The Futures of Scholarly Publishing--Urgently and Again

Yesterday I was surprised to find out that a paper I presented at the American Council of Learned Societies, "The Futures of Scholarly Publishing," has been reprinted in what looks to be the definitive book on this subject for our times, The State of Scholarly Publishing:  Challenges and Opportunities (ISBN 978-1-4128-1058-6), published by Transaction Publishers at Rutgers University, and edited by the remarkable Albert N. Greco, a distinguished professor in the Graduate School of Business Administration at Fordham University who, over the last several years, has made indelible contributions to all of us by giving us his  professional economic and business perspective on the crisis in scholarly publishing. 

If you are interested in reading my article, originally presented in 2004 but which (I just reread it for the first time in five years) is even more urgent now than it was then, you can do so online where it is part of the ACLS Occasional Paper series, available as a pdf along with other addresses in that forum, as #57 at the ACLS website:  http://www.acls.org/programs/Single.aspx?id=154  

However, if academic publishing is a topic near and dear to your heart--and if you are an academic in any field from African history to archeology to the various sciences taken over by commercial price-gauging publishers; if you are a publisher; if you are a librarian; if you are dean with a faculty coming up for tenure or promotion; or if you are a provost charged with paying for all of this . . . . well, then, you should buy this book. 

Al Greco is that rare bird (I don't know him, by the way, but I wish I knew more of his flock) who uses a model of interdisciplinarity where one takes one training, experience, observation, expertise, and intuition (maybe that's the most important part) from one field, turns to another field, learns that new field exhaustively, but then supplies a perspective that is essentially "outside" the field in the same way an ethnographer can study another culture precisely by being outside it.  There are many valuable modes and forms of interdisciplinarity, but this particular form--a specialist using his or her tools to look at a different or "other" specialized body of work--is relatively rare.  It's quite valuable when done well, for the reason that any form of informed outsider perspective always is.  You see things differently when you view from outside.  Not necessarily better but differently, and that difference helps everyone, including those who are inside, to see in a new way. Outsiders often see facets of a culture that insiders cannot see any more than we can see the air we breathe.  He often crunches numbers, for example, and turns up findings that are very useful for those who offer other forms of analysis.  (I personally have an intellectual stake in bringing together quantitative and qualitative forms of analysis so I especially like this.)   What he's producing isn't necessarily what a scholarly humanist would produce but it's useful, and it rounds out a picture we all would like to see more clearly.  So, thank you, Al, for that perspective.  It's a vital and necessary complement to other ways of assessing a mode of communication in transition.

Here's an example:  In his cover letter to me, announcing the publication of The State of Scholarly Publishing:  Challenges and Opportunities, he mentions, for example, that he put together this collection while in the midst of researching a study about Wall Street's investments in book publishing, distribution, and retailing.  Here are some amazing tidbits:   Border's, the mega-chain of bookstores, is controlled by a hedge fund.  Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt is controlled by a Cayman Islands-based private equity company.   Take that in.  Think about it.   Now, be pleased, very pleased, that someone like Professor Greco is also looking at the academic community and our own version of control, hedging, equity, and offshore publishing.

I am very proud that my essay was selected for this book. I know several of the other pieces and I admire them and I know others that I don't agree with--but even the terms of the disagreement are helpful.  It's a smart selection, in that sense, of not offering a unitary answer (any more than there is any one way to "solve" the meltdown of Wall Street), but of posing a number of possible entrances into a thorny and crucial problem.

And now a disclaimer:  I haven't read this book yet.  It may turn out that there are things in it I don't like at all.  It's just been published this week.  I've read several essays reprinted in it, though, and I know this will be interesting and, more important, I know I will come away from it better informed. 

It was interesting going back and reading my own essay which, as I said above, I hadn't read in five years; it was interesting to go back and take a look at both the changes and also the continuities between that piece and one I gave at MLA this past December.  That paper (called "Research Is Teaching") will be coming out this year in the ADE Bulletin.  It is directed specifically at English teachers and our self-hatred embodied in the fact that 88.8% of departments in Carnegie/Research Doctorate institutions report that publication of a monograph for tenure is "very important" or "important" and yet most profs in English do not teach monographs in their courses.  Rather, they teach "course paks" which profits no one but Kinkos.  

Ask any book editor at a university press.  Englishers write a lot of long (too long) books, sometimes without much regard for the fact that someone out there will be reading them.  Maybe that's realistic, given that relatively few English profs buy other Englisher books--and they assign relatively fewer in their courses.  But it shouldn't be that way.   If we believe in what we do (and I happen to be a believer), we should be writing for readers, first of all, and, second, we should be reading one another's work and, third, we should be teaching it.  Right now, a sale of 300 or 400 copies of a monograph is a lot.  That's appalling.   The result, materially, is that we do not pay our own way and certainly not that of junior members of our profession.  Intellectually, our students never learn the value the genre of the monograph because we teach excerpts in our courses, even our graduate courses.  We do not teach the kind of extended, nuanced thinking that goes into the genre that our very graduate students will have to produce for tenure.   We say the scholarly monograph represents the epitome of our profession and a hurdle to "lifetime employment" at a research university.   So we do not practice what we preach, adding to the crisis in scholarly publishing and the crisis in the profession of English in particular. 

Of course I am also an avid proponent of online scholarly publishing, including multimedia and multimodal scholarship (which I absolutely believe, as I've written many times in this Cat in the Stack blog, should count for tenure).  And we may well decide, as a profession, to give up the monograph as our gold standard.  But think about the implications of having such a monolithic standard but then not even supporting it with our book-buying and book-assigning habits. 

But that is my focus now.  In the essay "The Futures of Scholarly Publishing" reprinted in The State of Scholarly Publishing my focus isn't just  English.   I look at the entire cycle of writing, publishing, distributing, reading, and assigning books as a practice with many other comments on the cost-effectiveness of online publishing too.  The other essays in this collection offer other points of view, other object lessons, and other examples from the whole system of academic publishing today. 

As cutbacks face all of education, scholarly publishing will be even more imperiled.  If you want to defend the publishers dedicated to making your work available, then you better be well-informed.  This volume offers the one-stop-shopping opportunity to read a spectrum of arguments (some of them cynical, some optimistic, some practical, some idealistic) so you can be as informed as you need to be when talking to your dean or your provost or, if you are a dean or provost, when you talk to your department heads, faculty, librarians, and university press directors and editors. 

There's something here for everyone,  articles selected from the pages of the Journal of Scholarly Publishing by someone who understands the business of publishing in a world where, as we have seen from the recent demise of Wall Street, there's been an awful lot of over-extension, inflation, devaluation, Ponzi schemes, and sometimes, well, highway robbery.  

Who are the robber baron's?   Sometimes (yes, I mean you, English professors!), it is our own short-sighted book writing and book buying habits that are the problem.  Some of the "crisis of scholarly publishing" is of our making.  Sometimes the Ponzi schemes start with us.