Digital age transforms the landscape of academia

With the digital age driving academic publications online, faculty members and researchers face a changing landscape.

Academic journals, which began life as print, have become increasingly relevant online to both researchers and readers. Online content, which is published at a faster rate, can affect the tenure decisions and the amount of information accessible to students.

“For scientists, a lot of publishing happens online now, so you don’t have to wait for something to come out. People put their stuff on these preprint archives right away,” Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Dennis DeTurck said. “In a way, the journal process has become an archival process.”

While graduate student Michael Edwards said that for older sources he “relies very heavily on print material,” he admits that “a lot of the times, the journals themselves are online,” and new research is often online longbefore publications are released in print.

But backlogs — collections of content that are accessible online but have yet to be physically printed — lead to their own problems. Academic papers are typically published online prior to running in print, creating a longer waiting period for new submissions to be published.

“There are a lot of people out there, and journals get longer and longer backlogs,” DeTurck said.

Backlogs may make it more difficult for researchers to publish their work in the highest-ranked journals, although publication in these journals is a part of tenure evaluations.

“The definition of tenure at a place like Penn, on the research side, is that you have to be reasonably well known in your field and the way we assess that is by getting letters from external referees,” DeTurck said. “But in the case of a younger scholar, how are you going to evaluate them?”

DeTurck went on to explain that while larger backlogs in prestigious journals may make it harder to be published, scholars have other avenues to becoming well-known in their field. He mentioned that some Penn faculty members, such as linguistics professor Mark Liberman, have significant followings on their blogs — although informal online publications are often harder to rank “when the time comes for tenure or promotion.”

This shift may not be a badomen for academia, though.

With online content easily accessible, the archaic pecking order of journals becomes only one part of academic prestige, DeTurck said, adding that tenure decisions have, in some ways, “become more egalitarian” as online journals and other avenues offer more exposure to scholars who might not have access to traditional routes of publishing.

“It’s a challenge for the journals on the one hand, but you know whats going on everywhere all the time. It opens up doors for collaborations that wouldn’t exist otherwise,” DeTurck said. “A graduate student has the same access as a professor at Harvard.”

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