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Commentaries By John Willinsky, Kate Corby and Michael Apple

John Willinsky, Stanford University

How Gene Glass Changed My Life

I have to admit that Gene Glass came late into my life, but it was in a big way. Certainly, in my work in education, I had run across meta-analysis, but it was well in the background for someone working on curriculum theory, and I was not even aware that it had been the work of anyone in particular.

It was in 1999, on the verge of the new century. While at the University of British Columbia, I had worked with the local Vancouver newspaper to see if we could add something to journalism by connecting it to the research that was beginning to appear online. As the newspaper prepared a five-part series of articles on the schools’ use of technology, I worked with a team at the university to gather related research that we’d post as the newspaper articles ran each day of the week with a link to our page, which included a discussion forum.

The experiment with the Vancouver Sun was a modest success, by any measure, with almost a hundred people joining in on the discussion, with few making references to the research we had posted. However, what troubled me more was the nearly impossible challenge we had in finding research that we could share with the public, whether because the journal had yet to go online or, if it had, its license agreement with the library made it impossible for us to share it with the public. There was something, it struck me, terribly wrong with this picture.

I rather naively decided at the time that all that was needed was someone to convince the journals to move online and make their online editions free to read. I started the Public Knowledge Project to promote the idea, but ran repeatedly into questions from journal editors about what would it cost to move their journals online. It was a question I could not answer. So I employed Larry Wolfson, a graduate student at the time, to research the question of what does it cost to move a print journal online.

Larry identified a sample of online journals and online editions of print journals that he would survey. Our survey basically asked what has it cost to put out your journal online. Among them was Educational Policy Analysis Archive, which had, remarkably, been born digital in 1992.  Before Larry had finished sending out the emails to the sample of journals, he notified me that he had his first response. It was from Gene Glass. His answer to our question of costs was brief and blunt, with, I realize now, some of Gene’s twinkle to it: “Nada, nyet, nothing.”

We were very excited. We had a response to our survey, if a triply negative one. It clearly indicated to us that moving journals online was not the financial challenge that many had suggested. It meant that research could be circulated freely online. And so we believed for the week or two we waited for the next survey response to come in.

After much persistence with our sample, and reliance on other studies, we were able to assemble a report on the cost of moving journals online. There had never been, of course, another response like Gene’s. The costs ranged into the hundreds of thousands for a collection of journals, while the cost more typically ranged in the thousands of dollars for a single title.

Gene had gone on in his email to explain that he had a server under his desk and that he did all the work himself, having figured out as the web evolved how to move the journal from email circulation to online posting of articles. We never got over the initial email from Gene. It may have been because first impressions are so lasting or the sheer forcefulness of Gene’s direct, take-charge attitude in all of this. He was at once our hero of scholarly publishing. We wanted nothing more than to make it possible for others to follow Gene’s example.

We set out to build a Gene-Glass system for DIY (do-it-yourself) peer-review journal publishing that would enable others to walk in his footsteps. The result was a piece of software that we called Open Journal Systems which was released in 2001. It enabled editors to set up a journal website from which to run and publish their journal online just like Gene Glass had begun to do a decade earlier. Looking back, I can see that the software should have had a logo featuring Gene’s face on it, with that wry smile and twinkling blue eyes.

We estimate that there are currently more than 10,000 journals using Open Journal Systems as their publishing platform, with half of them publishing in the Global South. A dozen of us in the Public Knowledge Project continue to work on maintaining and upgrading the software that editors, libraries, societies, and others download from our site at no cost, under an open source license.

You could send an email today to any of the editors using OJS, whether through their library or from a server under their desk, and ask them, “so what does it cost to put your journal online?” They would, in principle, write back in the 36 languages into which the software has been translated. They would provide some multilingual version of “nada, nyet, nothing.” They have Gene Glass to thank for that. Only as it was with me and meta-analysis, they don’t know who to thank. It falls to me to do it for them. Thank you, Gene Glass, for Education Policy Analysis Archives. Thank you for responding to our survey. And thank you for meta-analysis.

