Opportunity knocks:Authors’ writing andpublishing decisions when manuscripts are solicitedPhillip M. EdwardsUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel HillSchool of Information and Library Sciencephillip.m.edwards@unc.edu10.29.2009Edwards, Phillip M. - 4S 2009 Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C.)

OverviewBackgroundWhat we know about how and why scholars writeResearch QuestionsHow do scholars make decisions about the venues in which their work appears?Study designInterviews and sorting tasks with biology and communication facultyResultsCharacteristics of opportunity decisions in venue selectionImplications for open access initiatives and emerging technologies10.29.2009Edwards, Phillip M. - 4S 2009 Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C.)

Background How literature is used and generated in labs(e.g., Latour & Woolgar, 1979/1986)How scholars negotiate the meaning of ‘excellent’ scholarship while reviewing(e.g., Lamont, 2009)How scholars write to develop compelling arguments(e.g., Bazerman, 1988; Gilbert & Mulkay, 1984;Latour, 1987)How scholars choose particular genres or styles for their writing(e.g., Ceccarelli, 2001; Meyers, 1990)10.29.2009Edwards, Phillip M. - 4S 2009 Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C.)

Authors’ choices as unstructured, strategic decision processesDecision stimuliOpportunity decisionsProblem decisionsCrisis decisionsSolution typesGivenReady-madeModifiedCustom-madeProcessesIdentification PhaseDecision recognition routineDiagnosis routineDevelopment phaseSearch routineMemory searchPassive searchTrap searchActive searchDesign routineSelection phaseScreening routineEvaluation-choice routineJudgment modeBargaining modeAnalysis modeAuthorization routineNew options and external interrupts (Mintzberg, Raisinghani, & Theoret, 1976)10.29.2009Edwards, Phillip M. - 4S 2009 Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C.)How do scholars make decisions about where to publish or how to distribute the products of their work?

Research questionsAt what stage of a scholarly project [participant-defined] do scholars begin the decision-making process with respect to publication or distribution, and what kinds of solutions to this concern do they consider throughout the process?What decision-making routines and dynamic factors (e.g., interrupts) do scholars encounter during the publishing lifetime of a scholarly project [participant-defined]?If active in some form of open access (OA) publication or distribution, how do scholars describe the ways in which OA initiatives extend, replace, and/or complement other methods of publication or distribution?How do scholars explain their publishing or distribution behaviors, and to what extent do they attribute their behaviors to various entities?10.29.2009Edwards, Phillip M. - 4S 2009 Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C.)

Study designPopulationFaculty in biology and communication departments at a large, public university, with open access options availableMethodResponsive interview (Rubin & Rubin, 2005) based on participant’s curriculum vitaeEach item on the CV is a single unit of analysisInitial prompt: “Please tell me about this article, or please tell me about the project that it reports about.”Sorting activity derived from the full context repertory test (Kelly, 1955)10.29.2009Edwards, Phillip M. - 4S 2009 Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C.)

Examples of item selection(researcher-generated)10.29.2009Edwards, Phillip M. - 4S 2009 Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C.)BCD

Examples of item selection(participant-generated)10.29.2009Edwards, Phillip M. - 4S 2009 Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C.)CD

Participant profiles10.29.2009Edwards, Phillip M. - 4S 2009 Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C.)

CV items as units of analysis10.29.2009Edwards, Phillip M. - 4S 2009 Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C.)

Opportunity decisions in unstructured, strategic decision processesDecision stimuliOpportunity decisionsProblem decisionsCrisis decisionsSolution typesGivenReady-madeModifiedCustom-madeProcessesIdentification PhaseDecision recognition routineDiagnosis routineDevelopment phaseSearch routineMemory searchPassive searchTrap searchActive searchDesign routineSelection phaseScreening routineEvaluation-choice routineJudgment modeBargaining modeAnalysis modeAuthorization routineNew options and external interrupts (Mintzberg, Raisinghani, & Theoret, 1976)10.29.2009Edwards, Phillip M. - 4S 2009 Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C.)Voluntary decisions made from relatively safe, secure situations, and the subsequent decision-making process occurs based on the decision-maker’s volition and controlIncludes decision stimuli are perceived to have weak, vague, or long-term rewards, and that might be easily abandoned if better options or more urgent decisions arise

Opportunity decisions in authors’ publishing historiesBased on easily-abandoned projectsBased on interpersonal requestsBased on external eventsBased on mentoring studentsBased on learned/reinforced practices10.29.2009Edwards, Phillip M. - 4S 2009 Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C.)

