Crises and Opportunities: The Futures of Scholarly Publishing Reviewed

by Charis Chapman

Traditionally, university libraries, flush with funds, have been the mainstay of scholarly publishing. They bought all the latest, most important books and maintained subscriptions to all the important journals. But in today’s environment of budget cuts and rising tuitions, many libraries (especially those at public universities) are being forced to cut back. Retailers, meanwhile, are increasingly corporate. In an age in which book-selling is dominated by chains like Borders and Barnes and Noble, it is increasingly difficult for scholarly books to reach their market. Unsure of being able to recoup their losses, publishers are less and less willing to take on academic books—especially those which do not have immediate appeal to a broad audience or are unlikely to be used as textbooks. Meanwhile, university faculty in the humanities whose tenure prospects depend on being able to cite book credits are scrambling to be published—and are finding fewer and fewer publishers willing to accept their work. These are just a few of the factors behind the current crisis in academic publishing.

In a meeting of the American Council of Learned Societies last year, panelists Carlos J. Alonso, Cathy N. Davidson, John M. Unsworth, and Lynne Withey discussed these and other important issues in-depth, and their remarks were published in an ACLS occasional paper entitled Crises and Opportunities: The Futures of Scholarly Publishing. The panelists were a diverse group, representing several different perspectives on the publishing crisis. Carlos Alonso is a Professor of Romance Languages and Chair of the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania; Cathy Davidson is Vice-Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies and Director of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University; John Unsworth, at the time of last year’s ACLS meeting, was Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia; and Lynne Withey is Director of the University of California Press. This paper addresses each of their remarks in turn, closing by relating those remarks to the experience of the Clemson University Digital Press.

In his remarks to the ACLS, Carlos Alonso addresses two main issues in scholarly publishing: the relationship between publication and tenure, and the difficult issue of funding scholarly publication at a time when most public universities are facing significant budget cuts. Many young academics, he explains, are caught in a double-bind. In order to be granted tenure, they need to publish a book. But because academic publishing is in such a bad way, publishers are reluctant to accept manuscripts from those who do not already have book credits. Alonso responds to two proposed remedies for this problem: (1) granting subventions to authors to help cover the cost of producing a first book, and (2) changing tenure requirements so that a body of articles can be accepted in lieu of a book, thus sidestepping the entire issue of book publication.

Subventions, in Alonso’s judgment, are a good idea, but might potentially threaten impartiality in the process of selecting manuscripts to be published. If the idea is that subventions are to be paid by scholars’ universities, differences in the policies of individual universities inevitably become a factor. One university may find that it can provide several $10,000 subventions; another may be able to offer twice that sum; yet another might be unwilling or unable to provide subventions at all. What would be the impact of such a state of affairs on publishing? Would publishers be more likely to accept the manuscript of Scholar A, who has access to a $15,000 subvention, or that of Scholar B, whose work is superior to Scholar A’s but who has no subvention? “One cannot,” Alonso argues, “remedy a crisis of legitimation by introducing into the system under pressure an element that creates legitimation problems of a different kind (14). One solution, he proposes, is to award subventions through a process of peer review after a book has already been accepted for publication. He also charges professional organizations with the task of creating and awarding subventions, perhaps through modest fee hikes. He sees a lot of promise in such a step.

Regarding the relationship between book publication and tenure, Alonso is much more skeptical. If universities decided to consider article collections in lieu of book credits in tenure cases, he says, “[t]he problem of finding a publication venue would . . . be resolved through the ingenious strategy of changing the rules of the game, yet awarding the same prize in the end (tenure)” (10). But, he points out, this does not really solve any problems, since many journals are impacted by the same declines in readership and library purchases that plague the scholarly book-publishing industry. In addition, he feels that switching to articles instead of books as tenure criteria simply because it is difficult to get a book published might make it look as though universities were letting scholarship take second place to convenience. Most importantly as far as he is concerned, a book is a much more significant accomplishment than a series of articles. His attachment to the book is at once intellectual and emotional:

Anyone, who has written a manuscript, submitted it for consideration to a press, and seen it through to publication can attest to the intense and compelling intellectual experience that the affair represents: the choice of texts, the marshaling of source and evidence, the construction of an argument that spans several chapters, the bibliographic research, the engagement with the readers’ reports, the reading of proofs, the choice of journals for review, and so on. (14)

Articles, he feels, may indeed be significant pieces of scholarship, but their necessary limitations of scale and scope render them inferior to the book-length scholarly treatment.

