Introduction

When Cinema Journal published an In Focus on publishing's role in the scholarly ecosystem in 2005, it was billed "The Crisis in Publishing." The thoughtful contributions to the 2005 feature made it clear where the greatest pressures were being applied to the system and sounded the call to "resist the pull into calamity."

Did calamity strike in the intervening years? Circling back to the 2005 In Focus had me nodding in greeting about familiar challenges, and there have been many vexing changes since, particularly in the publishing industry as a whole, where Amazon holds ever-greater sway, which is not to say that as a field we have been collectively sitting around wringing our hands. One of the enjoyable things about being a publisher now, at least for me, is experiencing the tremendous amount of thoughtful energy that so many smart people are dedicating to transforming scholarly communication. Have writers and publishers heeded Eric Smoodin's call in the 2005 In Focus to "take a deep breath" and confront the issues that scholars and publishers can and should control calmly, "with more knowledge and less fear"? I think many have.

In the lead-up to the 2011 Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) conference, Rob White, the editor of Film Quarterly; Matthew Bernstein, of Emory University (and Film Quarterly's book review editor); and I were discussing scholarly publishing, and our discussion led to Matthew's and my organizing and cochairing a panel at the meeting in New Orleans. There was tremendous energy at the panel, due in part to the wide range of responses we got from all the grad students, professors, critics, and other editors who attended. This feature grew out of that stimulating occasion. The vibe at the panel was this: if you see a glass half empty, you see a continuing crisis in scholarly publishing, but if you see a glass half full, you see the constant reality of growth and change in the world of scholarship. It is fundamentally true that publishers are still, always, seeking scholarship of the highest quality, the best, most exciting, and accessible writing in our field that they can find. Quality is the ultimate standard that all publishers seek to honor. Each of these essays makes that point.

These essays also make the point that the path from a writer's brilliant ideas to the largest, most varied group of readers grows ever more costly and requires ever-greater strategic flair on the part of the publisher. Jennifer Crewe's survey of the current landscape makes a matter-of-fact case for presses' need to be increasingly strategic, selective, and nimble, not just for their own continued health but also for the benefit of the writers whose work they disseminate and the readers who seek it. The mission of scholarly communication encompasses many interlocking readerships—scholars, students, the interested general public—and hence requires a careful balancing of the priorities of those readers and, by extension, the priorities of the press as a business enterprise. Leslie Mitchner, whose essay in the 2005 In Focus took stock of the supposed "good old days," again looks back, this time to examine more closely how we are moving ever further into a world where the norms of online commerce, and the technology required to succeed there, challenge long-cherished ideas about what kind of physical community the world of books should be. These challenges were certainly on the horizon in the pre-Kindle days of 2005, but they are intensifying in ways that younger colleagues and students will soon take completely for granted.

The essays by Susan Bielstein and Ken Wissoker highlight two developments that were also on the horizon in 2005 but were not yet as acute: the accelerating changes in the intellectual property climate and the transformative (and hence, disruptive) power of digital technologies to literally reshape scholarship. As Bielstein points out, fair use has long been a valuable, if frequently misunderstood, tool for scholars in all fields, particularly those concerned with the arts. SCMS has been an early actor in helping rationally define, and thereby protect, the rights of...