Opportunity decisions based on easily-abandoned projects“It was a project where a lot of people who I really respect in the field were already signed on to it, and it was hard for me to say no, y’know, to be in a, in a book that had all of those people in it and me [laughs] would have, I would have felt really, really good about it, but it was, um, the thing that they wanted me to do, I, I just didn’t feel like, it felt like it would ch-, take me quite a bit to gear up towards that, to, to do that, and it wasn’t really something that I, a place where I wanted my research to go.”—Associate Professor, Communication10.29.2009Edwards, Phillip M. - 4S 2009 Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C.)

Opportunity decisions based on interpersonal requests“I did something that was a little bit different than, I think, the way it’s usually done in my field. I published these as articles before I wrote the dissertation [laughs], before the dissertation was done. Typically, you mine the dissertation for papers. I went the reverse way, and that was because, um, I had presented these as conference papers, and in each case there was a member of the audience who was a, an editor of a special volume of a journal that said, “Wow, that’s a really good piece. I want to publish it in this special volume.” Um, so I started out my publication career really, um, not, y’know, in, in an odd way, with people soliciting my work for publication in journals rather than sending them in for blind review on my own.”—Associate Professor, Communication10.29.2009Edwards, Phillip M. - 4S 2009 Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C.)

Opportunity decisions based on interpersonal requests“This was the editor saying, “I’ve got this piece by [another author] on [a topic], and I want to, to publish it not as a regular article but as a forum with several [similar authors] commenting on it. Would you do that?” And I said yes, uh, because, y’know, again, I was kind of flattered to be called upon to do that, that, y’know, I was considered a [scholar] of high enough stature that I could be asked to do that, and, um, I had a RA. This is the only time I’ve ever coauthored. I had an RA working with me that quarter, and I, she’s very, a very good close reader, and I asked her if she would coauthor with me just to make sure that I get this thing done. […] It’s an interesting story. But it has nothing to do with any of my other work, really, except that it’s [on the topic I study].”—Associate Professor, Communication10.29.2009Edwards, Phillip M. - 4S 2009 Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C.)

Opportunity decisions based on interpersonal requests“I have not published anything published in the, sort of, the pure academic sense of the word, that is, refereed kind of journal. I’ve done government, I sometimes have done reports for a federal agency […] And for some, and often they say, well, [participant name], go out and study, y’know, two hundred years of […] policy or something [laughs] to write a report, which is, okay. […] I’d done some of these, some of this writing for this government report, but I wanted then to bring it to a slightly more academic audience which is what this [other article] says ‘cause a lot of the folks aren’t going to read those government reports. […] People [at the federal agency] there knew about my work […], and, um, so I’ve done [numerous] reports for them, on-again, off-again […] It becomes part of the record, and then various parties who are arguing one side or the other, I’m sort of a, my reports are, are sort of, they’re evidence for the [agency]. […] I kept trying […] to let go of this stuff, um, but every couple of years they would come back to me and, and ask for something, and that just sort of blew a big hole in my other research projects. I mean, that would all have to move to the back burner.”—Associate Professor, Communication10.29.2009Edwards, Phillip M. - 4S 2009 Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C.)

Opportunity decisions based on interpersonal requests“That’s another thing where I’m kind of going, um, opposite the way it’s supposed to happen, so you’re usually supposed to publish the scholarship in a, y’know, scholarly journal and then you report that to the public if you’re going to do public scholarship, you report that back to the public later. Um, but I’ve kind of been pushed into getting this out to the public before I’ve actually gotten it into a stage where I’m ready to send it to a journal, um, this [...] piece […] I mean this is another one of those things where it just, it’s in the, it was in the [local newspaper] last week, um. Yeah, so, um, this was circumstances again. I was, um, we give these little five minute talks in the department every couple of years just updating our colleagues on what we do, what we’re doing, and I gave my talk […] one of the, um, my colleagues, [name], said, “Y’know, that [topic] stuff is okay, but I’m really interested in this, um, [other topic],” […] and, uh, so he wanted me to give a talk at this, um, this thing that he does for alumni. […] Um, he asked me to give this talk and so I put, put it together, and, uh, there was a member of that audience, […] and she said, um, “This is just great, this is great stuff. Come talk to my group. I have a group of people, […] and, uh, so I went and I gave a talk for her group. […] And, uh, one of the people there, two of the people there were in charge, y’know, were the editors of this [open access forum (not peer-reviewed)], and they said, “We want to see this. Can you write up and editorial for us?” And I’m like, well, this is public scholarship, I need to really start doing the scholarship, um, but they wanted it.”—Associate Professor, Communication10.29.2009Edwards, Phillip M. - 4S 2009 Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C.)

Opportunity decisions based on interpersonal requests“Scienceasked me to do the review since they had published a review of my [earlier] book. I, y’know, I could hardly turn them down, um, plus it was Science, so, um, I, I think they asked me because my book had been reviewed there, so they, y’know, they knew I did [work on this topic] […] Um, so, yeah, I, I try not to do book reviews though, now, you can see, y’know, I’ve got a few here early in my career and then I stopped until one that I couldn’t refuse came in, but for the most part I try to not do those because they don’t count.”—Associate Professor, Communication10.29.2009Edwards, Phillip M. - 4S 2009 Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C.)

