Journal of Journal Performance Studies

Nicholas Knouf’s official statement:

I am very happy to announce the launching of the Journal of Journal Performance Studies.

Journal of Journal Performance Studies (JJPS) is a series of three interrelated works that engage with academic publishing. The project consists of a Firefox extension, an online radio, and a journal. The JJPS Firefox Extension overlays bibliometric data, graphs of journal ownership, and journal cost onto publisher websites. The extension also replaces advertisements on scholarly sites to provide a glimpse into the future of scholarly distribution. JJPS Radio is designed as a fully-automated internet radio station, presenting recitations of articles in our database of hundreds, translations of texts into sound, and news and views important for the study of journal performance. JJPS Radio suggests not only new methods for the dispersion of academic work, but also re-purposes academic texts as its source material. The Journal is an experiment in the propagation of scholarly work. The hope is that the journal will develop into an ongoing project on the limits of contemporary intellectual representation.

His less official announcement is a bit more obviously witty:

JJPS started as a result of my own disgust over the absurd prices for academic journals. Thinking about modes of distribution of digital content, and the fights over “piracy” started by the various media industries, I considered what would possibly be the logical conclusion of the crackdowns on the passing of files in their “native” formats. If the sharing of MP3 files, movies, and now PDFs continues to be criminalized, what other possibilities for distribution might exist? Given the textual nature of much scholarly publishing — and since authors often present their paper aloud at conferences — what would be the potential of an online radio station that consisted of nothing but recitations of academic articles?

This question lead to a myriad of directions, as the project itself shows. Because of my recent work with MAICgregator, a separate Firefox extension looking at the military-academic-industrial complex, I was interested in how a Firefox extension could contribute to our understandings of one potential future of scholarly publishing where the Google worldview dominates all. Thus the JJPS Firefox extension, software that not only provides information about the absurd journal costs as mentioned above, but also presents a myriad of “factors” and advertisement replacements that shows how bibliometrics and worry about Google’s influence might change how journals present and market themselves.