Toward the middle of the Spring term in my first year of doctoral studies, one of my professors added one final step to the list of required maneuvers involved in the class’ end-of-term project: we would prepare our work, and then submit it for publication in a peer-reviewed, scholarly journal. When I mentioned the possibility of publishing that article to The Orange Journal, an on-line journal of graduate student scholarship in rhetoric and related disciplines, the reaction was a skeptical one: “Why on earth would you want to do that?” The question caught me off guard, because the reasons why I would choose to publish in Orange seemed perfectly obvious to me; or rather, the alternatives to Orange seemed problematic to the point of irrelevancy, given the pedagogical intent of the exercise: to demonstrate scholarly ethos.

As graduate student scholars, we demonstrate professional ethos in three ways. First, we demonstrate knowledge and facility of the current, critical issues in the discipline, the history of discourse that led to their development, and the approaches toward those issues favored by different scholars in the discipline. The ideal venue for graduate student publication would provide access to that sort of information. Second, we must display expertise with the accepted scholarly practices in the discipline – including the formal peer review process practiced by journals. An ideal venue would facilitate practical experience with that method. Finally, we must participate in discourse about novel and timely topics with our peers, and with other scholars. The ideal publication venue would encourage that dialog.

Publishing an article in a recognized journal is a sign of full participation in the disciplinary conversation, and of one’s ethos as a practitioner within the discipline. However, given the exclusive nature of print publications, is that a practical goal? Similarly, the alternatives to print publication – self-publication, either in print or through a personal online presence – present their own drawbacks: while more accessible, and more immediate, they lack the ethos of a peer-reviewed print journal, as well as the exposure. How can one participate in a disciplinary conversation if no one is listening?

The compromise solution would be a venue that encompasses the advantages of both solutions: the ethos of a peer-reviewed journal and the immediacy of an online publication. This paper will explore the intersection between these two solutions, and then examine two hybrid publications, one outside the discipline and one inside, to determine whether a middle ground is attainable, and whether it can provide the same enculturating experience without hampering the development of professional ethos.

Ethos in Print

The first question to address, then, concerns the definition of professional ethos as it pertains to publication. Publication in print media – especially in a well-regarded, peer-reviewed journal – is seen as a critical step in the development of scholarly ethos.

As a genre, the peer-reviewed scholarly journal fills that role in two primary ways. First, the trouble and expense of professional print publication carries a presumption of ethos, out of centuries-old tradition in which print media was the premiere (and only) means of distributing scholarly work. In his discussion of technology and criticism, J. David Bolter refers to this quality as monumentality: “the values of stability, monumentality, and authority have always been interpreted in terms of the contemporary technology of handwriting or printing.” (148) The effort manifest in print privileges an argument that is presented in a physical, professionally-printed medium, even as it creates a sense of gravitas by distancing reader and author; as Bolter notes, “the printed copy [has] more authority because of its visual simplicity, regularity, and reproducibility. As the author in print [becomes] more distant, less accessible to the reader, the author’s words [become] harder to dismiss.” (149) When words are committed to paper, proofread, typeset, printed, and bound, they gather a certain sense of ethos: the format suggests that these ideas were worth the effort to compile, and worth the cost of printing and distribution. Print gives value to words, and by extension to their authors.

Second, the peer-reviewed journal provides ethos through process. When an article appears in print, in a journal, it is only after completing a rigorous cycle of review and revision. Mary M. Lay describes this process in detail. A scholar submits work to the editorial board of a journal, whose members read it (and request, and receive, modifications) before passing it on to multiple reviewers for further comment, refinement, and review as necessary. The process is a discriminatory one: the acceptance rate for most journals ranges from 20% to 30%. The process is also time-consuming, taking as much as eighteen months from initial submission to final publication. However, the strict process assures readers that the material printed in a journal is of the highest quality; that it conforms to what the discipline as a whole considers relevant; and that its author has the personal ethos to participate in a conversation with the discipline’s core of luminaries.

