ATG Book of the Week: Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy

Planned Obsolescence Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy

Author: Kathleen Fitzpatrick

Paperback: ISBN: 9780814727881, $23;

Cloth: ISBN: 9780814727874, $79;

Kindle Edition, $8.99

Imprint: New York: New York University Press, 2011

“Academic institutions are facing a crisis in scholarly publishing at multiple levels: presses are stressed as never before, library budgets are squeezed, faculty are having difficulty publishing their work, and promotion and tenure committees are facing a range of new ways of working without a clear sense of how to understand and evaluate them. Planned Obsolescence is both a provocation to think more broadly about the academy’s future and an argument for re-conceiving that future in more communally-oriented ways. Facing these issues head-on, Kathleen Fitzpatrick focuses on the technological changes– especially greater utilization of internet publication technologies, including digital archives, social networking tools, and multimedia–necessary to allow academic publishing to thrive into the future. But she goes further, insisting that the key issues that must be addressed are social and institutional in origin. Confronting a change-averse academy, she insists that before we can successfully change the systems through which we disseminate research, scholars must re-evaluate their ways of working–how they research, write, and review–while administrators must reconsider the purposes of publishing and the role it plays within the university…”

REVIEWS

“This primer on innovations in academic publishing is a must-read for all participants: university administrators, faculty authors, librarians, publishers, technologists, and informed general readers.”-P.E. Sandstrom, CHOICE

“Fitzpatrick’s Planned Obsolescence —its title a sardonic speculation on the future of the printed book — considers how academic publishing might best resolve this challenging dilemma. As co-founder of the digital scholarly network MediaCommmons, Fitzpatrick — who lectures in Media Studies at Pomona College in California — is well placed to observe the development of digital culture in academia.”-The Los Angeles Review of Books

“Fitzpatrick is well qualified to discuss alternate forms of publishing and unexpected futures for the academy…Chapters titled ‘Peer Review,’ ‘Authorship,’ ‘Texts,’ ‘Preservation,’ and ‘The University’ methodically dismantle arguments for the status quo, with sections debating accepted beliefs and practices such as the anonymous basis of peer review; recognizable, individual authorship; for-profit university presses; and the rejection of open access as a tenable scholarly publishing model.”-Library Journal