Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • The Distributional Politics of Dissertation Embargoes

    The American Historical Association has recently recommended that history dissertations not be made available online for six years. Here is the official statement, with my emphasis added.

    The American Historical Association strongly encourages graduate programs and university libraries to adopt a policy that allows the embargoing of completed history PhD dissertations in digital form for as many as six years. Because many universities no longer keep hard copies of dissertations deposited in their libraries, more and more institutions are requiring that all successfully defended dissertations be posted online, so that they are free and accessible to anyone who wants to read them. At the same time, however, an increasing number of university presses are reluctant to offer a publishing contract to newly minted PhDs whose dissertations have been freely available via online sources.

    Not surprisingly, this policy has been widely criticized. But the argument is like this: publishers will not publish books if their content is available online for free, because potential buyers will have no incentive to purchase them. If you believe this story, graduates are putting their dissertations online, and then finding that publishers are no longer interested.

    Who benefits from dissertation embargoes like this? I interpret this as a simple case of distributional politics. The book publishers win, and everyone else loses, including the AHA.

    1. The book publishers win here because they are using the AHA’s policy to entrench themselves as middlemen. Readers cannot access new research easily unless they buy books themselves or visit libraries that have themselves bought books. Scholars must rely on book publishers for their career advancement.
    2. New history PhDs lose because there is an additional barrier between their research and its potential audience.
    3. The discipline of history loses because it becomes that much harder to share the best new scholarship that can help to establish the value of historical research.
    4. The public at large loses too, because of limited access to the most relevant and engaged historical research.
    5. The AHA loses because it has surrendered its position as an advocate for the value and relevance of historical scholarship today, and it has sided with the middlemen against its very own constituency: historians.

    There is a simple alternative. Here is Steve Saideman:

    The argument is so simple. If the AHA insists that all dissertations must be published online, then publishers will have to decide that either they are not going to publish revised dissertations—which honestly might not be a bad thing, and could free up new PhDs to pursue new projects—or they decide that online dissertations are not competing with their product. This alternative, in other words, does not even mean that book publishers have to go out of business! It just aligns their function more closely with the academic enterprise. A win for everyone.

  • Journal Reform Wish List

    I have been thinking recently about what changes I would like to see in the publication process in political science. There are good reasons to think that the entire system of journal publishing is broken, but that’s not what I mean. Rather, I am interested in more incremental changes that can be made, right now, in political science journals. These are changes which should promote interaction among scholars in print, decrease the incentives for always producing new research and increase the professional value works that evaluate existing theoretical and empirical claims, and might eliminate some artificial constraints on the production of good written work.

    Outside of political science, most of the articles that I read are in the fields of economics, statistics, and the eclectic field-like thing called “Asian studies.” They have inspired three basic reforms that I have put on my journal reform wish list.

    1. Word limit nonsense

    My single greatest pet peeve is arbitrary limits on word or page length. I have spent countless hours trying to find 48 words to delete from a manuscript to get it under the 10,000 word limit, or trying to make bibliography entry lines extra long so that I get my total page length down to the 35 page max. My tricks are many: Did you know that even if are required to double space your footnotes, you can still single space the last footnote on a page, thereby reclaiming a line? No one ever notices this.

    These limits are a holdover from days in which people actually read journals in physical format, so printing and mailing costs were very important and limits on submission length were necessary to keep costs down. I still receive journals in the mail, but I just pile them up and use the piles as bookends. I have no doubt that printing and postage still matter, but we must understand that these are 15th century concerns. There is no difference between a manuscript of 9,998 and 10,002 words. Artificial limits like this waste the author’s time and have no substantive or stylistic justification.

    Of course, we want to avoid longwinded and wordy submissions, but we already have a technology for that: peer review! If a submission is too long but otherwise sound, make that an referee or editorial issue to be dealt with as part of the revision process. The idea that there is some number of words that indicates clear and concise, and above that hard limit the prose wordy and meandering, is patently absurd.

    Is this feasible? Well, let’s look at how another discipline does it, one that is widely admired by political scientists: economics. There are five “top” economics journals, and three of them have no word or page limit on submissions.

    Limits
    American Economic Review, Econometrica

    No limits
    Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Review of Economic Studies

    If the Kyooj doesn’t have word limits, we don’t need them either.

    2. Published comments and discussion

    These show up from time to time in economics journals, and also sometimes in political science journals (see e.g. the discussion of fixed effect vector decomposition in Political Analysis), but they are even more common in statistics journals. For example, this piece by Imai, Tingley, and Yamamoto.

    The difference between the Political Analysis comments and the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society A comments is clear. The PA commentary is essentially series of articles that correct errors in an earlier article. The JRSSA discussion is an occasion for different scholars who give their comments and reflections on the main points, the implications, and what we have learned from Imai et al.’s paper. Some are critical, and some are less so. But the point is not to correct an error, but rather to see how different scholars interpret the contribution. This has real value, and we don’t see enough of it in political science.

    I should note that Perspectives on Politics does some of these comments-and-discussions things, such as the recent discussion of Tim Groseclose‘s Left Turn. I like these, but they ought to be common in all journals in the discipline, not relegated to a journal which was established specifically to allow this kind of format to exist. In the main journals in political science, comments are only of the “corrections” type. In fact, many journals will not review submissions that do not make a new theoretical or empirical contribution, so even “correction comments” are impossible.

    3. Long review essays

    Long book review essays are rare today. Short reviews appear in Perspectives on Politics, Political Science Quarterly, and others, and it used to be the case that you could find long review essays in journals like the American Political Science Review (for example, Tarrow on Putnam) and World Politics (see Almond on Berger). But it is now the common consensus now that book reviews—because they are not peer reviewed, and because they are so short—do not even count as publications. Review essays which undergo peer review, on the other hand, almost universally cover several books.

    I’m not sure if the practice of writing long peer-reviewed essays on major books has disappeared because no one wants to write such essays, or because journals won’t publish them anymore, or won’t subject them to peer review. But I do know that in the humanities, and especially in disciplines like history which remain book fields, the practice of writing long, peer-reviewed reviews of major books has survived. And it produces incredible essays such as Victor Lieberman’s review of James Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed. It is a shame that this format has all but disappeared in most political science journals. Perhaps no one but Victor Lieberman could have read James Scott so carefully and with such a careful eye towards the argument and the evidence, and it does a great service to the rest of the discipline. Reading the essay helps to clarify what’s at stake in Scott’s argument and his treatment of Southeast Asian history, and raises important questions for anyone who wishes to pursue his themes.

    My experience writing long review essays is limited (I have done precisely one). But that essay made a key theoretical point, and so long as books continue to be published in political science—and they will—we should give professional credit to long, serious, and peer-reviewed essays that strive to make similar theoretical contributions in response to recent scholarship. Even if they concentrate on just one major work. After all, that is the natural way to foster the rigorous and critical exchange that drives the discipline forward.

    Lest I be accused of advocating something insufficiently social scientific, let me emphasize that even economists sometimes write such essays, like Edward Leamer‘s Tantalus on the Road to Asymptotia, a review of Angrist and Pischke‘s Mostly Harmless Econometrics. Whether or not we agree with the content of Leamer’s essay, the format is outstanding and political science should embrace it.