The limitations of peer-reviewed print media as a venue graduate student scholarship are implicit in the medium’s virtues, as Andrew M. Odlyzko (1995) describes in his critique of the genre. A peer-reviewed journal garners the ethos of a professionally-printed document, but at a high cost in money and in effort. Both of these costs are largely subsidized by the discipline as a whole, in the form of member dues, institutional subscriptions, and fiscal grants (for the monetary costs), and in the volunteered labor of editorial and peer-review staff. Odlyzko notes that this “free” labor also represents a fiscal subsidy by the academy: “The reviewers of scholarly papers are almost uniformly unpaid, and so are most editors. Since many submissions require several revisions and extensive correspondence…it seems reasonable to estimate that between one and two weeks’ time by the editors and referees is devoted to their jobs for each accepted paper.” (107) Journals also establish the discussion of record within a discipline, but at the price of immediacy: if each argument in a discussion takes up to 18 months to reach the discipline at large, the discussion may proceed under a sense of decorum, but it will be unable to adapt quickly to emergent issues.

Electronic Ethos

Self-published, electronic documents such as websites and weblogs occupy the other end of the publication spectrum, and at first glance, have little room for comparison with peer-reviewed journals. Odlyzko observes that electronic documents have none of the cachet of printed publications, unless published through the online presence of a recognized, peer-reviewed venue; their readership ranges from the anonymously small to the randomly diffuse; and they are rarely subject to strenuous professional review. Barbara Warnick and Ananda Mitra both identify credibility as the primary flaw of self-published electronic media; Warnick’s work suggests that readers of electronic documents often make assumptions about credibility based on visual appeal and accessibility factors, rather than empirical judgments of authority:

…when users consider credibility as a dimension in their choice of Web sites, their evaluation is not intrinsically tied to the identity of the site author or credentials. Instead, users are more influenced by other factors, such as professionalism of design, usability, relevance and usefulness of site content, motivation, and other factors that operate as signs of trustworthiness and expertise. (Warnick 262)

Similarly, Mitra cites the inherent anonymity of electronic publications as a primary threat to credibility. Finally, Paul Ginsparg notes that electronic documents are ephemeral by nature; they are quick to appear but have brief life spans which limit the possibilities for citation in other venues (the practical evidence that one’s work has entered the disciplinary discussion), unless preserved by an established and trustworthy archival system. How can one cite an article confidently if there’s no guarantee that it will still exist in any recognizable form in a week, let alone in eighteen months?

Still, publishing in an electronic venue has several advantages which allow authors to accrue ethos in ways that print journals cannot accommodate. Again, Odlzyko maintains that electronic “journals” are cheap and easy to publish. He observes that electronic venues may encompass the content of multiple journals, while costing a fraction of the time and money that a single print operation would require. The fact that online venues can exist with little monetary support from research institutions or other traditional funding sources, and little investment in volunteered time (the peer-review process of scholarly journals is subsidized by unpaid efforts) also speaks to their independence: when a publication venue requires outside support to exist, there is always a danger that the material it publishes will be influenced by the patron’s biases.

Electronic media offer an immediacy and inclusivity that print journals are not designed to match. A print journal is the publication of record for the disciplinary conversation, and represents a long period of consideration combined with the participation of multiple reviewers; a weblog represents one person’s statement in a larger conversation, but invites the participation of the discipline at large to frame it, direct it, and lend it meaning and context. As Mitra observes, the ethos of an electronic document lies in its currency, and in its ability to reflect the discipline’s multiplicity of voices. In particular, Mitra questions the implied authenticity of a discussion mediated by experts (such as the articles printed in a peer-reviewed journal):

The connection between trust, authenticity, and power then results in a broad question: Which representation might be trusted as more authentic when the same phenomenon may be represented by the “spoken for” discourse, as well as represented by the speakers’ own discourse? (Mitra 28)

Electronic media can provide a place for emerging discussions, and for disparate viewpoints that cannot be accommodated within the scope of a peer-reviewed print publication.

