Nobel Prize-winner Brian Schmidt, in a National Press Club address on 30 May 2012, reflected that academics’ reputations were now ‘almost totally based on our publications’. The argument that the reward system encourages writing for the discipline and the funder, not for the reader, leads onto Helen Sword’s practical and useful book, Stylish Academic Writing. Sword, Associate Professor in the Centre for Economic Development at the University of Auckland, writes, ‘For many academics, “stylish academic writing” is at best an oxymoron and at worst a risky business’, as ‘colleagues reject as unserious any academic writing that deliberately seeks to engage and entertain’.

In order to measure the gap between the academic perception of good writing and what is actually published, Sword undertook various studies, including a ‘stylistic analysis’ of one thousand peer-reviewed articles across various disciplines. This revealed a ‘startling gap between how academics describe good writing and the turgid prose they regularly produce’. In order to relieve stylistic blockages, Sword provides useful tips and commentaries, with comments from scholars such as Stephen Greenblatt, Gillian Beer, and Anthony Grafton, to enhance textual clarity and accessibility.

Greg Thompson, Lecturer in Education at Murdoch University, has echoed Sword’s desire for accessibility beyond the ‘inviolable rules’ of the discipline. With reference to the Australian Research Council’s Excellence in Research in Australia (ERA) exercise, Thompson has commented on The Conversation: ‘The ERA process means that many research articles are written up in such an obtuse, jargonistic manner to appeal to smaller and smaller groups of peers who review for specific articles.’

Universities seeking higher positions in global research league tables also encourage a ‘mimetic drift’ to the use of publication metrics. Glyn Davis, vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne, highlighted, in his review of Stefan Collini’s book What are Universities For?, the ‘rigid orthodoxy that has descended on the sector with each university aspiring to the same narrow measures of esteem’ (ABR, May 2012).

This leads back to Sydney University, where scholars who have not produced four ‘eligible research outputs’ in three years, in conjunction with other performance measures, are threatened with redundancy or being moved to teaching-only positions. At Sydney it is alleged that neither the length nor the quality of articles was initially measured. Sword has a revealing table that lists the average number of authors, page numbers, citations, or footnotes in articles from ten disciplines. Medicine tops the list with an average of 9.6 authors per nine-page article. Anthropology has only 1.9 authors, history 1.1, and literary studies one author per article, which speaks volumes for the way different disciplines function and publish. The average extent of a law article is forty-three pages from 1.4 authors, and twenty-four for higher education from 1.8 authors.

Christina Parolin, executive director of the Australian Academy of Humanities, has also recently commented on The Conversation that, ‘In the sciences, you’ll get a research team or a lab and everybody’s name will get on the article ... So in the sciences you get people who can claim ... not illegitimately – 15 journal articles a year. That practice just doesn’t exist in the humanities.’

Sword notes the ‘powerful role of citation styles in reinforcing disciplinary epistemologies’. Recent bibliometric studies have revealed how stylistic ‘tricks’ can impact citation counts, apart from the fact that an apparently increasing number of journal editors and publishers coerce academics to include additional citations to the journal publishing the article.

Parolin also commented, ‘Journal articles aren’t seen as the main form of publishing output for the humanities; it is still the book, the monograph, that is the principal output. No citation indices can capture that form of publishing.’ This is not the place to comment in depth on the issues relating to the scholarly monograph in Australia (see ‘Book to What Future? The Scholarly Monograph in the Digital Era’  on the website of the National Scholarly Communications Forum), but the success of Australian open-access scholarly monograph publishing through the e-presses of Australian National University, Sydney, Adelaide, Monash, and UTS was reflected in NSCF’s latest forum.

In 2012 I was a judge for both the Non-Fiction and History categories of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards. A number of the monographs submitted represented many years of research and meticulous writing, some representing over a decade of work. The present quantitative frameworks may well mitigate against such monographs being written in the future, as scholars in the humanities and social sciences ‘salami slice’ their intended books into articles to gain more metric brownie points, or struggle to meet short-term publication goals. In so doing we risk narrowing the capacity for considered reflection and extended narrative argument.

If metrics are to be used, a wider framework needs to be adopted, including public impact assessments and usage analyses. David Sweeney, director of Research, Innovation and Skills at the Higher Education Funding Council for England, has called on the arts and humanities to make their own case in terms of promoting their research to society. A wider definition of ‘impact’ is currently being introduced in England in relation to scholarly evaluation. In Australia, however, for a variety of reasons, we are still in a scholarly publishing winter of discontent, compared to the overseas ‘academic springs’.

It was disappointing, in this context, when Margaret Sheil, the former CEO of the Australian Research Council and now provost of Melbourne University, recently downplayed the benefits of open access to research funded by the ARC. Gavin Moodie, Principal Policy Adviser at RMIT, was one of several higher education commentators who were dismayed, as he termed it, by Sheil’s ‘simplistic understanding of open access’ and by her inability to see the benefits of enhanced access to Australian scholarly knowledge for fellow researchers, the general public, and the independent scholar. The latter, in Australia, has been particularly disadvantaged by a lack of access to scholarly content in the digital era due to high publisher subscription ‘firewalls’.

In the digital era, the potential to provide the widest possible dissemination of scholarly research may best be expressed in Thomas Jefferson’s words from 1788 that ‘By far the most important bill in our whole code is that for the diffusion of knowledge among the people.’ The Sword in this case combines mightily with the pen or the keyboard.