The Futures of Scholarly Publishing

'When people expect to get something for nothing, they are sure to be cheated.'

- P.T. Barnum, Struggles and Triumphs

I will return to that quote from P.T. Barnum later in this paper. To begin, however, I'd like to thank ACLS for organizing this panel on 'Crises and Opportunities: The Future(s) of Scholarly Publishing.' Those multiple plurals - the emphasis on crises and opportunities, and that injunction to imagine our 'futures' - signal that we are finally beyond the panic response to 'the crisis in scholarly publishing.' Not that the crisis is over. If anything, it has intensified. However, we now know more than we did in the past, there is less hysteria, and we have an opportunity to make some decisions that could reshape, and potentially save, the best aspects of academic publishing - which means the best academic research.

A key feature of academic publishing is that it touches on so many aspects of our academic lives, since it is the chief evaluating and credentialing mechanism upon which the reward system of academe is based. University press publishing has many portals, and, as individuals, we enter variously as students, scholars, teachers, mentors, editors, and administrators. Institutionally, we also have different relationships to scholarly publishing - as professional organizations, private universities, public universities, libraries, electronic publishers, and a range of different presses. It is important to have all of these - individually and institutionally - represented in our discussion because this forecloses the possibility of thinking there is some utopian 'elsewhere' where there is no problem. There is a problem, and we are all part of it. Kate Torrey, Director of the University of North Carolina Press, likes to say, 'we all breathe the same air.' The 'we' in that sentence is not just those in the world of university press publishing but all of us who, in multiple ways, have been rewarded in our professional lives because of work that has been supported by underpaid, understaffed, and overworked scholarly publishers. If we are part of the problem, we all must collectively, and more equitably, contribute to the solution.

At the risk of belabouring the obvious, I am going to linger on this notion of collective responsibility, inclusive decision making, and profession-wide resolutions. I believe we are at a turning point where many of us want to find systemic and strategic solutions and move beyond hand-wringing, finger-pointing, and blame-pinning. Pinning the blame is a shell game that constantly diverts our attention from the ever-travelling pea, leaving us baffled, guessing, and typically looking in one place when the 'real problem' resides elsewhere.

A sampling of the essays written on this topic over the last three or four years makes it abundantly clear that we do not need more diagnoses of theproblem. We've had plenty of those. Theproblem is that we have tied tenure to the publication of a scholarly book. No, others say: uncoupling tenure from books cannot solve the problem because journals are in trouble, too. Others suggest that the problem is the scholarly monograph itself, or that the problem is curtailed library spending on humanities books. The problem is price-gouging by commercial publishers of science journals, forcing libraries to spend less money on humanities and social science publications. The problem is chain bookstores, the dwindling number of independent bookstores, and the increasing conservatism of those that remain. The problem is electronic booksellers like Amazon.com, with their heavy discounting and selling of used books. The problem is that books cost too much to produce. The problem is that electronic publishing is too expensive and doesn't work for monographs. The problem is shrinking subsidies to presses in the wake of cutbacks to higher education for state universities. The problem is shrinking subsidies to presses in light of dwindling returns on endowments and diminished philanthropy at private universities. The problem is that many universities that depend upon academic publications (books or journal articles...