Dr. Alexander Chirila, Position Paper: Publishing with the LSS

1. The Library of Social Science and its Mission: Dedicated to the promotion of high-quality scholarship, an interdisciplinary organization positioned at the vanguard of the digital text revolution. The LSS publishes, disseminates, and promotes writings on a range of topics dealing with the psychology of war and genocide, human conflict, and the symbolism and ideation at the root of social violence.
2. Challenging the conventional reading of history as an inherently logical and rational narrative of events motivated by entirely conscious factors, the Library of Social Science invites contributors to consider new approaches to perennial questions: how is the mythology of war perpetuated? What role does the irrational play in the designs of empires? How is the mass slaughter of the 20^th and 21^st Centuries to be understood?
3. The Library of Social Science encourages and supports contributions from a variety of disciplines including psychology, sociology, anthropology, politics, and history. The LSS creates a space where myriad perspectives can come together in unconventional and innovative ways.
4. LSS is taking full advantage of the opportunities presented by the electronic market to disseminate research quickly, efficiently, and consistently.
5. Representing the highest standard of scholarship and research, the Library of Social Science reaches thousands of subscribers through its newsletter and website. Contributors accepted by the LSS will see their writing reach a wider audience than most academic journals.
6. With a formerly unprecedented range of exposure to readers throughout the world, the visibility of an article or essay published with the LSS allows writers to make an impact in real-time, contribute to ongoing discourse, and actively participate in the future of scholarship.
7. Rather than waiting months for the print run of a traditional journal, the Library of Social Science can circulate accepted essays immediately. Contributors who produce scholarship on contemporary subjects can finally keep pace with the increased speed of history. Relevant essays can be put “out there,” at the forefront of the transition from information into knowledge and data into analysis.
8. What the Library of Social Science is looking For: ongoing discourse on the Ideology of War. Thoughtful, unconventional, meaningful, and well-researched reviews and articles will be published through the newsletter and website.
9. Scholarship and the Digital Revolution: Traditionally published monographs are becoming increasingly untenable due to rising costs, decreased circulation, and the competitive advent of alternative media platforms. Traditionally published articles in peer reviewed journals reach a limited audience.

10. Scholars post blogs that garner more traffic than print essays. Online reviews, articles, and essays are incorporated into ongoing discourses at an unprecedented speed. In contrast, traditional journals linger months—even years—behind the light-speed propagation of information conducted by the World Wide Web.
11. Citation is the hallmark of a successful article and an accomplished scholar. Electronic texts reach more people at a faster speed and generate more discourse than their modern print counterparts.
12. New forms of communication and information exchange are becoming increasingly fluid. Academic discourse stands to benefit greatly from these changes, all the more so because relevant research, contributing towards collective understanding and positive change, is needed now more than ever.
13. As a counterpoint to uneducated opinion, media sensationalism, and the relentless bombardment of information, research and scholarship does far more than provide another stream of data: it offers insight, analysis, creates narrative, and draws together disparate threads of meaning into comprehensive interpretations. In order to do this, academic writing must enter the field of discourse, whether vocal, textual, or electronic.
14. Students, readers, scholars, and writers all participate in this ongoing conversation. To do otherwise would be akin to holding a conversation alone outside of the dining hall behind a closed door! In order to be heard, in order to be read, one must be willing to join in—to take a seat at the communal table and participate.
15. Information is no longer purely localized. Every bit of information has the potential to impact a worldwide audience. Translating that potential into actuality now depends on the ability of a writer to reach his or her audience. This is in turn depends on a writer’s skill, clarity, focus, and on the opportunities available to project his or her work into the public domain. The Library of Social Science offers that opportunity. The writer, in turn, is responsible for producing quality work in accordance with the highest standards.
16. This obstacle is no longer insurmountable to scholars with new ideas, challenging perspectives, and unorthodox interpretations. On the contrary, ideas are disseminated more freely. Their impact is proportionate to the attention they are able to elicit. Their value is determined by the effect they produce.
17. Writers can receive feedback on electronically published text almost as soon as it enters the public domain. They can track the effect of their ideas on the discourse. Moreover, they can modify and adapt their writing based on input and changes in audience response.
18. This allows writers more control over the process and over the exchange between their work and the audience. They assume an active role in the continued dissemination of their work, projecting it into wider and wider spheres of attention.
19. LSS publishes high quality essays and e-books that address social topics of significant relevance: the collective and national psychology of war; the irrationality of the ideations that compel leaders to pursue violence on an unprecedented scale; the underlying narratives of fear and prejudice that precipitate persecution, racism, and hatred.
20. Without attention, without a readership, ideas cannot effect change. Attention is earned when the format used to convey ideas is successfully able to reach a target audience.
21. Struggling through the lengthy process of submitting to a traditional journal or publishing a monograph is losing ground as a viable business model, more so every year. Scholars languish in anonymity going the traditional route while those who are exploring the possibilities of the electronic market see rapid returns on their investments of time and effort.
22. The Library of Social Science accepts only the highest quality scholarship and research. Contributors receive input almost immediately from published work.
23. Contributors will see their work reach thousands of readers almost instantly. Laborious processes that took years and decades to consummate in a professional way now take a fraction of the time, encouraging writers and researchers to increase productivity and build their body of work.
24. Secondary: To provide publishing alternatives to scholars in lieu of traditional journals or monographs; to reach a wider audience with greater alacrity, without sacrificing quality or integrity.
     
