This document is a presentation by Paul Prinsloo given to young academics at the University of South Africa on alternatives in academic publishing. It discusses some of the challenges with traditional academic publishing models, including brutal abuse by the systems and metrics driving quantity over quality. It also explores alternatives like blogs, tweets and magazines. The presentation considers why scholars publish, who they answer to, and what the risks and benefits are of conventional versus unconventional publishing routes. It emphasizes understanding the academic "field" and rules, and finding one's voice within that system.

1. Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/hands-tattoos-rings-accessories-1031131/
Letters to a young(er) scholar:
On (alternatives in) publishing
Paul Prinsloo
University of South Africa (Unisa)
@14prinsp
Presentation to the Young Academics,
University of South Africa, 16 August 2018

2. Acknowledgement
I do not own the copyright of any of the images in this
presentation. I therefore acknowledge the original copyright
and licensing regime of every image used.
This presentation (excluding the images) is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
License.

3. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/art-perspective-statue-1851439/
These slides reflect my own personal sensemaking of thinking and
living out loud as scholar and researcher – getting lost, being
found, of finding, the constant fear of missing out, the perpetual
precarity of being measured/watched and constantly
(re) considering value: risk

4. Image credit: https://www.amazon.com/Letters-
Young-Rainer-Maria-Rilke/dp/0393310396
Image credit: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Letters-
Young-Contrarian-Art-Mentoring/dp/0465030335

5. “I beg you, to have patience with
everything unresolved in your heart and to
try to love the questions themselves as if
they were locked rooms or books written
in a very foreign language. Don’t search
for the answers, which could not be given
to you now, because you would not be
able to live them. And the point is to live
everything. Live the questions now.
Perhaps then, someday far in the future,
you will gradually, without even noticing
it, live your way into the answer.”

6. “In the deepest hour of the night,
confess to yourself that you would
die if you were forbidden to write.
And look deep into your heart
where it spreads its roots, the
answer, and ask yourself, must I
write?”

7. • Why do we do/want to do research/publish?
• What changes/will change as a result of our
research/publishing?
• Who do we answer to when we do our research/publish?
Who will hold us to account for our questions, our processes
and our findings?
• What will happen if we don’t do research/publish?
Before we consider alternatives to
conventional publishing, let us consider the
following:

8. What are the alternatives to conventional
academic publishing? What should we
consider when going ‘alternative’?
• Where does this question come from?
• What are the rules in going ‘alternative’?
• What are the costs – financial, reputation, and
risk?
• What are the benefits?
• What are the links (if any) between conventional
forms of publication and alternative forms?
• How do I choose? How do I find my voice?

9. Why should we even think about
alternatives in sharing our thinking,
research and praxis?
• Being a scholar in a networked world – abundance, risk
and networks
• The beauty (and danger) of the immediacy of living
“onlife”
• Brutal abuse by traditional systems of academic publishing
• Alternative forms of publishing may support the more
conventional forms of sharing/peer review
• The nature of scholarship and the sharing of
research/thinking/praxis has changed
• Being a scholar has changed

10. “Hypatia[a] (born c. 350–370; died 415 AD) was a
Hellenistic Neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer, and
mathematician, who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, then
part of the Eastern Roman Empire. She was a
prominent thinker of the Neoplatonic school in
Alexandria, where she taught philosophy and
astronomy. She is the first female mathematician
whose life is reasonably well recorded”
Source credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia
Central to the question of academic
publishing, is the issue of scholarship…
When is someone a scholar?
How do we know?

11. On being a scholar
• Having academic expertise in a particular field or
fields/disciplines
• Recognition of the expertise by institutions (e.g.
awarding of degrees/appointment)
• Acknowledgement by the gatekeepers in the
discipline/field of inquiry
• Recognition by peers
• Maintaining and expanding expertise
• Dissemination of thinking/research/praxis
• Being a gatekeeper/peer
• Developing and recognising expertise of others

12. Source credit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia
WARNING: The field is rigged –
gender/race/power
Image credit:
http://thesociologicalcinema.tumblr.com/post/142531355075/youre
-playing-monopoly-one-player-is-given-all

13. On being a scholar and the rationale
for publishing
• Having academic expertise in a particular field or
fields/disciplines
• Recognition of the expertise by institutions (awarding of
degrees)
• Recognition by the gatekeepers in the discipline/field of
inquiry
• Recognition by peers
• Maintaining and expanding expertise
• Dissemination of thinking/praxis
• Being a gatekeeper/peer
• Developing and recognising expertise

14. Conventional publishing (Un)conventional publishing

15. “Conventional”
publishing in higher
education
• Monographs
• Edited volumes
• Peer-reviewed articles in
journals on IBSS, ISI,
Norwegian, Scopus
“Unconventional”
publishing in higher
education
• Blogs
• Tweets
• Opinion pieces
• Letters to the editor
• Articles in magazines

16. Soccer Rugby
Baseball Hockey
What are the rules?
Image credit – https://pixabay.com/en/soccer-field-
diagram-green-307046/
Image credit –
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rugby_field.png
Image credit –
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Baseball_diamond.
svg
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Field_hockey
_offside_1987_rule.png

17. ‘What’ needs to be shared?
How urgent is the findings/message?
‘What’ are the
reputational
benefits and
risks?
How accessible will/should it
be?
Who will be the peer
reviewers and how will peer
review happen/impact?
Who are the gatekeepers?
Who is the intended audience
and why?
‘Where’/’how’
does it fit into
my career –
short-term/
longer term?
What are the rules?
Going conventional,
alternative or somewhere
in-between?

