Cirrus@Austlit

'Even within the humanities, the discipline of English is unusually diverse in both its object of study, and its approaches and methodologies. It has multiple subfields and frequently aligns with other disciplines including creative writing, cultural studies, and theatre/screen studies. As Ronan McDonald explains:

A typical department of English … might include one faculty member working on a research-funded project with colleagues from the sciences on neurological dimensions to narrative, another researching the philology of Icelandic quest narratives, another working on performativity and gender in relation to contemporary urban street theater, and another working on neglected social histories of Jacobean chapbooks. All these projects are informed by diverse agendas and methods and would provide widely different accounts of their raison d’être. (3)

'The porousness of its disciplinary identity is what makes English studies so compelling. However, this openness may also make it difficult to survive let alone flourish in the metric-driven rankings culture that currently dominates the academy, and which frequently determines institutional priorities as well as the flow of funding. Moreover, in the Australian context, waves of restructures have seen many English departments folded into larger institutional entities with which they are more or less aligned.' (Introduction)

'Despite recognition that the use of journal rankings in research assessment is problematic, they are implicitly or explicitly used by institutions to evaluate individual researchers. This essay reports on a study we undertook on behalf of the Australian University Heads of English (AUHE) investigating research assessment policies within the field of English, and their impact on academics’ publishing strategies and careers. After an initial online questionnaire, we conducted follow-up interviews with twenty-seven Australian literary studies academics from a range of institutions and at varying academic levels. Given generally widespread scepticism about the role of journal rankings in measuring quality, we asked these academics how they think literary studies can and should be evaluated. What we discovered was a broad and rich range of responses to this challenging question, as well as various creative ways literary studies academics negotiate questions of value in relation to institutional priorities and modes of evaluation. This paper suggests that broadening conceptions of value may be an important strategic response to the current institutional context in Australia.' (Publication abstract) 

'Publishers of academic books in Australia have evolved in response to the crisis in scholarly publishing by adapting to the opportunities afforded by digital technologies for faster, cheaper, and more dynamic publishing approaches. Academic authors are at the core of the scholarly publishing landscape, so publishers need to understand their motives and needs. This paper examines data from a survey of academic authors in the humanities and social sciences (HSS) in Australia. Our aim for the survey was to understand the publishing experiences, behaviours, and perceptions of these authors. We discovered their expectations for publishers are high. They want fast turnaround, high-quality editing and production values, and cheaper books, which run up against three principal constraints for all scholarly publishers: quality, time, and cost. The prestige and reputation of a publisher are critical, and authors are primarily interested in traditional success measures of academic performance. Societal impact or engagement with research end-users was seen as less important. The findings of this project highlight a number of contradictions and tensions within the scholarly publishing landscape, and they have tangible implications for practices in HSS for authors and publishers, as well as for grant funders and university administrators who adopt policies and assign criteria for research evaluation.'

Source: Abstract.