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I have the great pleasure of introducing

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John and Bea.

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So to begin with, John
Maxwell is an associate

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professor in the publishing program
at Simon Fraser University.

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He has served as director
of the publishing program

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since 2014 and has taught in the program
since 2001.

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John currently publishes the Open Access

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Journal Pop Public, Open, Participatory,

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and he has authored or coauthored
multiple touchstone articles

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and reports on open scholarship
and scholarly communication.

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And I really encourage you
to check out his publication record.

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I know that
it has has greatly influenced my own work.

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Bea Glickman — welcome — is a writer

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and master of publishing student
at Simon Fraser University.

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She is interested in queer and feminist
publishing

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and has helped edit
and proofread a queer white novel.

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Bea is passionate about helping people
tell their stories.

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She has a background in scientific

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editing and transcribing lectures
as well as working with students.

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And this work focuses on translating
one kind of language into another.

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And she really brings that commitment
to accessible communication

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to all of her work. So

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and Bea has also let me
know that she'd like me to share with you

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that she firmly believes
that can be counts as dinner

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and has been known
to follow cats around her neighborhood. So

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if you're looking to ingratiate yourself
with B, I recommend candy and cats.

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And today John and Bea will be speaking
on the social life of scholar

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Bea documents
establishing value in the Commons.

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Thank you, Lisa.

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Thanks for the introduction.

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Thanks, Kim, for such an interesting talk.

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I really like the emphasis on the the

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how and not just the what
of scholarly sharing.

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And I love the idea
of optimizing the commons for serendipity.

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I think there's just so much richness
in that

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that's a really, really

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fruitful way of thinking about things.

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So I am John Maxwell and I'm Associate
Prof in publishing here at Simon

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Fraser University here in Rainy Vancouver
today on the traditional

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unceded territories of the Muskingum
Squamish slate with two peoples.

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I am a third generation white settler

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with ancestors from Lowland
Scotland, West Country, England.

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I was born in Alberta in the

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northern reaches of the Nakhuda
and Stoney Peoples.

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But I've spent most of my life,

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I'm lucky to say, here in coastal
ish territories.

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I like to say
that I'm not nearly as interested

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in digital humanities
as I am in digital humanists,

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and especially in
how digital humanists talk to each other.

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My main research these days is in
the evolution of scholarly communications.

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I look introduced B,
who has been fabulously important

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in working through the ideas in this talk
today. Hi.

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So yeah, I'm me.

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I'm doing my master's in publishing
and as a few with John

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and I grew up in Montreal
on the land of the Guardian,

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the Hugo Nation, and I've since lived in

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in Halifax, Vancouver,
and I've just moved to Toronto.

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I'm interested in scholarly publishing,
queer and feminist lit science

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communication and robocalls.

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So what we're going to do today
is just kind of think

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through some variations
on our vision of what the Canadian

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commons could be.

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I wanted to throw in
just how much I appreciated

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Leslie Chen's Institute
lecture on Tuesday,

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which, if you haven't seen,
you should check out the recording.

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A lot of what Leslie Chen talked about
are ideas that are just foundational

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to what we're going to talk about today,
about openness and platforms

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and things like that.

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So to dove in.

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To our ears, at least

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the critical point of a commons
is that it's not exclusive, right?

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Like that
is kind of the heritage of this idea

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and in scholarly communications.

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The model, I think, par excellence
of exclusivity is the scholarly journal

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which even in its open access incarnation

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enacts exclusivity in a bunch of ways
through its submission editorial review

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processes, and I think really in the way
it imagines its audience as well.

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So I mean, I think in a sense

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the Commons is positioned as an antidote
to what's missing in

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journal publishing, especially from
the perspective of open scholarship.

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So as Elisa pointed out,

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the evolution of our thinking

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here travels through the publication
of a scholarly journal, Pop Public, Open,

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Participatory, which we've been publishing
for the past few years.

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And just a few began
when a group of us, including Elisa,

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started thinking about the journal
and what we needed it to do,

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both in a pragmatic sense
and also in the kind of abstract.

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And so pop has been kind of a crucible
for thinking

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an evolving Ricci research prototype
that's become a kind of minimum

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viable product of a journal which we tried
to take back to first principles.

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It's got a simplest possible editorial
and production workflow, minimal tech.

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And in getting rid of a lot of the baggage
around journal publishing and platforms,

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we wanted to get back to like
what's really essential in a journal.