Opportunity decisions based on interpersonal requests“That [paper was] invited, and I actually wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about doing it, but the person who I know—sort of distantly—kept pressing me, so I finally threw up my hands and decided to write something for him […] He lined up a bunch of authors, and he and I had crossed paths at a couple, on a couple of occasions and he asked me to contribute something and I really was involved with other work, but as I said he kept pressing, so what I did, um, I took little pieces that had, I had worked on before some of, a little, parts of it had been published but parts hadn’t, and I sort of pulled them together under, um, what otherwise would be somewhat discrete and, er, distributed stuff. I pulled them together because there was some conceptual link for the, basically, the three things I wrote about.”—Associate Professor, Communication10.29.2009Edwards, Phillip M. - 4S 2009 Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C.)

Opportunity decisions based on interpersonal requests“That article was very interesting ‘cause it ran the gamut from [topic] and [topic]. So I’m a [biological specialty, and my coauthor is from a different specialty]. Science called us up and said, “Would you write a little summary for our news section of this article?” um, so we just sat down and wrote it, and they’re supposed to be a little clever, [and], and, y’know, we put in a few quotes from [popular author]in it. […] So that’s not a research article, but that’s when you’re called up, and I’ve done that several times, and I’ve had my own articles’ Perspectives written about them by other people. It’s always nice because if they pick your research article, and they call someone up, it means it’s a good article, they want to call attention to it. If they call you up to write about somebody else’s work, it means they know who you are [laughs], right, so, so that was a nice thing to do.”—Professor, Biology10.29.2009Edwards, Phillip M. - 4S 2009 Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C.)

Opportunity decisions based on external events“This is sort of on the outskirts of my research interests, but the roles of [events], and […] it had been a long-standing interest and then you may remember two summers ago the whole thing about [current event]. […] And I’d actually published something on [topic] back about 1980, and I’d been saving notes, and I didn’t really want to do this, but I figured, y’know, if I waited five years to, to sort of update what I’d done on [topic], by then there are going to be a gazillion articles in the wake of [current event], especially law reviews ‘cause it’s a real ambulance-chasing type of scholarship, that is, y’know, the scholars, when there’s a big case or a big incident there’s just a flood of articles, y’know. […] And that’s not really my kind of scholarship. I like to find topics that are sort of in the eddys and the back side [chuckles] and do them, but this one I knew if I wanted to do anything about [topic], um, and as I said, I’d had a long-standing interest in them. I probably needed to strike while the fire, iron, or whatever, was hot because there are going to be so many articles, mine would be, would come out so late it would be sort of an afterthought, so I sort of cranked that out and got it out before what I expected to be a flood of articles. […]Um, [these items are] outside the main stream of my research. […] I couldn’t just sort of sit around and wait another five years, because by then, so many other people would have done it, mine would be redundant and wouldn’t be as useful or helpful.”—Associate Professor, Communication10.29.2009Edwards, Phillip M. - 4S 2009 Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C.)

Opportunity decisions based on external events“There really is a distinction, experientially for me, between being invited to write something and having a set of research questions that I pursue and investigate and then have to find a place to publish them. […] All the other invited things are, y’know, people from out there who know my work and, whatever, we’ve crossed paths at a conference, and they know that I have some body of research in s-, something that they’re wanting to do an edited collection on, and so they contact me for that. So [an editor], in this case, had been, um, part of the, um, group of planners, y’know, planning editors for this series that the [a funding agency] were putting together on [topic], and so this was a very different kind of enterprise then typically happens. […] The [funding agency] officers [were] saying, “We really want to see more publications in this arena,” so the [funding agency] there is very clearly trying to do some agenda setting. […] So [the editor] basically, um, approached both of us and said, “Y’know, would either or both of you be willing and interested in doing something?” and he knew that our work was close enough that if we could collaborate, that would be better for the volume because then he would fill the other chapters in the volume with other things.”—Associate Professor, Communication10.29.2009Edwards, Phillip M. - 4S 2009 Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C.)

Opportunity decisions based on mentoring students“This actually was [from] a seminar that I taught, a grad student came up with a proposal for a study as part of the requirements of the seminar, I said that would be a very doable study and you should do it, um, do you want me to help you with it, so he took the lead, I helped him with it, he did the study, he wrote the article, y’know, we published it, and we did a conference presentation on it, so there’s a, there’s an article.”—Associate Professor, Communication10.29.2009Edwards, Phillip M. - 4S 2009 Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C.)