Heidi Huse offers a contrasting view, examining the rhetoric of community-based discussion. She notes that information in successfully-implemented online communication genres gains a ‘bottom-up’ approval and acceptance, rather than a ‘top-down’ imposition by disciplinary authorities. Huse suggests that online communication reflects the influence of a different power structure than printed communication, and notes that rhetorical moves within online genres must be made with respect to that power structure, but stops short of endorsing that structure over traditional print media (unlike Odlyzko), expressing skepticism with the notion that a purely online medium can produce a community: “I found it difficult to conceive of the possibility of feeling a real sense of community with words on a computer screen, regardless of how passionately I might agree with those words.” (44) She notes, however, that the distance created by the medium is (at least partially) offset by its immediacy: “e-mail correspondence with friends does make me feel in closer contact with them than the occasional letter exchanged in the mail… Yet as with the [subject community], I know that once my search is completed, I will no longer maintain any kind of significant contact with those in my new ‘community.’” (44)

In short, electronic media offer the possibility of ethos derived from the collective judgment of an author’s work by members of the wider discipline, and from the immediacy of theorizing new solutions to new questions as those questions arise.

Ethos and the middle ground

Given these two very different means of generating ethos – the gravitas conferred by considered expert judgment, compared with the immediacy of discussion in a dynamic, participatory community – the question becomes: is there a middle ground? One might point to the online versions of existing peer-reviewed journals, or to online-only only journals (Kairos is the premiere example) as the compromise; however, these sites, while embracing some of the useful aspects of online genres (such as monetary and labor costs), maintain the basic process of a print publication: expert review, with subsequent promotion into the disciplinary conversation. Such sites generate ethos as a print publication, or as an adjunct to print publication, not as electronic publications in their own right. They represent a nod to electronic publication as a solution for publication exigencies – or in the case of Kairos, to electronic publication as a means of discussing new concepts of text and text-interaction in a more salutary format – but apart from adopting a new medium, they are not new genres.

In his analysis of publication practices, Odlyzko predicted that new genres would have to emerge in response to growing publication costs, as well the growing population of the disciplinary conversation. Print media are too expensive, he argues, too slow to adapt to exigencies, and too bulky to meet the evolving needs of disciplinary discussion:

Scholarly publishing, because of its nature, cannot benefit from the economies of scale that the trade press enjoys. As our numbers grow, we tend to work in narrower specialties, so that the audience for our results stays constant. … On the other hand, in principle we need access to all the literature. This leads to a crisis, in which we cannot afford to pay for all the paper journals we need in our work. (Odlyzko 75)

In mathematics, he notes, the number of published articles has historically doubled over each 10-year period through the late 1980s; and while the discipline established new journals to accommodate the increase, he projects that traditional print journals will not be able to keep up, both because of the increasing cost of publication and because of the mass entry of new writers from a wider geographic and cultural base. Based on his analysis, he predicts that print journals will fade in importance to the academic disciplines within 10 to 20 years, to be replaced by other media.

Given that Odlyzko made his prediction in 1995, and given that, ten years later, print journals are still the medium of record in academic disciplines, we must question whether his analysis is sound and relevant. Ginsparg attempts to answer that question by noting that while print journals have continued to expand their coverage of the disciplinary conversation, and while, as Odlyzko predicted, there is still a gap between the growth of various disciplines and the print publications that serve them, that other options have emerged to address that gap. First, he observes that many of the traditional, premiere publication venues are exploring electronic publication as a means of facilitating faster, less expensive operations and easier archival reference by readers; however, he notes that these flagship venues are slow to change, and will likely be led by other, newer arrivals. He offers arXiv, a site that he administers, as an example of this new, leading edge in the middle ground between print and electronic publication.

The history of this site is instructive. arXiv was founded in 1991 at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) to address a specific gap in the publication practice as it existed in the academic field of physics and its related disciplines in the late 1980s. The disciplines of theoretical and experimental physics were, and remain, highly competitive; many teams of researchers will investigate the same problems, with professional ethos dependent on primacy of publication: whoever publishes on a topic first gets credit for the work. Print publication in a peer-reviewed journal could take months, from submission to final publication, and in that time the author ran the risk of having their ideas ‘scooped’ by a competing researcher publishing in another journal. On top of that, the rapid rate of scientific advancement in the field lent information a relatively short half-life: new data or techniques could go from discovery to obsolescence in less time than it would take to publish an article in a print journal. An accepted solution in the discipline was to mail a physical copy of one’s work to a list of interested colleagues concurrently with submission to a journal; the final, peer-reviewed, published version might be different than the ‘draft,’ mass-mailed version, but the practice secured the author’s primacy on the topic.

