Elephant in the conference room: The Public Historian
22 April 2012 – Cathy Stanton
Marty Blatt, John Dichtl, Randy Bergstrom, Bob Weyeneth
You wouldn’t have known it from the Twitter feed over the past few days, but a steady undercurrent of the conference conversation among public historians in Milwaukee has been the situation with the field’s flagship journal, The Public Historian, and NCPH’s announcement in January that it would be terminating its more than 30-year relationship with the University of California at Santa Barbara, its partner in publishing the journal. Noting that recent negotiations with UCSB had not led to what the organization’s leadership considered a viable arrangement to continue the status quo, NCPH stated its intention of relocating its publication activities to the east coast and embarking on a new partnership involving American University’s Public History Program and the Smithsonian Institution. The initial announcement noted the hope that The Public Historian would remain the name of this new venture, but that negotiations with UCSB were continuing on that front.
The response within the public history community has been strong and sharply divided. Some have seen NCPH’s new plans as a rash move that threatens to split the professional energies and personal loyalties of a relatively small and quite close-knit organization and field. Others have welcomed the proposed shift as a changing of the guard in the profession after an extraordinarily long run of our signature journal at the same institution. Many have been on the fence, waiting to see how the UCSB/NCPH discussions pan out. Although as an NCPH board member during the run-up to this situation I was aware of the many reasons why those confidential discussions couldn’t be held in a more open way, I’m also sympathetic to the viewpoint that this crucial decision for the field deserved more transparency and consultation.
All of this has made for an interesting and sometimes uncomfortable subtext to the Milwaukee conference. So it was no surprise that this afternoon’s membership forum on the journal was a much-anticipated and well-attended session, with more than a hundred people gathering to raise questions and hear from the organization’s leadership. NCPH Executive Director John Dichtl, outgoing and incoming board Presidents Marty Blatt and Bob Weyeneth, and Public Historian editor Randy Bergstrom responded to concerns from the audience, after giving a brief overview of some of the backstory to the January announcement.
Noting that this was “a fast-breaking story,” Weyeneth started things off with the latest update, which is that NCPH and UCSB had agreed yesterday to a two-year timeline (still to be ratified by the two organizations) to extend the negotiations and explore various options for the future of the journal: continuing the partnership, adding additional partners, or going separate ways in a better-prepared and–it is to be hoped–more amicable transition. While dissolving the relationship is still a possibility, Bergstrom noted that this option actually allows the partners “to be venturesome”–that is, to look beyond the status quo in a number of directions.
Questions from the audience were wide-ranging and forward-looking, and the session generated what felt to me like a generally positive and hopeful sense that good things could come out of what has begun as a difficult conversation. Attendees asked questions about the actual sticking-points of the past negotiations, the financial side of the NCPH/UCSB partnership and the NCPH investment in a new journal, the ways that NCPH members are currently using The Public Historian, the process by which the partners and stakeholders will work out the questions that remain on the table, what kinds of “best practices” we might learn from the editorial and structural arrangements of other journals, and how digital publication might fit into the “journal for the 21st century” that NCPH is hoping to foster, among other things.
I took two main things away from the session. First, as John Dichtl noted, it’s now possible to talk openly about these issues and arrangements, which is infinitely more productive than having to talk around them as has been largely necessary until now. And that feels good.
And second, NCPH’s interest in really pushing for newer forms of public history scholarship, particularly in the digital realm, seemed confirmed by my reading of the Twitter feed during the session. It lit up around points relating to more open-access content, questions about the usefulness of the traditional journal format for newer practitioners, and the Press Forward initiative that we have been exploring with the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, reflecting the grasp that Twitter-savvy public historians have of the possibilities that exist in these new media. Laura Feller commented that she feels old when people talk about “new media,” but that she recognizes the importance of these realms for those who are increasingly stepping into the profession and the organization. John Dichtl followed up on this with a comment that I really liked: he noted that there are lots of great ways that we can cross-pollinate between the journal, this blog, and NCPH’s various other publications, but that we’re not sure yet what’s in “the space in between”–that’s what remains to be discovered. And that feels good, too.
~ Cathy Stanton
I have been following the discussion on the H-Public, the Newsletter, and on some blogs. I read the emails I get from NCPH. I have to be honest. I still have no idea what the sticking points between the two organizations are. I understand they have something to do with open access and new media, etc, etc, but the actual positions of the two groups is a mystery to me. Have I missed something? Will there be transcripts from this meeting for those of us who could not attend? Is there a web site I have missed? I would love to give express my opinion, but I have no idea what that opinion is. Sorry to sound exasperated, but this has been going on for months with very few details shared. I understand the need for confidentiality, but can we now learn details.