18. Making these choices require that
we understand the ‘field’
Image credit: http://www.basicknowledge101.com/subjects/reality.html

19. Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/wonder-woman-superman-superhero-552109/
In research there are
Superheroes
(and rituals to celebrate
them)
(and rules that define
them)

20. Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/one-against-all-all-against-one-1744083/
The imposter
Those that do not quite fit in, don’t play
according to the rules, and live to carry the
consequences of not ‘fitting’

21. Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/one-against-all-all-against-one-1744086/
A strange land where novice researchers ‘[f]ake
it till you [they] make it’ (Ivana, 2016)

22. Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/graffiti-artist-graffiti-art-1380108/
Those that go ‘alternative’
The deviants

23. Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/tree-natur-nightsky-cloud-stars-736887/
Higher education as ‘field’

24. Source credit: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/30/science/predatory-journals-academics.html
30 October 2017

25. Source credit: https://clinicallibrarian.wordpress.com/2017/01/23/bealls-list-of-predatory-publishers/

26. Source credit: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/01/elsevier-academic-publishing-
petition/427059/

27. Source credit: https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/elsevier-declines-to-cut-off-german-universities-that-
cancelled-journal-subs/3008505.article

28. Source credit: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Higher-Ed-s-Real/243867

29. Academic disciplines in our time have
been subjected to the principle that more
productivity is better, and a lot more is
better than better, giving rise to a kind of
productivity syndrome.
Quantity is so much easier to evaluate.
Professor X has 18 articles, 12 book
reviews, 21 conference presentations, two
monographs, and an edited volume. The
university’s T&P committee is going to be
impressed. End of story.
Source credit: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Higher-Ed-s-Real/243867

30. “Academic culture — like American culture
more broadly — has become
monomaniacally infatuated with
productivity as the marker of a successful
life, and quantitative measures have
become central to determining what
counts as success. Although academics can
be found resisting (mildly) the metrics of
productivity foisted on them by
administrators, they also enthusiastically
measure themselves.”
Source credit: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Higher-Ed-s-Real/243867

31. Source credit: https://www.chronicle.com/article/Feeling-Anxious-You-re-Not/243117

32. “Academic labor and performance anxiety”: where the “shame
[of not performing] becomes a central tenet of everyday
academic life” (Richard Hall, 2014a, par. 2)
Academics “overwork because the current culture in
universities is brutally and deliberately invested in shaming
those who don’t compete effectively…” in stark contrast with
the heroic few who do, somehow, meet the shifting goalposts
(Kate Bowles, 2014, par. 7-8)
Image credits: http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Karloff
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Superman_S_symbol.svg
You are
either /or

33. Source credit: https://www.amazon.com/Metric-Power-David-Beer-
ebook/dp/B01JE3SI20/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1526806112&sr=8-1&keywords=metric+power+beer
“…we are created and recreated by
metrics; we live through them, with
them, and within them. Metrics
facilitate the making and remaking
of judgements about us, the
judgements we make of ourselves
and the consequences of those
judgements as they are felt and
experienced in our lives. We play
with metrics and we are more often
played by them”
(Beer, 2016, p. 3).

34. Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/bridge-concrete-pillar-architecture-1819153/
“Those things that cannot be counted are
rendered invisible, and those that can be
counted achieve visibility”
(Beer, 2016, p. 59).

35. Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/urban-urbex-lostplace-abandoned-628269/
When numbers are used alone, “when the world is
reduced to numbers, a measure, to what is calculable
and laid before us; when humans are summed,
aggregated and accounted for; then much remains
forgotten, unsaid, concealed”
(Elden, 2006, in Beer, 2016, pp. 59-60).

36. Source credit: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26367751-slow-professor
What are the
opportunities to talk
back, to claim back
stolen identities, stolen
dreams, stolen time?

37. Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/tree-root-moss-overgrown-green-2266626/
Some considerations for
alternative scholarship in a
networked age
Overlay image credit: http://site.sharespot.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/conectados-redes-sociais.png

38. Networks do not only include but
also exclude
While not everyone is
included/connected,
everyone is affected
See Castells, M. (2009) Communication power .Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press
Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/photos/locked/

39. Don’t underestimate the tribe
Image credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ontario_Historical_Society,_Ottawa,_1914.jpg

40. Scholarship in traditional networks
• Old (white) boys networks, glass ceilings
• Disciplinary connections/gatekeeping/journals
• Institutional reputation and networks
• Legacy privileges/drawbacks – race, gender, class,
country of birth
• The role of individual reputation (as result of the
previous three)
• Social gatherings (by invitation only), conferences
(depending on funding and gatekeeping)
• Water fountain meetings, cafeteria discussions, bus and
train conversations

41. Don’t underestimate ‘accidents’
Image credit: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Japanese_car_accident_blur.jpg

42. Connect to the “Connectors”:
The “Connectors” have the
ability to span different
worlds which is a
combination of their
personality, curiosity, self-
confidence, sociability and
energy. These people not only
have feet in different worlds,
but the ability to bring these
worlds together (Gladwell
2000, pp. 49-51).

43. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/
Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/man-strange-male-funny-face-794514/
Connect to “mavens” – a Yiddish word for someone who
accumulates knowledge (Gladwell, 2000, p. 60).Mavens are
“information brokers, sharing and trading in what they know” and
“data banks. They provide the message. Connectors are social glue:
they spread it” (Gladwell, 2000p. 70).

44. A personal
journey in
‘alternative’
scholarship
Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/boards-height-balance-2040575/

45. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/
Source credit: https://www.slideshare.net/prinsp/mapping-and-managing-my-scholarly-digital-identity-the-effort-the-dividends-
the-risks-and-the-unknown
Resource 1

46. Source credit: https://www.slideshare.net/bonstewart/education-in-abundance-network-literacies-learning?qid=edf4a92b-23cd-413a-
894f-a3eb0889ba81&v=&b=&from_search=6
Resource 2

47. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/
Goodier, S., & Czerniewicz, L. (2015). Academics' online
presence: a four-step guide to taking control of your
visibility. [Third edition]
Retrieved from http://open.uct.ac.za/bitstream/handle/11427/2652/GoodierOnlinePresenceV3.pdf?sequence=11
Resource 3

48. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/
Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/traces-snow-snow-lane-footprints-69808/
Our digital footprints….
The (un)informed and (un)intentional,
(non)actions we take

49. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/
Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/shadows-jogging-footprints-evening-183121/
Our digital shadows….
Content that are collected from us (by other human and
non-human actors) and that are stored, analysed,
combined with other sources of information (including
our digital footprints) to compile digital dossiers

50. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/

51. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/
Some scholars say that Twitter ‘does not
work’ for them…
This reminds me of walking into a library and
expecting books to find you
Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/books-door-entrance-italy-colors-1655783/

52. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/
Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/books-door-entrance-italy-colors-1655783/
Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/ant-shadow-big-small-metaphor-1541524/
Using Twitter as scholar requires effort, dedication,
a careful selection of who to follow, a willingness
to be surprised, and dealing with an
abundance of stimulation

53. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/

54. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/
Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/nacelle-workers-wall-city-work-1888587/
The increasing disappearance of
public/private/professional/personal
Using Facebook as scholar…

55. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/

56. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/

58. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/

59. Case in point: Slides prepared for a group of 30 bored
academics in a small stuffy venue. One year later,
10,773 views

61. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/

62. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/

63. The art of alternative scholarship:
some pointers
Image credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/143601516@N03/28011015990

64. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/
Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/doors-choices-choose-open-decision-1587329/
Central to our strategy to take (more conscious) control of our
digital footprints and shadows is the need to understand the
choices we have, the (sometimes irrational) reasons why we
choose specific options, the downstream effects of our choices
and the choices we don’t have
Pointer 1

65. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/
Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/window-dark-old-opinions-shadows-2387518/
Going ‘dark’ or ‘offline’ is increasingly impossible.
For a scholar, going ‘dark’ is not really an option.
We need to understand what is (not) in our
control , the (ir)rationality of our choices, the
(un)foreseen downstream use of our data
Pointer 2

66. Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/sign-open-neon-business-electric-1209759/
Pointer 3

67. Source credit: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/

68. Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/creative-commons-licenses-icons-by-783531/

69. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/
Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/prey-hunt-bird-sparrow-nature-cat-244070/
Weighing the opportunities
with the risks; weighing the
abundance with the peril
Pointer 4

70. Source credit: https://tressiemc.wordpress.com/about/

71. Source credit: https://tressiemc.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/mcmillan-cottom-academic-engagement-
microcelebrity-and-digital-sociology-in-the-matrix-of-domination.pdf

72. (In)conclusion
Image credit: https://pixabay.com/en/hitchhiker-thumb-hoodie-backpack-691581/
Final advice to a young(er) scholar:
On (alternatives in) publishing

73. Imagecredit:https://pixabay.com/en/binary-code-man-display-dummy-face-1327512/

74. THANK YOU
Paul Prinsloo (Prof)
Research Professor in Open Distance Learning (ODL)
College of Economic and Management Sciences,
Samuel Pauw Building, Office 5-21, P.O. Box 392
Unisa, 0003, Republic of South Africa
T: +27 (0) 12 433 4719 (office)
prinsp@unisa.ac.za
Skype: paul.prinsloo59
Personal blog:
http://opendistanceteachingandlearning.wordpress.com
Twitter profile: @14prinsp