John Unsworth could not disagree with him more. Having himself been granted tenure based on a body of articles, Unsworth sees the monograph as both outdated and unnecessary. Why, he asks, would anybody write a book when they could construct a thematic research collection? Therein lies the future of scholarship—at least in his estimation. This argument would seem to broaden conventional tenure criteria, but in fact Unsworth’s definition of the “thematic research collection” (41) is shockingly narrow. It runs as follows:

[a thematic research collection must be]

1. necessarily electronic (because of the cost of 2, 3, and 8);

2. constituted of heterogeneous datatypes (in other words, multimedia);

3. extensive but thematically coherent;

4. structured but open-ended;

5. designed to support research;

6. authored (usually involving multiple authors);

7. interdisciplinary; and

8. gathering digital primary resources (themselves second-generation digital resources)

When I first started reading his remarks, I assumed that what he meant by “thematic research collection” was a series of related, published articles—all treating on, say, love in medieval literature or the impact of the Boer War on the British consciousness or gender portrayals in the modern cinema—that, taken together, constitute a unified body of scholarship. But if I understand him correctly, what he’s really talking about is the creation and maintenance of a web page or digital archive. I am rather skeptical about this. Though I can easily see how, in some cases, such work would in itself constitute enough of a contribution to a scholar’s field to justify awarding tenure solely based on that qualification, I find the thought that such work should replace the book appalling. Not all research is readily adaptable to electronic format, and some pieces of scholarship simply work best as books. On the other hand, someone must tackle the task of compiling the databases of the future. But surely there is room in academia for more than one type of scholarship! Unsworth makes the point that online archives of scholarship enjoy far wider audiences than the print monograph. But I would be willing to bet that scholarly books would attract similarly wide audiences were they available online. The issue as far as print scholarship goes is not lack of audience so much as lack of access. People can’t buy what they don’t know about, and convenient though Amazon.com is, it doesn’t allow you to browse through a book to see if it might be useful. The other big issue is money: academic books and journals are expensive, and the average academic cannot afford to buy many such books in a year or maintain more than a couple of subscriptions at a time. And students can afford even less. Unsworth agrees with me here, arguing that “we could enlarge the audience for humanities scholarship not by dumbing it down, but by making it more readily available” (43). But his solution is to convert everything to digital media, because he seems to think that nobody reads print anymore. Because, as a poor college student, I do not buy scholarly books or subscribe to journals, Unsworth would dismiss me as an audience for such print resources. But that just means the university library is that much more important as a resource for me. I am part of the audience, because I visit the library. This year, I have read, in part or in full, any number of old-fashioned, printed books and articles on topics ranging from ancient mythology to pirates to the crusades to modern literature. My usage numbers don’t show up anywhere, but that doesn’t mean that my library should get rid of its books and switch to all-digital archives, where each visit could be properly recorded to allay the anxieties of the number-crunchers. Why, I ask, can’t we have both? Digital archives are a useful resource for discovering new sources, browsing for content, and accessing multimedia information such as sound and video clips. Long analyses, however, are really better read in print. In an ideal world, you would be able to conduct a search online, take a quick look through the books and articles your search turned up, and then dive into the stacks to retrieve paper copies of the most useful ones for more detailed study.

Whether paper, electronic media, or both play a role in the future of scholarly publishing, cost will inevitably be a factor. Unsworth does not really deal with the issue, apart from pointing out that Alonso’s proposed subventions would not provide for the needs of all publishing scholars. Cathy Davidson, however, addresses funding at some length. “The bottom line,” she insists, “is that scholarly publishing isn’t financially feasible as a business model—never was intended to be, and should not be. If scholarship paid, we wouldn’t need university presses” (24). In general, she favors Alonso’s subvention proposal, but thinks that the money should go directly to struggling university presses rather than being attached to a particular manuscript. The essence of her argument is that, if the scholarly and professional community wants university and scholarly presses to continue turning out high-quality projects, it is going to have to be willing to shoulder some of the financial burden. This could be done through modestly hiked membership dues or $500 pay cuts to university faculty salaries that would go into a book-publishing fund, where it would be accessible to all who needed it.

I seem to have moved away from tenure issues here, but I will sidestep the subject slightly by citing Davidson’s persuasive argument that today’s crisis in scholarly publication should be considered independently of debates about tenure criteria. Publishers should concentrate on publishing good books irrespective of tenure concerns, and scholars should concentrate on producing good scholarship regardless of the difficulties they may face getting it published.

