You can now download an eBook that includes all of the six steps to preparing an academic article manuscript blog entries, several pieces on peer review and manuscript revision, and a few posts on converting a dissertation into a book manuscript! Maybe the era of the blog is officially over? And, if so, I’ll put together the content from this blog into a series of thematic eBooks. In the meantime, enjoy these slightly revised blog posts as chapters.
Academics have been complaining about the for-profit models of publishers like Elsevier, Sage, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, and Springer since I started my career as a graduate student in the early 2000s; it’s one of the reasons why my cohort of graduate students started an Open Access journal, reconstruction, in 2001! It’s a drag that they generate as much profit as they do off of the “free” labor of academics, who do all of the research, writing, and peer review that makes their journals run, but have you ever considered just not publishing with them?
Alt-text: A still from The Simpsons, in which Abe Simpson, Homer’s father, is pictured yelling at a cloud with his arm raised in a fist. “Old Man Yells at Cloud” is the headline of the accompanying newspaper article.
I’ve published with Sage, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley over the years and maybe there was a time when they could have argued that their model worked better to provide authors, editors, and peer reviewers with the kind of editorial support that made doing their jobs easier. That was never my experience–some of my worst peer review and publishing experiences were with for-profit publishers–but that would be a solid counter-argument to the obvious profit-seeking those publishers do. I’m not an apologist for the Big 5 for-profit academic publishers, but I’ve accepted over the years that getting my work in front of the right audience means publishing in a journal owned by a for-profit business.
The sad reality is that getting tenure is a numbers game, and getting the right number of articles and books published is the only goal. I’ve accepted needing to peer review for for-profit publishers because I recognize that other peoples’ careers depend on that labor. I also accept that the profits generated go to creating more journals and publishing books, all of which have the downstream effects of getting more scholarship into the world–and helping academics meet the metrics they need for landing jobs and getting promoted. It’s not ideal and I wish every university had a not-for-profit press that published journals across fields, but this is the late capitalist world we inhabit.
That being the case, journals get readers because they’re prestigious, for lack of a better term, and if people stopped submitting their work to journals owned by the Big 5, their rankings will drop. Academia is a massive ship and slow to change course. Getting the overwhelming number of scholars who don’t have a problem peer reviewing for and publishing in–let alone doing the editorial work of–journals run by the Big 5 to stop doing that work seems very unlikely. The likelihood that a sea change could actually occur in the prestige of the Big 5’s journals is rather low; they will continue to publish a lot of work in your field unless people start opting out of working with them.
So, you could just accept that making money for other people is an unavoidable part of the job–like generating tuition dollars off of students and their families and overhead costs through grant writing–or you can opt out of publishing with the Big 5. How do you do that?
Publish in University Press and Society-Run Journals: Many fields have journals that are published by university presses, which tend to be not-for-profit business that receive state monies through university budgets. There are massive publishers, like Oxford, that publish journals across the arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences, and smaller publishers, like Duke, Minnesota, California, Texas, Chicago, and more. It likely won’t cost you any money to publish in these journals–unless you pay Open Access fees, if they have them–and they generate more funds through institutional and individual subscriptions (which helps support these publishers and their mission to publish books that help people get tenure!).
There are also Open Access journals published by many academic societies. Years ago, the Society for Cultural Anthropology moved to make their journal, Cultural Anthropology, society-funded and Open Access, and they’ve managed to keep it afloat since 2014. Similarly, Disability Studies Quarterly is funded by the Society for Disability Studies, and receives support from Ohio State Libraries, which publishes several other Open Access journals. You might need to be a member of the society, but the costs associated with that are likely significantly cheaper than paying Open Access fees at a large publisher. You can also consider publishing with publishers like Berghahn, that are committed to Open Access publishing.
Just Stop Publishing Articles: If you’re past tenure, and especially if you’re past full professorship, why are you still publishing journal articles? I’ve long thought that full professors taking up the limited amount of real estate for publishing articles in journals is a bad look. I recognize that reaching the right audience (and sometimes earning a raise) depends on maintaining a publishing presence. But as a full professor you likely already have a readership and can push out your own publicity regardless of where you publish–and your university probably doesn’t care too much if you’re publishing in a top tier or third tier journal. I’d even go so far as to say that publishing in a third tier journal is exactly what senior academics should be doing, since it helps to increase those journals’ prestige by driving citations (for better and worse).
Make Your Work Available for Free: Many state universities have agreements with for-profit publishers to allow their faculty to make their work published in for-profit journals available through public repositories, which Google Scholar will notify you about (and make available to people). If your university isn’t one of those universities, there is precedent in making this happen and working with your librarians and faculty senate might secure a better, Open Access future for your faculty. But you can often also post pre-print versions of your work on your own website or through services like ResearchGate and Academia.edu (if you want to aid their attempts at capitalization)–or you can post the actual copy of the article or book chapter and take it down if a publisher gets upset about it.
None of these are Seize the Means of Production! level suggestions, but failing the ability to meaningfully change the way academic publishing works, they are options that can support other models of publishing and dissemination. The next time you feel yourself itching to publish in a Big 5 journal, take 30 minutes and investigate whether there might be a university press or society-run journal you might publish with instead.
