Academic publishers depend on libraries. Academic libraries are on the ropes. Academic libraries depend on academic publishers. Academic publishing is dying.
A story by way of explanation:
Several months ago, an editor of a major journal in my little field of history asked me to review a collection of essays.
At first glance, the work appeared promising. The publisher’s Web site pledges research based on “recently opened archives,” “surprising” revelations, and a “comprehensive overview” of important and neglected topics.
The list of contributors includes important figures in the field. The editor, a reputable scholar, teaches at a good university.
The publisher is a well-known commercial press.
And the book is an absolute mess.
Sentences do not parse. Punctuation comes and goes as it pleases. Basic grammatical standards retreat in the face of indifference. Narrative coherence gives way to meandering, self-absorbed stream of consciousness. The essays largely eschew arguments and theses. New information and archival research: not so much. Inanities abound. And those essays that do evidence some internal coherence bear little relation to their neighbors.
Perhaps most troubling is the almost utter lack of correlation between the book’s content and the content promised by promotional blurbs. “Key themes” noted in the introduction appear nowhere else. We can only assume that topics presaged in advertising copy took a wrong turn in Albuquerque.
As I pondered this train wreck and wondered what to tell my editor, I thought about the reckoning that put her and me in this position. The press, it seems, had made a jaded if wily calculation: that important journals will review and scholars and libraries will spend $145 for a collection of unrelated and apparently unedited essays, so long as said essays are cleverly—nay, deceptively—marketed. In this case, I am sorry to say, the calculation proved correct. The WorldCat database indicates that only several months after the book’s publication, some 86 libraries, including mine, own copies.
One could, I imagine, draw any number of lessons from this tale: Libraries can be deceived. Even good scholars need a press that holds them accountable and edits their work. Never trust advertising copy. Caveat emptor.
But I want to suggest some more-sobering lessons.
The first, of course, is this: Major players in the world of commercial scholarly publishing have little shame. Resorting to cynicism of the worst kind, the press behind this fiasco has adopted a business model of charging outrageous prices for embarrassingly bad books, knowing that enough unwitting individuals and institutions will snap them up. Commitments to scholarship, to quality, healthy disciplines, even to honesty, take a back seat to binding something—anything—between two covers and charging whatever it takes to turn a profit.
Every academic can name a press or two known for an inverse correlation between the price and quality of its books: ABC-CLIO, Ashgate, Edwin Mellen, Greenwood, Peter Lang, Praeger, Routledge, Scarecrow, University Press of America. Insert your favorite here. That these presses sometimes produce good books only highlights the extraordinary if unusual accomplishments of authors working with meager or no editorial support, i.e., consigning their work to publishers that care little about scholarship or reputation.
We all understand the woes confronting the good university presses bucking this trend. Those still kicking survive by canceling series, releasing fewer titles, slashing runs, and declining to consider manuscripts that lack broad appeal. The result: Scholars increasingly throw their lot in with the disreputables; libraries purchase garbage; promising manuscripts go unpublished; and good manuscripts go to press half-baked. University presses committed to publishing worthy books—the presses we admire and on which we rely—can no longer give us what we need. And those that try find that libraries—each year spending ever-greater portions of their budgets on commercially produced serials—can’t afford to buy what we beg the presses to produce.
So all of us academics, and particularly we librarians, complain. And whine. And wring our hands. And commiserate. And then complain some more.
It is time to move on.
The state of academic publishing is so depressed, so depressing, that libraries must step into the breach.
A few have. The University of Michigan’s bold decision two years ago to merge its press with its library, and to publish all future books online, free of charge, offers tremendous hope and a way out of our predicament. What is so inspiring about Michigan’s experiment is its selfless audacity, its resolve to produce good, free books without waiting for other institutions to reciprocate. A pragmatic, calculated business plan might have looked something like a Start treaty: We, Michigan, will undertake years of negotiations with presses and libraries at other institutions, cautiously acting in concert, committing ourselves and a circumscribed group of signatories to verifiable targets for sharing our publications without charge, while striking protocols to ensure that what we give away is commensurate with what we receive from others.
Instead, Michigan acted unilaterally, with no assurances of reciprocity, in a fit of altruism.
Staring reality hard in the face and recognizing that academic publishing is close to broken, Michigan decided to leap. And to leap without additional resources.
My library and thousands of academic libraries will benefit. Our faculty, our students, scholars, and citizens around the world will enjoy free access to quality work, publications that chasten the ridiculous titles for which we now pay $150, $200 a pop.
Michigan’s lead, and experiments under way at Utah State, Penn State, Stanford, and elsewhere, should shame us into action. Will we libraries, arguably the chief beneficiaries, reciprocate?
Yes, our budgets are tight. No, it is not immediately apparent how we might shift funds and reconfigure positions to support and establish presses. Yes, we can now barely afford to provide our faculty and students with the material they need.
But that’s exactly the point. We cannot provide those we serve with what they need. Perhaps it is time to produce ourselves what we can no longer afford to purchase; to use personnel and financial resources from our libraries, even our small libraries, to save and revive academic publishing of high quality.
When we think hard about the alternative, it becomes less difficult to dig deep, even to the point of serious pain, to reconfigure one, two, three, four ... library positions to establish and run a press.
The Oberlin Group, a loose confederation of 80 liberal-arts libraries including my own, commissioned a task force last fall to investigate the possibility of jointly founding a “liberal-arts press,” a serious, scholarly press committed to rigorous peer review, superb editing, and the free dissemination of publications. We’ll see what happens. We’ll see how deep we’re willing to dig.
In the meantime, we continue to contemplate the shoddy publications we purchase out of resignation or bamboozlement. We pine for books nobody will publish. And soon even the more wealthy among us will ask whether positions we support to process books we can no longer afford might be put to better use.