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What are the things that are
super important, you know, editorial

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board, copy editing,
typography, article level metadata,

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IDs, fully closed peer review

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and important to us was an ethic of
care for authors and editors.

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Those are all pretty
solid kind of things that you can love,

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but even pared down to its bare
essentials.

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Pop is still playing the journal game,

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which is a game that I think
everybody here probably knows really well.

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It's a game with really strict rules
and a very ritualized set of processes.

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But as scholars, we've all been trained

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in write for years and years and years
and that.

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Baked in ritual ization
of how journals work

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in the context of open social scholarship.

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What we found was that if we published
journal articles in a.

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In a in a journal. Scholarly journal.

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It's really hard
to conceive of doing anything that's novel

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or public
or even particularly open in that format

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beyond the kind of baseline
level of open access.

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And that's, I think, because historically
there's a sort of nexus

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of pragmatics around the culture
and the political economy of print.

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And that's been, you know, manifest
for many, many, many years.

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Where a journal becomes
an extraordinarily stable form

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over many years and over many,
many iterations.

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It's a stable gathering.

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It's been reliably produced
and packaged and sold for decades,

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if not centuries,
according to the economics of print,

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you know, economies of scale, predictable
audiences, subscription sales,

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libraries, scholarly societies,
all of that kind of stuff

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that.

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You get to a point where in logic
that's really close to Falco's argument.

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What is an author that publications
also accrue authority

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and prestige and credibility
over time in a process that's, you know,

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really technically
it's a kind of circular logic,

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but it makes sense because we're talking
about the circulation of

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social and cultural capital.

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That's what publications tend to do.

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So you can think of all of that
print culture, logic, economics, prestige

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as being a kind of Marxist base

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that the scholarly superstructure sits on.

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Right.

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That's the part that we like
to talk about,

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the community of discourse
that a journal represents.

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And then troubling all of that is,
you know, about

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three decades ago, all of this one
journal of all of this went digital.

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Right.

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And the journal hasn't really changed
very much for being digital.

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We poured all of that material
into content management systems and one

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platform or another and all sorts
of horrific bits of software.

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But the Journal remained really intact,
and the article did, too.

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To the extent
that we still call them papers.

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So there's this tightly bound logic
of exclusivity and boundary policing

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economics
that's still in the journal format.

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So comments.

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Right. What about this?

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So I think the obvious predecessor
to the Canadian Hs2'S Commons

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project would be the Modern Language
Association's MLA conference.

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Many of you may be familiar
with this or members of it.

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MLA comments and the extrapolation of that
into the larger humanities

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comments network.

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So MLA comments was founded in 2013,

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and as Kathleen Fitzpatrick Patrick
put it, the idea was why not create

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a means through which members could
communicate directly with one another?

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Like holding the MLA
convention year round.

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And she said also that the Commons
was intended to be an argument

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about the relevance of joining a scholarly
society in the age of open access,

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not to just receive

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the journal as a member,
but to participate in the conversation.

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So the MLA call

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Commons is
I think notably a disciplinary repository,

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which makes it distinct from, say,

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your institutional repository,
which I think nobody actually loves.

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And my apologies to all the librarians
out there that slave away at making work.

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But a disciplinary commons
comes a little closer

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to the idea of a scholarly journal,
in that it has an organizing principle

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in the disciplinary discourse
that animates it.

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No. The Commons isn't supposed to be
just a place to share papers.

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It's a place to organize and participate
in the discourse.

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And so it's kind of an intervention
in the struggle for or against

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platform ization and platform dominance.

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To echo Leslie Chan's talk again.

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So we wanted to think about
what do people actually do in the cocoons?

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So we

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did a little bit of a dove into the MLA
comments.

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I became a member of MLA
and signed up for it

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and it's it has about 30,000

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active members there as of May 2022.

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And the broader humanities
commons network, of which

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the military is a part,
also has about 30,000 active members.

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And there's an overlap
of like 6000 members

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who are also in the MLA.

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So the MLA Commons, through its core
repository, provides a place

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to post journal articles, books and book
chapters, syllabi, teaching materials and

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a lot of other stuff.

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And it is open access,
meaning you don't need to be a member

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in order to read or download
anything that's on there.

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Typical downloads of

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of an article or teaching materials

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is around 2200,

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and occasionally there's something
that gets up into the hundreds.