Maybe one day for-profit academic publishers will start paying their authors, peer reviewers, and editors, but I doubt it. It’s too profitable not to, and relying on the conservative nature of many academics invested in prestige economies is a super safe bet–maybe the safest! Even if publishers start to pay their contributors, it will likely never feel sufficient to the work that people do to support the journals. Instead, maybe the warm feeling of publishing in an Open Access, university press journal will suffice?
Let’s get this out of the way: Vince McMahon is a terrible person. But, the Vince McMahon Glowing Eyes meme is really excellent. You probably know it and know that it builds from a modest claim to a more exciting one to even more exciting ones, leading to McMahon’s Glowing Eyes.
In 2022, I was on the job market and decided it was time to take a very different rhetorical approach to my job letters. What I had noticed over the years is that academic job letters often start with broad topic sentences and then follow them with ever-narrowing sentences that provide finer details to support the topic sentence. A broad sentence about a project that makes it really appealing is then followed by a series of sentences that provide detail that make the project seem increasingly less interesting (unless the reader is really familiar with relevant details). Here are two paragraphs, from successive iterations of a job letter, that cover the same ground:
My scholarship largely falls into two streams that intersect around questions of embodiment, temporality, and subjectivity. One stream draws on historiographic, media-based, and ethnographic approaches to analyze the contexts that make “neurological disorders” objects of concern for scientists, health care workers, patients, and their families. In The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine, and Modern American Life (2012) and Unraveling: Remaking Personhood in a Neurodiverse Age (2020), my research shows how neurological disorders become sites of profound social and personal transformations for individuals and families as they confront changes to beliefs about personhood, subjectivity, and everyday life in the U.S. In The Slumbering Masses, I show how the history of industrial capitalism shaped ideas about innate human nature—as expressed in sleep and wakefulness—and laid the foundation for contemporary American everyday life in ideas about whiteness and typically abled-bodies. In Unraveling, I demonstrate how attending to communication disorders—autism, aphasia, and deafness—troubles conceptions of subjectivity as principally being based in an individual’s capacity for speech. These assumptions have structured the practice of psychiatry and medicine in the U.S. and shaped social theory in and beyond the humanities and social sciences. Developing a metalanguage of care based on family experiences of caring for disabled family members, Unraveling forwards an anthropologically-informed theory of “affective bioethics” to reconceptualize how institutions can support families in their interdependent relationships. The other stream of my research focuses on speculative practices, particularly in cinematic and literary science fiction and within scientific and medical knowledge production. This work draws on popular and scientific media and focuses on ideas about the future in the context of the Anthropocene and changing dynamics around racism, environmentalism, and capitalism in relation to the articulation of more inclusive and sustainable futures—captured in Theory for the World to Come (2019) and now the basis for a new project on mental health and climate change, discussed below.
My scholarship is focused on histories of contemporary institutions as social technologies, which follows emergent problems through their trajectories as medical, scientific, governmental, and popular concerns. I have developed “the biology of everyday life” as a framework for conceptualizing how capitalism shapes human physiology, social norms, and cultural expectations. This framework helps show how ableism and racism shape scientific and medical understandings of basic processes, like sleep, digestion, and communication, and the technologies that are developed to address their disordered experience. As an analytic, the biology of everyday life provides novel ways to describe the relationships between individuals, institutions, technologies, and society, integrating social and environmental determinants of disease with theories of subjectivity and personhood. In all of my work, I employ interdisciplinary methodologies that are built on ethnographic, archival, and textual analysis. The Slumbering Masses, which won a first book award from the Society for Medical Anthropology in 2013, was the first book-length social scientific study of sleep in the U.S. and garnered widespread media attention, including in the New Yorker and academic journals across the social sciences, humanities, and medicine. My second book, Unraveling, recovers the history of the nervous system as a complex system that is physiological, environmental, and social, proposing a model of “affective bioethics” that moves beyond exclusionary forms of bioethics that marginalize disability perspectives. In both of these books, the environmental and social interdependencies of everyday life are brought into relief as determinants of health, disease, and disability, which technologies—from institutions to pharmaceuticals—are developed to remedy.
The first one is from 2021 and the second from 2022. There’s a lot going on in both of them, but the first one is so saturated with content that I have a hard time reading it (and reviewers probably did too). The second one is comparatively breezy, with much more concise and targeted sentences that cover a lot of ground without getting bogged down in details. Those details exist in other places–in my research statement, in this case–and the aim of the cover letter is to get people to want to read those documents. One of my dissertation committee members, Thomas Wolfe, once counseled me that “Job materials are like a Vegas show: Always leave the audience wanting more.” The Glowing Eyes Job Letter is my attempt to try and embrace that at the cover letter level.
I wrote these letters as an associate professor approaching promotion to full, so the letters have ~15 years of scholarship, teaching, and service to draw on and describe–which is all the more reason to try and keep it light in the job letter. I think the same lesson holds for early career letters: rather than start a paragraph with a broad description of a dissertation project and then get deeper and deeper into the details, move to discuss the implications of your research, the points of connection it makes possible, and its broader merits in the field. Save the details for other parts of the application and employ them sparingly, knowing that interested people will have a chance to ask you about them during interviews or campus visits.
Paragraphs about teaching tend to do the same kind of thing: they start with broad claims about pedagogy and end with lists of classes people are willing to teach. Putting that list at as the second sentence in the paragraph and then using it to build out to broader issues related to teaching stops that paragraph from deflating as it goes along.
Maybe it was a fluke that it worked for me! But it might be work experimenting with. Let me know how it goes.
Matthew Wolf-Meyer 