The online service that eventually became arXiv was designed by researchers in high-energy physics at LANL to alleviate these problems. They created an electronic distribution network for pre-press articles. These articles could be retrieved quickly and easily via modem by subscribers to the system (subscription was free, but only advertised within the discipline); they could be modified and replaced at will by their authors; and they could be conveniently archived until publication. Ginsparg observes that the archiving feature was one of the most popular and powerful; the system was initially designed to hold articles for three months – the time it would take for a journal’s editors to evaluate an article and indicate interest to the article’s author – but quickly expanded to enable indefinite archival. That process allowed authors to quickly and easily review the literature on a topic without referring to print journals; and it preserved work that, while not significant enough to warrant print publication, still added useful information and practice to the disciplinary conversation.

The original LANL site is now hosted by Cornell University, under the name arXiv. It serves five primary disciplines (physics, mathematics, nonlinear science, computer science, and quantitative biology), as well as several specialties within each discipline. In 2001, arXiv contained over 140,000 articles in physics, and projected receipt of 35,000 new articles each calendar year thereafter from submitters in over 100 countries worldwide. (Ginsparg, 2001) Any scholar registered with the site can submit work for download and review by any other site member; the also makes authors’ e-mail addresses available to all registered users, facilitating easy contact between readers and authors. Articles on the site are considered available for public discussion and use within the member disciplines – it is considered appropriate and legitimate, for example, to cite an article by its arXiv reference number.

The site calls itself an e-print archive, and now fills a critical role in the disciplines it serves: while peer-reviewed print journals continue to be the medium of record for the disciplinary discussions, arXiv has become the archive of record. It preserves the broader scope of the disciplinary conversation, including those artifacts that are excluded from print. Ginsparg observes that this exclusivity is a necessary component of the journals’ role – “recall that we don’t ordinarily regard sculptors as involved in a futile effort just because the vast majority of their time is also spent removing extraneous material” (Ginsparg, 2001) – but also concludes that inclusivity is one reason why arXiv has achieved acceptance as quickly as it has.

Writing in response to Odlzyko’s prediction that print journals would eventually disappear, Ginsparg agrees that these journals are artifacts of an earlier time, but maintains that they are a vital part of disciplinary practice, and that arXiv is not designed to replace them. Instead,

the arXiv provides instant pre-review dissemination, aggregated on a field-wide basis, a breadth far beyond the capacity of any one journal. The journals augment this with some measure of authentication of authors (they are who they claim to be), and a certain amount of quality control of the research content.… Both the arXiv and the journals provide access to past materials; and one could argue that arXiv benefits in this regard from the post facto certification functions provided by the journals. It is occasionally argued that organized journals may be able to provide a greater degree of long-term archival stability, both in aggregate and for individual items, though looking a century or more into the future this is really difficult to project one way or another. (Ginsparg, 2002)

arXiv is a supplement to the existing practice of peer-reviewed journal publication, and as such, serves to maintain the continuity of disciplinary practice. On a more practical level, arXiv costs far less to operate on a per-article basis than any journal, even online journals: Ginsparg lists the publication costs for arXiv at US$1 to US$5 for each submission, as compared to US$500 for each article published in an online journal, and in excess of US$1000 for an article in a print publication. arXiv is available universally, to all practitioners within the member disciplines (the site maintains a very simple user interface, suitable for users constrained by primitive web browsers or low-bandwidth connections, and mirror sites in various locations around the world). Most notably, arXiv is not, and does not style itself as, a journal of record. It is a distribution center, which allows contributors to solicit peer review and establish primacy of their work, while retaining copyright and first publication rights to their work. Works submitted to arXiv may be published by peer-reviewed journals (and, in fact, acceptance by the larger community of arXiv readers is a predictor of eventual journal acceptance, as noted by Johannes Gehrke, Paul Ginsparg, and Jon Kleinberg), or, as observed above, cited by other authors without publication – facts which suggest that arXiv confers professional ethos on submitters. That ethos may be different from that of a traditional scholarly journal, but it is nonetheless significant, and thus valuable to the scholars who use the arXiv.