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So it is not a huge number of people,
but that's not insignificant either.

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And interestingly,
teaching materials and bibliographies

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and those sort of less formal
written works seem to do just as well

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in terms of downloads and reads
as scholarly, peer reviewed articles,

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which suggests that there is an
appetite for more than just

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your what you think of

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as just a traditional scholarly piece.

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And there are also some social features
on the site other than the repository.

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There are groups by topic,
like there's one for digital humanities

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and there are discussion threads
and there's a newsfeed.

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But none of those seem
to have really caught fire in terms

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of being really active.

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Like there's not a ton of people.

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There's often
a lot of discussion threads with zero

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responses on them, that sort of thing.

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Outside of maybe the private groups,
which you can't see into

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where things like conference
organizing go goes on.

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But the MLA commons

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remains a disciplinary space.

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You need to be a paid member of the MLA

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in order to participate.

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Nonmembers can look in,
but they can't like post things.

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So the comment
still controls its boundaries and excludes

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participation from the outside,
which is not unlike a journal.

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So the Commons is trying to do
a different thing than a journal is.

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The one is concerned with open

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sharing and aspires
to a kind of social network like status.

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The other is concerned

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with recording and credentialing,
importantly, the scholarly record.

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So from the perspective
of open scholarship,

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we think there's an opportunity here
specifically in the crossing

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of disciplinary boundaries
and in making scholarship accessible,

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not just beyond a discipline,
but beyond maybe

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the traditional academic space entirely.

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The thing about a disciplinary discourse
is that it succeeds in

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sort of establishing
a center of gravity around

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which everything can revolve
because there are a bunch of additional

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organizing structures
like the scholarly society,

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organized peer review conferences
and things like that.

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And those are pertinent to a disciplinary
space like Emily Commons, less

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so with Humanities Commons as a whole,

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and the Canadian Process Commons, I mean,
which has the Federation of Humanities

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and Social Sciences behind it
and not necessarily running it,

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is, I think, a

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bolder
move into a multidisciplinary space.

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So then the question becomes
what provides the organizing

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principles and structures
in a space like that?

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And we think maybe what it needs
is something like a journal

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or journals that operate as an overlay.

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On top of the commons,

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but whose value is specifically
interdisciplinary.

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And I'm really liking
how Kym Martin's talk really set this up.

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I like this idea about how

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if there was a conception
of a journal on top of the commons

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that isn't bound by a society
and disciplinary

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boundary policing
and the institutional and economic logic

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that keeps that tightly bound up
and keeps it exclusive.

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And in that I think is where we see
an opportunity to break the fourth wall

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and make scholarship more truly open
and public by leveraging the editorial

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and the curatorial and review mechanisms
of a journal in a different way.

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So not with the traditional agenda
to police disciplinary boundaries

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and ensure disciplinary rigor, but
rather with the aim of making scholarship

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more open
and more able to cross boundaries,

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able to reach actual publics.

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And we think the way to do
that is to actually leverage peer review.

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So this is really to my

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mind about what
peer review in the humanities could be

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if we decoupled it from the decision
to publish.

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That is,
if we decoupled peer review from the print

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based logic of traditional scarcity
based publishing models

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and Post-Publication
peer review is not new.

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It's a thing now,
especially in the sciences.

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But I think the opportunity here
is a little different than that.

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And the way we've been thinking about

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this is peer review
as a kind of privileged readership

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and peer reviewers
as privileged first readers,

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because nobody reads a work
in the same way that a peer review does.

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No one else gives it
that particular kind of attention.

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A peer reviewer takes a particular
kind of responsibility for a work

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about whether it makes sense, about
whether it hits the right notes

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and connects the right dots,
and importantly, takes responsibility

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for whether it should be seen
and who it should be seen by.

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Which is maybe blurring the line
a little bit between reviewers

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and editors, but that might be
an appropriate move in the comments.

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In peer reviewing,
there is this aspect of serendipity,

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right, that chemists kind of foreshadowed
that lattice of coincidence

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that connects the unconnected
because at every incidence of peer review,

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there's a connection made between a writer

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and a privileged reader
that is fundamentally unpredictable.

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But it has enormous consequence for
what happens to that work subsequently.

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So we want you to imagine
in a multidisciplinary context

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where papers actually are crossing
the usual kind of boundaries,

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where the value judgment made in peer
reviewing

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is explicitly not about boundary
policing or disciplinary rigor,

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but rather about reach and positioning

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of a piece of work in an open ended way.