Kate Corby, Michigan State University

Impatience is not always a vice: A personal perspective on working with Gene V. Glass

For over ten years I served as a founding section editor for Gene Glass’s second publishing adventure, Education Review.  By the time we started that publication, EPAA was already well established and well respected.   That fact gave us a tremendous boost as we sought to build a contributor base and attract readers. The story of how I came to be affiliated with Education Review goes a long way toward explaining why Gene has been so successful and so well loved. As a librarian buying education materials for a major research university, I buy most English language scholarly books as they are published.  But the field of education also produces a huge quantity of practical books, many built on research findings, but directed to the teacher.  I need to be able to select just the best of these types of books, and that means I need reviews.  Before Education Review, there were very few available.  I was spearheading an effort with colleagues to post reviews each month of the new materials that were flowing into our collections.  About six months into this project, at an AERA annual conference, I dropped in on a round table discussion about book reviewing.  It turned out to be Gene, trying to build enthusiasm and contributors for his latest online journal brainstorm.  I told him what I’d been doing and asked if we might join forces.  By the time I got back to Michigan I was listed as an editor of Education Review.

That type of generosity and just-do-it mindset was evident throughout our work together.  If I was in the audience when Gene was speaking, I was introduced.  When changes were needed I was consulted.   Although we rarely saw each other, we worked together, my suggestions and opinions were heeded.  At one point one of our reviewers discovered that large portions of the book she was reviewing had been plagiarized.  I sent a notice to the publisher about our findings as a courtesy.  They decided to pull the book from the market and asked us not to publish the review.   Gene was inclined to

help them save face by pulling the review.  I argued that that was unfair to the reviewer who had done extensive research, so we kept it.

Of course the fact that Gene is apparently tireless also helped.  I grew to expect a turnaround time of hours, not days, no matter when I wrote.  His impatience with delay was sometimes frustrating, as I would send him things early, wanting to publish reliably at the first of the month, but he never could wait.  The urge to get things out and available led him to develop an unusual peer review model for early issues of EPAA.  He sent out new submissions to the entire reviewer mailing list, knowing that those who were interested in the subject and had the time would respond, and giving express permission to everyone else to hit delete.

I’ve sometimes been unhappy with the slow pace of change in the scholarly publishing landscape, but as I look back at the decade plus, I see that things really have changed.  Publishers have begun to allow authors to retain some rights, many open access publications like EPAA and Education Review are now established and well-respected contributors to scholarly discourse, and academic authors are becoming more knowledgeable about rights issues.  It is a good time to take a step back and honor people like Gene Glass, who have contributed so significantly to our progress.

Michael Apple, University of Wisconsin-Madison

EPAA/AAPE and the Political Economy of Publishing

For a number of years I was a member, and then chair, of the University of Wisconsin, Madison Library committee.  I began my tenure on that committee just when the state was moving away from its commitment to adequately fund one of the best public universities in the nation.  University budgets were being eroded.  Cuts were becoming the stuff of daily life—and it was predicted that the situation would get significantly worse.  These predictions were accurate and there soon was a truly precipitous decline in state support, so much so that now state funding for the university is at a level almost unimaginable just a decade or two ago.  It has fallen from nearly 70% to only approximately 17%.   Painfully ironic jokes stating that we are the “private university of the State of Wisconsin” or the “state-located University of Wisconsin” have become ever more prevalent. [Do you want the first paragraph to be 1.5 spaced?]

The effects of all of this have been massive in terms of who can and cannot attend the university, the ever-rising costs, the increasing dependence on private money, the shrinking and at times elimination of much needed programs, and the list goes on and on.  I mention all of this because one of the things on the list bears directly on this set of comments about the importance of EPAA/AAPE.   I am referring to the crisis that all of this has caused in library acquisitions and on academic publishing.  Let me say more about this.

During the period of time I served on the Library Committee, each semester the Director of Libraries would come in with a list of journals “we could no longer afford.”  The list grew longer and longer as time went on given the decline in state support.  An intense competition soon arose.  We were faced with making choices between journals in, say, medicine and the sciences and in education, literature, and similar fields.  Similar choices had to be made over whether to cut journals published in languages other than English.

