastic about your design. You have reached the limits of your coding abilities. You wonder whether it might be easier to pull your piece and submit it instead to a more traditional publication. You just need to have this research published in order to advance your career.
You are the editor of a well-established journal. You think that it is time that your publication joins the 21st century and determines new ways to interact with readers. So, you create social media accounts, but you are unsure exactly what tone you want to strike. Should you try to be funny? Who should you interact with? You realize too that, if you want to share journal content on these accounts, it would be helpful to publish some articles as open-access texts. You recognize that there are significant time and monetary costs associated with open-access. You also worry how your readership will perceive these changesâwhether they will begin to think of your publication as less rigorous if you begin to use social media and publish open-access articles, even if you alter nothing about your peer review process or acceptance rate.
If you see yourself in any of these stories, this book is for you.
These situations represent aspects of the contemporary academic publishing landscape. Researchers at all levels hunt for the most germane scholarship. Many graduate students and current faculty must publish in order to obtain or keep an academic position. A healthy publication record becomes especially important given the tenuous status of employment in higher education. For every attempt at publishing innovation, there are attendant risks or obstacles. Publishing is a significant investment for all parties involved, from authors to editors, peer reviewers to students. In short, to participate in academic publishing, as reader, scholar, or distributor, means engaging in a complex ecology of conscious and unconscious choices on a near-daily basis.
The questions that motivate this book are thus central to the work of the academy, yet heretofore largely undiscussed: how do researchers perceive the current status of academic publishing, and in what ways do these perceptions affect what is produced and âcountsâ as academic writing? Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe noted in 2001 that âthe new electronic wor(l)ds of writing and publishing can be glimpsed, but not yet fully examined; contemplated, but not yet comprehendedâ (187). In the nearly two decades since Hawisher and Selfeâs piece, there have been increasing venues for and institutional acceptance of open-access and multimodal forms of scholarship. To say, however, that these emerging modes are on par with traditional print publications elides multiple strata of consciousness and history.
This is where the third element of this bookâs titleâspecifically, writing center studiesâcomes into play. Although, according to Elizabeth Bouquet (1999), citing Lerner and Gere, the concept of an institutional writing center likely has its origins in the late 19th century ideology of âconference practiceâ and the âextracurriculum of composition,â writing center studies as an academic discipline only began to constellate in the late 1970s/early 1980s (466). This is when WLN: A Journal of Writing Center Scholarship (formerly Writing Lab Newsletter ), founded in 1976, and The Writing Center Journal , established in 1980, began to disseminate academic conversations pertaining to the work of writing centers. A third publication, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal , began to publish scholarship on writing center studies in 2003. WLN, Writing Center Journal, and Praxis exist across a spectrum of digital and print representation. WLN is primarily a print-based journal, but the publication makes its entire archivesâexcept for the most recent issueâfreely accessible to individuals on its website. Writing Center Journal is the most prestigious forum for writing center-related scholarship, and it only publishes in print format, although its archives are available through some databases and online resources. Praxis, on the other hand, is a native digital, open-access journal . It does not publish multimodal webtexts (i.e., that would include images, audio, video, etc.), but instead distributes articles as PDFs and simple HTML pages.
In some ways, these established publications exist in tension with two new journals within writing center studies, The Peer Reviewâa journal launched in October 2015 that, according to its website, is a âfully online, open-access, multimodal, and multilingual journal for the promotion of scholarship by graduate, undergraduate, and high school practitioners and their collaboratorsââand Tutors: A Site for Multiliteracies About Tutoring , which launched in 2014 and also showcases digital, multimodal work. The emergence of these two highly hypermediated publications within the past three years thus seems to suggest an important shift within the sub-discipline of writing center studiesâa transition that increasingly interacts with native digital modes of distribution. Writing Lab Newsletter, Writing Center Journal, and Praxis also, however, sustain a variety of other media, including blogs, research databases, and social networking accounts. These are all supplementary tools enabled by digital technologies that exist apart from the content of the journal itself, but work to shape a journalâs overall ethos. As a discipline then, writing center studies is small enough to be assessed comprehensively, but large enough to stand as emblematic of the kinds of queries central to contemporary academic publishing, especially those that have taken place in the past 40 years.
Writing center studies also maintains a unique exigency regarding the relationship between digitality and accessibility. It could be argued that the value of openness is central to writing center ideology. Stephen Northâs (1984) âThe Idea of a Writing Centerâ is a foundational writing center text that, according to Lerner (2014), âappears in nearly every third articleâs [published in Writing Center Journal] list of works citedâ (68). Northâs oft-cited piece might therefore demonstrate one basis for this core belief. In his conclusion, North waxes nostalgic on the origin of writing centers, which he locates within an Athenian marketplace, where âa tutor called Socrates set up the same kind of shop: open to all comers, no fees charged, offering, on whatever subject a visitor might propose, a continuous dialectic that is, finally, its own endâ (445). More recently, the 2016 National Conference on Peer Tutoring in Writing , one of the two major North American conferences on writing center studies, was held at the University of Puget Sound and had as its theme âItâs For Everyone: The Inclusive Writing Center.â Its call-for-papers asked participants to, â[explore] the question of how we can more effectively serve all students, particularly those who may be otherwise marginalized by the academy.â Even Nancy Grimmâs (1999) influential text Good Intentions: Writing Center Work for Postmodern Timesâa work critical of standard approaches to writing center laborâstill advocates an embedded openness toward multiple forms of literacy as central to the centerâs purpose. She explains, âWriting centers cannot resolve the national confusion about literacy, but I believe that over time they can contribute to a deeper understanding of literacy and to more democratic approaches to literacy educationâ (xiii). Any barriers to democratic access could therefore be viewed as contradicting this central principle of writing center work. For those researchers and tutors who look to scholarship to guide their own practices, the extent to which the digital enablesâor possibly complicatesâaccessibility is therefore an important consideration within writing center studies specifically. Significant too is the fact that scholarship about the work of writing centers can by its very nature illustrate the trajectory of conversations about writing across the curriculum and the status of writing within a university setting.
In some important ways then, writing center studies, like many disciplines, seeks to validate emerging modes of scholarship. More than just reaffirming the conventional wisdom about itâthat such a shift is happening and we do not always know how to pinpoint these changesâI argue in this work that the labor of legitimizing emerging digital scholarship is a responsibility to be shared by many stakeholders, from journals, to faculty and administrators making tenure decisions, to the scholars themselves. As much a comprehensive reading of the state of the field, I suggest that scholars in all disciplines, compositionists, and writing center practitioners should work to understand the nuances of academic publishing, as they manifest in the interconnected histories of a publication, attempts at outreach, and scholarsâ perceptions. In this large-scale, multifaceted assessment of writing center studies, I provide a focused and critical lens for gaining insight into factors that influence the production of scholarship in toto. I seek then in Open-Access, Multimodality, and Writing Center Studies to use the history, broadly conceived, of one disciplineâwriting center studiesâto reveal significant implications for the relationship between the old and new guards of academic publishing.