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And that, we think,
would be the nature of peer reviewing

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if you made peer
reviewing a first class activity

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in the comments.

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So it's hard

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enough to incentivize scholars
to do something new,

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especially if that thing is not

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rewarded in the traditional ways that.

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That our careers need,

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but we do.

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Many of us,

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I think, feel an ethical obligation
to share our knowledge and our findings.

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This is a major facet of the movement
towards open access and open scholarship.

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And we all, I think here
at least have the belief that knowledge

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develops best in community
and in the process of sharing .

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There's an opportunity then in the Commons
that Kathleen Fitzpatrick

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has pointed to,
to shift the culture of scholarship

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and to shift the normal practices
to something that isn't

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just serving the print logic
from the 20th century,

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and that isn't an
exclusive disciplinary space.

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This is about
infrastructure, but we think the emphasis

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has to be on the practice
and not just that, the technology.

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So we're not just talking
about the tools for collaboration, but

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we're talking about creating an embodied
spirit of collaboration and community.

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To paraphrase the brilliant Virginia
Woolf, the commons alone was young enough

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in the commons alone
was young enough to be soft in her hands.

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Another reason,
perhaps, why she wrote for the Commons.

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The Canadian Justice
Commons is a still embryonic,

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still soft idea that is malleable,
malleable enough to open up

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how we think about reading and writing
and research and discourse itself.

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And we think the game should be
to take the best commons

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as far away from being
just another article repository as we can

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to make it a live, open, friendly space

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that does embody
that spirit of collaboration

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with accessibly written works
where a broader readership,

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not just academics, might actually
want to come and be made welcome.

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We want to make it a publication
in the sense that Matthew Stadler

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talks about, in the sense of gathering
and nurturing a public.

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This would require a different approach
to editorial

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and as we have suggested to peer review
in shifting

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from a more disciplinary approach
to a curatorial approach

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that embraces interdisciplinarity,
accessibility and serendipity

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as can work.

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Totally talked
about how this we're already on that track

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and if the comments can be something new,

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then we potentially can make it
something that fills a new need,

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something
that is more than or a compliment

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to a traditional scholarly journal model

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presenting scholarship
that successfully engages a wider

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community beyond the discipline itself
and perhaps accumulates

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a different kind of cultural capital
than traditional journal publishing does.

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But we
need to make it as public as possible

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because frankly, if no one cares about it,

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then no one is going to care about it.

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The critical incentive is to make

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the word publicly relevant.

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We think there is an enormous potential
for a wider

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readership
and interdisciplinary engagement

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and public interest
in scholarly work in the humanities.

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But we think we can only get there
if our editorial curatorial

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and review practices
can be pivoted with this in mind.

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The HMS Common's,
which we keep accidentally calling it

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over and over, could be a different
kind of ships to get on.

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It could be a ship
that sails in new and better directions.

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So thanks, everybody.

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Thanks so much.

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00:21:24,850 --> 00:21:28,220
Thanks for Rana, Lisa
and the DHS site team

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for making the opportunity for this
this particular gathering.

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00:21:31,356 --> 00:21:33,825
Thanks to Graham
for all the work that you've done

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stewarding, piloting the ship, as it were.

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We're not going to
let that metaphor go. Sorry.

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And we hope
that this can be a conversation about what

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the Canadian nature of this commons
could be.

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As Kim already demonstrated,
this is kind of upon us.

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There is a version of this talk
that we put on each US

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Commons site itself,
which is longer and richer,

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and it has footnotes
and scholarly apparatus.

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And you can look up the, you know,
sources of things we're talking about.

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And so in the spirit of this whole thing,
we really invite everybody to log in

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and have a look at that and comment on it
and review it and do

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those kinds of things.

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And maybe you will serendipitously

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find something in there
that takes you in a new direction.

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00:22:22,240 --> 00:22:24,343
That's not something
you would expect to expect.

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00:22:25,477 --> 00:22:28,246
It's easy to find
there's not so much in the Commons yet

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that you won't find that
that paper easily.

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If you look under reason publications,
you'll see it.

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00:22:34,553 --> 00:22:37,789
And we would love
if you were in touch with us.

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00:22:37,789 --> 00:22:40,258
And if you let us know what you think.

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00:22:40,258 --> 00:22:41,093
Thank you very much.