“Profiles in Digital Scholarship & Publishing: Cheryl Ball”

Interview by Elizabeth Barnett | Xchanges 14.2, Spring 2020

Toward a True OA Publishing Platform: Vega

Xchanges: In your 2015 article with Doug Eyman, History of a Broken Thing: The Multi-Journal Special Issue on Electronic Publishing, and elsewhere, you’ve spoken a lot about the critical infrastructure—scholarly, social, and technical—needed to create, sustain, and archive digital scholarly work. You’ve also been quite honest about your anger at our relatively collective failure as a field of study to address the technical infrastructure needed to track our own scholarship.

Is the development of Vega an attempt to synthesize, or standardize, these three criteria for scholarly digital publishing? A practical response to your anger about disappearing digital scholarly work?

CB: It culminates my entire career, not to put too fine a point on it. That’s the thing we learned by working primarily on a software program for the last four years: it will never be done until it just is no longer working. Software is always iterating and always improving. Vega is something that we’ve been wanting to do with Kairos for at least 15 years. I’m heading into my 18th year [with Kairos] now, and it became evident pretty early on that we couldn’t keep crafting it by hand the way that we do, even though crafting it by hand is the only reason why we’re still around. It’s so ironic.

We have this massive staff that’s constantly undergoing change—because people have academic and professional and personal lives—and that requires us to train new people and training them into the ways that we do things. We have a good set of documentation, but we realized that we couldn’t port that outside of Kairos into any other discipline because so many other disciplines don’t have the editorial, pedagogical approach that we do.

Vega is an attempt to give scholarly digital publishers some structured data that they can work with that doesn’t write any crap code on the back end. Something that then can be easily exportable and migrated into new systems while at the same time preservable in the backend through libraries or deep preservation archives.

There’s so much more that we still have to do with the journal and I would just want to get it in the right place for that. We want to be able to teach other editors and publishers how to do successful digital publishing through the platform itself just in the same way that the most innovative web texts that Kairos publishes teach their readers how to read them through the process of engaging in that generous reading strategy. We want data; data is built to teach editors and publishers how to properly and to most sustainably create and publish digital media scholarship. It’s built into the system.

All of these warm-fuzzy journals, independent journals, and presses in our discipline, they’re the ones who get to test it first. We’re figuring out how we can get that done in a way that isn’t going to take everybody’s time and money. Another part of our business plan is the creation of a new publishing house that will use Vega as the platform so that we can host for people who can’t host the software themselves. Vega has been built with journals like Xchanges in mind. It’s nice that I can attend to those interdisciplinary journals that I came from academically.