Publishing crisis

The MLA's Profession 2004 features four essays on the "crisis in publishing" by Judith Ryan, Philip Lewis, Jennifer Crewe, and Domna C. Stanton.  All of the essays converge on a number of key points:

• Scholarly monographs !=profitable publishing.
• University presses cannot rely on libraries to purchase their books in mass quantities.  Nor can they rely on academics to purchase their books in mass quantities (even though it is in the academics' own interest to purchase academic books...).
• The cult of the book for tenure has generated far too many books that, as Jennifer Crewe puts it, "do not need to be books" ("Scholarly Publishing: Why Our Business Is Your Business Too," 27).
• Tenure requirements need rethinking.  Somehow.

Missing from this discussion, as far as I could tell, were the $20,000 questions: why publish? To what end? Would the quality of academic scholarship go up if we expected books later in a career, instead of sooner? If scholarship is a conversation, with whom are we conversing? And to whom are we speaking? To what extent do "hot topics" have an academic audience? How can we determine what scholarship has lasting merit, when it's often the case that we won't be able to tell for years (or decades?)? Who determines what constitutes "quality"? How well does peer review succeed in its aims? And, to bring in rational choice for a moment, will academic publishers who expect us to buy their books ever start pricing books cheaply enough for us to buy them--without foregoing that month's gas bill, that is? Merely adjusting the numbers required for tenure--numbers of books, numbers of articles--leaves the core issues untouched.   

Comments

[rob]

Not meaning to blow my own trumpet, but I link to some articles that do broach some of these questions on a recent post :)

[rob]

Um, there was a link there, but it didn't come out:
http://rob.ifanything.org/detriment/index.php?p=103

[A. G.]

I have been thinking about this issue more pointedly lately. I just received Lindsay Waters's Enemies of Promise book(let) on these same topics, and the title addresses your third question. Can open access scholarship, particularly the kind of work that Peter Suber is spearheading, help in this crisis? I am halfbaking, but will keep thinking and probably will post to my blog on this.

Am I reading you right: monographs are profitable? Really?

[Miriam]

Sorry: "!=" means "not equivalent."

[David]

A good book on this topic from the publisher/bookseller point of view is Andre Schiffrin's The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read.(New York: Verso, 2001).

[fred lapides]

My friends from academica, some of whom have gone to very prestigious American universities, tell me that a young person seeking a good education would do well to save the zillion dollars spent at an Ivy or other prestige school because he or she would but get grad assistants or part timers for at least two years...Best bet? good liberal arts college that does not offer grad work.

I do recall being at MLA, having drinks, with a group of profs from a mid-west big university. They were discussing a potential tenure prof. One fellow noted that the potential tenure candidate had 6 published articles...another remarked: but that still is no book, right?

so it goes...