Again, my apologies if I have missed an email or newsletter. Just tell me where to go and I will.
I was trying to adhere to our own conventions of keeping posts under 1000 words, so didn’t include all the details, but here’s how that question was answered when it was posed in the session. The main sticking points are as follows:
(1) how to configure the Editor and Managing Editor positions and where they should be housed;
(2) who holds the trademark to The Public Historian; and a related issue:
(3) if the NCPH/UCSB partnership does end, on what terms should that happen? (i.e. who “owns” which aspects of the journal?)
These are obviously just point-form answers and I assume and hope that there will be more detailed communications coming soon from the NCPH leadership, who can speak to this much more authoritatively than I can (a transcript of the meeting may be a good idea). But as you can see, the big issues have to do with management and ownership, not with new media – we’re all agreed that we should be moving in that direction in some way.
Thank you. I didn’t mean to come off accusatory to you Cathy, though in rereading my post and your response I fear it may have been taken as such. Here and on H-Public you have shared what you could often. Thanks.
No worries – I certainly understand your concerns and didn’t read your post as accusatory at all. It’s been frustrating for many of us not to be able to speak more plainly!
So what were the answers to these questions? This post doesn’t really provide much insight into the whys and hows and what’s of this situation for those of us not in the know or at the meeting.
see above
Glad this is out in the open.
I hope the NCPH will seize this opportunity to break away from the suffocating conventions of a scholarly journal. Most of all, any new journal must be open access. It is astonishing to me that the Public Historian is not available to the public unless they join the organization. Our members contribute articles to the journal, volunteer reviewers work on the articles, then they go straight behind a pay wall where hardly anyone can read them.
I don’t know how much the NCPH receives from JSTOR each year, but the costs of this arrangement are HUGE. Our organization loses relevance and audience when we hide our work under a bushel.
There are other advantages to starting over as well. I would love to see something closer to a magazine than a scholarly journal (the conventions of academic articles are not relevant to most public historians). We can publish digitally with print-on-demand for those who prefer paper copies, we can incorporate multimedia, we can–well the sky is the limit.
But the most important thing is that a new journal be open access. Every year, JSTOR turns away 150 MILLION attempts to read journal articles! We are public historians, our work needs to be accessible to the public.
First, huge thanks to the NCPH leadership for navigating these negotiations. I’d like to second what Larry Cebula is saying. There are innovative, creative ideas being discussed for the future of the journal, which I hope we seize. While I understand the need for a peer-reviewed journal for our academic colleagues, I hope that there’s equal attention paid to the needs of practitioners, who have diverse backgrounds (like myself). Having a fertile relationship between the blog and the journal, for example, makes content available to the wider public while also keeping the journal as a bonus of membership. Insuring that the varied audiences who read the journal are taken into consideration, while also maintaining a critical intellectual engagement with issues around public history is, to me, the sweet spot NCPH should aim for..
Those of you looking for a sense of the meeting itself might want to check out the Twitter feed #ncph2012 — several people tweeted the discussion.
A PH journal would gain in becoming OA ? The web is there to facilitating this option and public historians want to “open” knowledge to wider communities. But printed journals still have a sense in the academic world and also continue to be an enjoyable object. Receiving it at home by post in Florence is something exciting each times it happens. And this also for digital historians used to do everything online. Please keep in mind that a nice printed product has still a sense in the virtual world and is partially OA when distributed together with a membership subscription to NCPH,
I agree, Serge – there’s a continuum between “open” and “closed” which doesn’t map neatly onto the “print/digital” distinction.
To clarify, I think that the new journal should absolutely have a print version that would be mailed to members, as well as an open access digital version with the same content and some webby additions like podcasts and author interviews.
The model here is the Atlantic magazine, which by putting its web version first has actually increased print sales and subscriptions, even as the rest of the magazine industry contracts: http://mashable.com/2011/12/19/the-atlantic-digital-first/
Yes – one of the things we’ve been discussing is the work-flow aspect of digital publishing – i.e. rather than going from print to web, things might go in the other direction, or some fruitful combination of both. It’s taking some time to get our heads around this, but we’re working on it!