Lynne Withey has an interesting take on the purported decline in (paying) readership that has brought scholarly publishing to the current crisis. Publishers suffer, she argues, not from a lack of readers, but from an excess in output:

[I]n 1960 there were 60 university presses operating in the United States. Today there are 96. There are, in addition, many other organizations publishing scholarly books and journals; the membership of the Association of American University Presses now stands at about 120. . . . In 1963 . . . university presses published, on average, 41 titles. By 1993, the figure had more than doubled, and has remained at about that level since then. (46)

Since we can’t very well go shutting down presses and telling scholars not to write, we must look at other approaches. Speaking as a publisher, Withey likes the idea of subsidizing presses through subventions or grants from universities and professional organizations. But by itself, she feels, a funding increase would not solve the problem. She has two other ideas of how to address the crisis. First, she contends that we should take advantage of the technology now available. “Arguments about the deficiencies of digital technology,” she declares, “are becoming my biggest pet peeve. Electronic and print publishing are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, the distinction will eventually become irrelevant” (50). Most, if not all, journals and publishing houses now prepare text electronically. Many retain electronic copy of their products, and some have made such content available online. She argues, therefore, that print-on-demand is a viable and relatively inexpensive option for keeping works of scholarship in print that might otherwise become unavailable—such as back-issues of journals or highly specialized scholarly books with small print runs.

Withey’s second proposal, which evidently has met with a great deal of resistance, is that some books be published more like journals. Publishing houses, she says, are best suited to take on projects with a fairly broad appeal whose sales will be sufficient to offset the costs of “cranking up the machine.” Many professional organizations and academic departments already have such machines going for the purpose of publishing journals and occasional papers (such as the one that these remarks appear in). Could such organizations (and their resources) not also take on the occasional esoteric monograph or specialized book series? Furthermore, “[i]f digital libraries and university computing centers have already developed sophisticated technical infrastructures, can they extend their technical expertise to include providing electronic publishing services?” (52)

These proposals may have sounded all hypothetical and wishy-washy to Withey’s audience, but they are being implemented at Clemson University even as we speak. For many years, the Clemson University English Department has put out two journals, The South Carolina Review and The Upstart Crow: A Shakespeare Journal. Now, these journals form the “two shoulders of [Clemson’s] publishing house,” as Dr. Wayne Chapman put it (4). Currently, Dr. Chapman is responsible for maintaining both “shoulders,” since he edits both The South Carolina Review and The Upstart Crow. Since 2001, he has also been director of the Clemson University Center for Electronic and Digital Publishing, which oversees both journals and the Clemson University Digital Press. All of these ventures are run out of his office. His shelves are stacked high with issues of Clemson’s literary journals. In one corner, manuscripts in various stages of review spill out of bulging cardboard boxes. In another are invariably stacked boxes of freshly-delivered publications still waiting to be distributed. Much of the work is done by English Department graduate students and students in the MAPC (Masters of Professional Communications) program. Everyone benefits from this arrangement: the students gain experience, the CEDP continues to produce books and journals, and the public ends up with a quality product. The system is relatively self-sustaining. As Dr. Chapman puts it, the “sale of [one] book will support another book and another student. And so on and so forth” (9). But continuing budget cuts in the state of South Carolina put all the programs on which CEDP depends—the Clemson University graduate program in English, the MAPC program, funding for salaries for enough faculty to teach classes and maintain these programs—in jeopardy. It is all very well to suggest that journal editors, new technology, and existing infrastructures can help restore academic publishing to its former glory. There are many who are willing, and digital technology certainly opens up the field. But for such ventures to be sustainable long-term, the institutions in which they are often fundamentally based—i.e., universities—must be secure. Whether or not such proves to be the case in chronically—and increasingly!—underfunded states like South Carolina remains to be seen.

Works Cited

Alonso, Carlos J., Cathy N. Davidson, John M. Unsworth, and Lynne Withey. Crises and Opportunities: The Futures of Scholarly Publishing. ACLS Occasional Paper, no. 57. New York: American Council of Learned Societies, 2004. [This monograph constitutes the proceedings of a session on “Crises and Opportunities: The Futures of Scholarly Publishing” presented at the ACLS annual meeting on May 10, 2003. The co-authors each contribute a chapter and are referred to here by last name and page reference.]

Chapman, Wayne K. “Writing Literature/Writing and Literature: What We Publish and What We Teach.” Literature and Digital Technologies: W. B. Yeats, Virginia Woolf, Mary Shelley, and William Gass. Ed. Karen Schiff. Clemson, SC: Clemson University Digital Press, 2003. 3-13.