I have vivid memories of one meeting where we were given a document in which the relative costs of journals in various fields were compared.  If we wanted to keep one major journal on medical imaging we would have to cancel subscriptions to ten (yes, ten) journals in the humanities and social sciences.  A lively debate over the politics of legitimate knowledge went on for quite a while.  But ultimately the decision was made to cancel the ten journals.

As journal publishing increasingly became a major source of profit for large commercial publishers, and as the rules for tenure at even smaller “teaching” colleges and universities became wedded to an ethic of “how much have you published,” more and more journals were produced.  These journals were mainly controlled by large media and publishing conglomerates.  The cost of journals kept going up.  Public resources kept going down.  Every meeting of the Library committee now had a specified time when the painful cuts in journals had to be made.  And every meeting provided a lesson in two of the most significant questions in education at any level:  “What knowledge is of most worth?” and “Whose knowledge is of most worth?”  As is too often the case, ultimately rationality followed funding.  The situation has gotten worse, not better.

I should not have been surprised by this.  In an entire series of books, I had analyzed the complex relations among knowledge, ideology, and power.  Indeed, in some of my earlier work, I had even gotten closer to the particular dilemma that is the subject of the reflections in this brief set of comments.  I had critically examined the political economy of educational publishing (Apple, 1986).  I had detailed the ways in which markets affected what counts as “legitimate knowledge.”  I also demonstrated the ways in which the mobility patterns within publishing firms were dialectically connected to the generation of profit and how the competitive market structured both these mobility patterns and the decisions about what could and should be published.  I had also documented the ways in which particular kinds of technical/administrative knowledge had come to dominate university life and the effects this had on university life and on the kinds of decisions that were being made about what universities and its academic areas were for (Apple, 2012).

But understanding some of the major economic, political, and ideological reasons behind what the committee was facing was one thing.  Living through and having to face the economic, political, and even epistemological realities of all of these reasons at every meeting was another.

I mention these things because we can either accept this as the world tout court, the only world.  Or we can creatively begin to create another world.  This is where EPAA/AAPE enters as a truly creative intervention into a world in which profit dominates academic publishing and decisions are made in a context severely limited by an economic crisis that is decidedly worse than the period in which I was on the Library Committee.  EPAA/AAPE proves that technical skills and resources can be used in imaginative and disciplined ways that interrupt the realities of ever-rising costs and the substantive intellectual/academic/personal effects that accompany these realities. It proves that one does not need to acquiesce to the current economic rationalities that dominate journal publishing, that alternative modes of keeping serious scholarship, deliberation, and debate alive and flourishing can be collectively built and maintained.

But let us be honest.  This will be an uphill struggle.  Tenure and funding decisions are increasingly becoming dependent on publication in “high-impact” journals nationally and internationally.  Indeed, when I am at East China Normal University in Shanghai, one of my other academic appointments, I am asked to give seminars on how to publish in high-impact journals.  This is high-stakes for universities who want to gain prestige, and the funding that might come with it, in national and international ranking.  And it is definitely high-stakes for real people’s lives and careers.

Because of this, those of us who are committed to the ongoing project of creating a different publishing reality that is more collective and less dominated by profit, have other work to do.  We need to defend and continue to build electronic journals such as EPAA/AAPE.  But we also need to work just as hard on publicly questioning the systems of ranking that may make it harder for people to decide to publish their best work in such journals.

Let me end this set of reflections with a personal note of thanks to the originators of EPAA/AAPE and to those who now work so hard to expand its reach and maintain its quality.  Not only are we in their debt, but let us hope that future members of university library committees throughout the world will have a less painful time because of the creative labors of people like those behind EPAA/AAPE.

References

Apple, M. W. (1986). Teachers and Texts: A Political Economy of Class and Gender Relations in Education. New York: Routledge.

Apple, M. W. (2012). Education and Power (Routledge Classic Edition). New York: Routledge.

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