25. What’s this? ‘A psychological approach to culture focuses—not on the idiosyncrasies of individuals—but upon how shared desires, fantasies, anxieties and conflicts give rise to collective representations.’ That sounds interesting! I want to read more about that.”
     
26. Now, however, a scholar can “publish” his or her own work in any number of ways, through blogs, tweets, and posts. This is unfiltered and unauthorized content.
     
27. Opportunities: Education is all about networking. It seems that the world has always worked this way. Names get you in the door. Scholars—especially in a specialized environment—tend to recognize names (or brands) that keep coming up.
     
28. It’s a bit like a game: get some of the bigger names playing, invite newer scholars onto the field, and increase the sphere of dialogue so that it reaches a larger audience. Or, if you rather, it’s a bit like a concert: get the headliners (Creedence Clearwater Revival, Grateful Dead) playing, attract the right audience, infuse the affair with the appropriate tone, and you might have the nexus of a revolution on your hands.
     
29. New scholars are looking to play, and many of them have a genuinely good sound. They need a venue, and they know they’re not going to get it the old-fashioned way.

31. The “Slow” Decline of the Elite Scholarly Journal (In “The Academe Blog,” posted on October 18, 2014 by Aaron Barlow.
     
32. The elite scholarly journals, long the gatekeepers of the ivory tower, have been losing their effectiveness this last decade or so–in their gatekeeping role, at least. As these journals increasingly become profit centers in the corporate publishing industry, their real impact is constricted to only those who can afford the toll.
     
33. At the same time, as holes in the castle walls–alternative means of scholarly publication–have appeared, promotion, tenure, and re-appointment committees are becoming less enamored of the peer-reviewed article in a top journal as a major benchmark, seeing it, more and more, as simply one of many possibilities.
     
34. The decline in the importance of elite journals that we are seeing today, we now must admit, was inevitable in the face of emerging digital possibilities that are making the walls of our ivory towers as archaic as the quaint walls still standing around a few old European towns, walls of interest to tourists but keeping no one in or out.
     
35. In other words, useful research in a broad variety of disciplines appears more and more frequently outside of the elite journals. Google Scholar, admittedly, has a stake in this change, for it provides metrics that can be used to show impact beyond the established elite. As is said on the Google Scholar blog: “In the past, scholars had few means of showing the importance of their work outside of the reputations of their venues of publication. Today, a candidate for promotion can make a case for the significance of even a blog post, showing where it has been cited and how often–and can also, of course, show how many times it has been viewed (a weaker metric, in academic situations, but still of significance).”
     
36. The process of change in academic publishing has been gaining momentum for more than a decade, now. It is not unusual, today, to find scholars totally uninterested in pursuing publication in traditional venues, looking instead to maximize the impact of their work–which they can now do in informed fashion through attention to things like bibliometrics.
     
37. Today, many of the elite journals are stymied, unable to participate in the changes. Unless they are released from the strangleholds of corporate owners, they are going to find themselves replaced–no matter what other changes might take place in any particular field.
     
38. Scholars want professional conversation, and they cannot find it–certainly not in the free-ranging style it demands–when the words of some of the discussants are hidden behind paywalls, and expensive ones, at that. They are already taking advantage of the digital possibilities that have grown these last twenty years–and they will continue to do so, gatekeepers be damned.