Date Rape

The leading category in the blog readers’ poll (scroll down to the bottom right hand corner), at the time of writing, is requesting “Ecology / Science”, which nicely coincides with this last post to finish the series on reviews (thus far comprising “Insult to Human Intelligence” and “Reviewing the Situation”), and specifically reviews of scientific publications, although this point, in particular, appears to apply equally to other non-fiction and in fact, most fiction too.

The issue involves publication dates.

A publisher sets a publication date for several reasons, including, establishing their own schedule for the development, production and printing (often done “out of house” and therefore requiring an estimated “time of delivery” to the press), formalising the agreement laid down in the author’s contract whereby they commit to producing the book, but also as a prerequisite of catalogues and online vendors, most universally Amazon.

But with all these roles to play, how is a publication date set?

Googling “publication date” turns up some interesting views, for example:

The choice of publication date is arbitrary. There are a number of reasons for not publishing as soon as your book is printed include:

• Allowing time for reviewers to incorporate your book into their schedule – many magazines go to print months before their cover date. Even papers will need several weeks

• It gives time for orders to be placed so the books are in the bookshops when publication date arrives.

• You might want to time the publication date to tie in with some relevant date.

• It takes time for the data about your book to filter through to the bookstores through the ‘bookdata’ system.

Publication Dates. Writers Services.

The official release date is today. This doesn’t feel like much of anything, since the book’s been shipping for several weeks now, and as a first-time author I was surprised to learn that these release dates are something of a fantasy.

A Book’s Publication Date: One Author’s Perspective. University of California.

Note the mention above of how reviews are timed to coincide with a book’s publication date.

So, what’s the issue? The system works, it has done so for some time.

The issue is that if, for whatever reason, a book is not sent to a reviewer (usually in it’s proof version), well in advance of the publication date, then it is nigh on impossible to get the book reviewed, and reviews tell readers about books. Or, at least, that is what they are supposed to do, (but also see the previous posts in this series).

So, why not just get a copy to the reviewer early enough? One reason is because, smaller publishers do not have the financial leverage to afford a preliminary/draft print run, but also for the main point that in the modern age, it is unnecessary to do so. Especially damaging, as by doing so, the position of power enjoyed by the media over the reader is maintained.

By way of explanation, and in the similar vein of getting your work publicised, there is a practice of the higher profile science journals charging authors to publish their papers, a cost other journals cover solely through subscription fees. The rationale is that those authors will be prepared to pay printing charges (several hundreds of dollars, and often out of a public-funded research grant), in order to get their paper seen by the most readers, in journals with the highest circulation.

The measure of a journal’s reputation is given by its Impact Factor. Nature, Science, PNAS and The Lancet, etc, are usually in the Top 10 ranked by various aspects, but, aside from the criticisms levied at the system in general, and assuming that the peer-review system ensures a high quality of work accepted for publication, then there is a source of a more fundamental contradiction that undermines, if not nullifies, the need by authors to target high profile journals.

The internet.

The internet has exposed information for our use; citation indices and e-journals have revolutionised and facilitated scientific research. Thanks to Google alone, not even Google Scholar, and just by knowing minimal information, the authors surnames, year of publication, etc. (although additional search terms do help when honing in on a specific paper), it is now possible to immediately access abstracts and, given sufficient access rights (usually bought with a membership fee paid by an institute or university), a PDF copy of any paper, from the last few decades and often beyond, regardless of the journal in which it appeared.

For example, Googling just “Watson Crick 1952” throws up the Nature DNA archive with their seminal papers in the journal Nature.

Or,

the first link when Googling “Williams 1957 Evolution” is his classic on “Pleiotropy, Natural Selection, and the Evolution of Senescence” in Evolution.

For more contemporary material, in Google Scholar “Fisher Frank Leggett 2010” returns their recent “Breaking Bergmann’s rule: truncation of Northwest Atlantic marine fish body sizes” in Ecology.

All of the above journals are considered high impact. Yet, in equally quick time, Googling “Derry Dougill” provides the abstract and, one click further, the entire PDF of “Water location, piospheres and a review of evolution in African ruminants” that appeared in the comparatively low-impact journal African Journal of Range and Forage Science.

And so on.

The point being, other than snobbery, there is no point in targeting high impact journals for the sake of exposure, (serious researchers will properly explore the literature), and there is certainly no sense in paying for papers to appear therein.

So, what has this to do with book reviews?

Everything.

In the same way that the internet has normalised academic journals, so it has also exploded the book market such that it is now possible to track down a copy of the rarest tome, regardless of publication date.

Before online shopping, the availbility of a book was determined by the stock currently on sale in your local bookshop. Before Waterstones and the hyper-bookshop, that meant quite a limited number of titles. If you wanted a book that was not in stock, then the bookseller could offer to search their system for it, but that was also limited to their distribution network, and the networks of their stock providers.

But the internet is decontructing all that because it is now possible to find books for yourself, from the smallest outlet, anywhere in the world. This is a wonderfully welcome consequence of the transparency and global extent of the information superhighway.

To persist in a small-minded, blinkered notion that a publication date, an arbitrary construct at best, is important for any reason except for the reviews section in a newspaper or such appearing topical, is yet another way that the media are playing at being cultural gatekeepers, filtering out what is presented to the public at large, and through the machinations of the industry, inevitably concentrating on major publishing houses, at the expense of smaller operators, and the diversity of literature.

It is tantamount to the wanton spoiling of cultural potential by limiting what is presented to the reading public.

Once again, the reviewers, and the media that they work for, need to remember for whom and for whose purpose they are reviewing books. I would like to think for the reader, but the way they are going about it, I doubt that more and more.