Opportunity decisions based on mentoring students“An idea’s sort of been bouncing around in the back of my mind for a long time, for ten years, and some undergraduates who’d been in my intro course came and said, “We want to do a project with you, a research project,” and so I’d had this [topic] analysis, um, on the screen for a long time, and I said, “Well, I don’t have time to do this, but I really like these two students,” and so I said we, we could start on this, on this project, so that, that, that was the genesis of it was to try to answer this question […] And so from there we went on the develop the, the protocol for doing it, and, and then when, when we looked like we had an interesting result, could, could actually make a statement about the [topic], […] we thought, “Well, let’s give it a shot.” It was a fairly small, short paper, um, y’know, one or two figures and so we thought it might work, both deliv-, have something interesting for a general audience that Science serves and, and, and take advantage of the fact that they, they wanted to start publishing some [topic] stuff.”—Lecturer, Biology10.29.2009Edwards, Phillip M. - 4S 2009 Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C.)

Opportunity decisions based on learned/reinforced practices“Well, it’s not the pattern that I teach my students to follow, right? I, they’re, they’re all supposed to send stuff in for blind review to journals, the top tier journals, and, but, um, it’s just, this is the way things have worked out for me, and I know other, there are others in my field who have, have been in the same sort of trajectory. I think my, my, um, I doubt that my mentor has sent in anything unsolicited since he was probably an assistant professor. […] I mean, I think, y’know, there are some people in the field who, and I think tha-, I think of that as a good thing, actually, y’know, I mean, he, his work is so respected that people keep wanting him to write stuff, and so he doesn’t have to go write stuff and send it in and ask for it to be published, he, people as-, solicit him to write stuff for them, and the problem is that that’s not going to get one tenure or promotion in today’s environment, I don’t think. I think today you need to, well, you need to at least show that stuff has been reviewed, and I think most of my stuff has been.”—Associate Professor, Communication10.29.2009Edwards, Phillip M. - 4S 2009 Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C.)

Opportunity decisions based on learned/reinforced practices“It was in a con-, conference volume from a conference that was held in nineteen ninety-four. I got the paper written promptly, submitted to the editors for that volume in [year], and the volume didn’t appear until 1999. […] Well, it was, it was a, uh, a conference in which my talk on which the paper was based was one of the keynote addresses. It was, y’know, very desirable for the conference organizers and editors to have that in their book. […] They were eager to have it. It was at a point where we had, uh, accumulated a lot more data since the early paper that was published a couple years earlier, uh, so it was an appropriate time, um, but I think the lesson I learned there is that books that are being edited and published by an ad hoc group of individuals don’t always get out in a timely fashion and don’t always reach the broadest audience. […] Writing conference proceedings oftentimes involves either writing up incomplete projects that just happen to be the subject of your talk at a meeting or, or reviewing something that, y’know, somebody else has already reviewed or you don’t have time to really do proper justice to, and I’d rather not do it than to commit to doing something like that, and not have it be something that I’m particularly proud of.”—Professor, Biology10.29.2009Edwards, Phillip M. - 4S 2009 Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C.)

Opportunity decisions based on learned/reinforced practices“Second book, um, uh, several things happened. One was it was a series and so one of the editors knew me, or I know one of the editors, of this series in communication out of [a university press], so there was a, “You ought to send us something,” uh, and then, um, I did actually write a prospectus for the book and sent it to two places, uh, there were two series. I knew both of the editors […] and I believe that I got the book contract for the second book off of presenting a prospectus and one chapter. […] So it was pretty simple. I didn’t actually have to do very much, and so, but that had to do with that I knew some people, but it also had to do with that I was already an established author. And then the third book, uh, was even less where, […] I knew these people, I was on their advisory committee, I’d had, at lunch, a conversation, we wer-, I was at a lunch meeting with people from [a university press]. I said, “Let me tell you an interesting story,” so, and, and, y’know, and I said, “Do you think that would make a good book?” Oh, they loved the idea and […] so I think I got a contract from them on the basis of, maybe a prospectus, or I may have just filled out the, um, forms that they have that are much less. […] They knew me, I was a known quantity.”—Professor, Communication10.29.2009Edwards, Phillip M. - 4S 2009 Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C.)

Implications for OA initiatives and emerging technologiesMost opportunity decisions are aimed at ‘fixed’ solution typesNo single solution (funding agency mandates, institutional mandates, publisher policies, author education) can be applied to these types of materialsCross-linking these various forms of intellectual work from opportunity decisions will be especially important10.29.2009Edwards, Phillip M. - 4S 2009 Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C.)

Opportunity knocks:Authors’ writing andpublishing decisions when manuscripts are solicitedPhillip M. EdwardsUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel HillSchool of Information and Library Sciencephillip.m.edwards@unc.edu10.29.2009Edwards, Phillip M. - 4S 2009 Annual Meeting (Washington, D.C.)Questions or comments?