Ethos, the middle ground, and graduate scholar enculturation

On analysis, The Orange Journal has the potential to enjoy the same success, and provide many of the same benefits to its community of contributors, because it is largely based on arXiv’s operating model. Like arXiv, Orange is an adjunct to the formal, peer-reviewed publication process that combines the gravitas of disciplinary participation with the immediacy of an online format. It has a simple submission and update process, and provides a space where graduate students can submit work for public review, easily and inexpensively, while providing an introduction to the formal processes and genres expected by the discipline. Orange provides a venue for graduate student scholars to read the works of other graduate scholars, and introduce and discuss their work with their peers in the discipline at large, because, like arXiv, Orange combines the professional practice of peer-review with a wide readership; as of March 2005, the Orange website reported 9,000 hits per month, on average, from 3,500 individual readers worldwide. Those statistics describe a readership base wide enough to facilitate conversations featuring viewpoints from the discipline at large, to allow everyone a voice, and to allow participants to meet and discuss critical issues with colleagues from a wide variety of settings. Finally, like arXiv, contributors to Orange retain the copyright and first publication rights to their work; the site provides graduate scholars with a potentially vast peer-review network that can facilitate the sort of improvements in an article that can help it – and its author – mature to the point where publication becomes a realizable goal.

That maturity – that evidence of successful enculturation, is, after all, the point of the end-of-term publication requirement. Ann M. Blakeslee (2001) notes that one of the purposes of any assignment that extends the classroom experience into professional practice is to help enculturate the student, and foster a sense of professional ethos by “exposing them to the cultures and activities of the workplace and gradually introducing them to the genres that both arise from and support those cultures and activities.” (189) The ideal such assignment combines authentic exposure to professional conditions with a transition between the intimate, supportive environment of the classroom with the broader, unmediated practice of the profession at large; and if the profession in question is academic scholarship, then the publication requirement is not only appropriate, it is a model of success.

To return to the beginning then, why would graduate student scholars want to submit their work to Orange, or to other publication venues in the middle ground? Because, if the assignment is pedagogically sound, then which is the most appropriate, pedagogically valid response: to submit one’s work to a peer-reviewed journal, where, if the work is one of the few chosen to represent the disciplinary conversation, the student author will interact with a very limited subset of their fellow practitioners; to self-publish in an obscure venue, which will ensure that one’s work has the potential for wide review, but not the promise of actual participation; or to submit to an active, dynamic, growing discussion community of peers, give and receive feedback, and incorporate that feedback into an evolving understanding professional practice? While the two extremes have their benefits, and while both can provide the experience and professional ethos that graduate student scholars need in order to mature into the discipline, the alternative venues of the middle ground – venues like The Orange Journal – offer the a promising compromise of practical attainability and professional validity.

Works Cited

Blakeslee, Ann M. “Bridging the Workplace and the Academy: Teaching Professional Genres through Classroom-Workplace Collaborations.” Technical Communication Quarterly 10 (2001): 169-192.

Bolter, J. David. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1991.

Gehrke, Johannes, Paul Ginsparg, and Jon Kleinberg. “Overview of the 2003 KDD Cup.” SIGKDD Explorations 5 (2004): 149-151.

Ginsparg, Paul. “Can Peer Review Be Better Focused?” 2002. arXiv.org. 6 April, 2005 .

---. “Creating a Global Knowledge Network.” 2001. arXiv.org. 6 April, 2005 .

---. “Electronic Clones vs. The Global Research Archive.” 2000. arXiv.org. 6 April, 2005 .

Huse, Heidi. “E-mail’s Effect on the Rhetoric of Community Information: Is ‘Online Community’ an Oxymoron or a New Reality?” Journal of Computer Documentation 22 (1998): 37-44.

Lay, Mary M. “Reflections on Technical Communication Quarterly, 1991-2003: The Manuscript Review Process.” Technical Communication Quarterly 13 (2004): 109-119.

Mitra, Ananda. “Trust, Authenticity, and Discursive Power in Cyberspace.” Communications of the ACM 45 (2002): 27-29.

Odlyzko, Andrew M. “Tragic Loss or Good Riddance? The Impending Demise of Traditional Scholarly Journals.” International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 42 (1995): 71-122.

Warnick, Barbara. “Online Ethos: Source Credibility in an “Authorless” Environment.” American Behavioral Scientist 48 (2004): 256-265.