A little over a year ago, I strode into my local bookstore, Micawber Books, on Nassau Street in Princeton, and peered into the future. Stacked high above the novels, biographies, and popular histories on the main table were copies of the late Stephen Jay Gould’s last work, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Handsomely produced, lavishly illustrated, reasonably priced, and well publicized, this large (nearly 1,500-page) and impressive Harvard University Press book struck me as a hopeful harbinger for scholarly publishing.
For university presses, long dependent on readership in shrinking humanities disciplines, an expansion into robust scientific fields would have clear potential benefits. But the payoff to science may be just as powerful, if less obvious.
This past summer I attended the annual meeting of the American Association of University Presses, in my capacity as social-science publisher at Princeton University Press. During the plenary session, the sciences -- not the humanities -- dominated the agenda. Two university provosts and a leading research librarian discussed the crushing encroachment of commercially produced science publications on library budgets, sources vital to the economic health of university presses. This crowding-out effect, long damaging to the market for our books, was news to no one. But it appears to have reached a critical point.
Science journals and books are sold at nosebleed prices by a tiny, heavily concentrated cadre of giant, mostly European publishing conglomerates, like Springer and Elsevier. According to Mary M. Case, director of the Association of Research Libraries’ office of scholarly communication, writing in the October 2001 “ARL Bimonthly Report,” “In 1999-2000, ARL libraries spent almost three times as much on serials as they did in 1986, and yet the number of titles acquired was 7 percent fewer. ... Monograph acquisitions ... have fallen from a median of 32,697 titles purchased in 1986 to 27,059 titles in 2000 -- a 17-percent decrease overall.” Most observers attribute this state of affairs to the commercialization of the “hard side” -- that is, of science, engineering, and mathematics.
And yet academic publishers’ best response, as some of my colleagues have intimated in The Chronicle and elsewhere, and as books such as Gould’s indicate, is not to avoid science, but to embrace it. Perhaps the foremost exemplar of this approach is MIT Press, which publishes outstanding works in the cognitive and neurosciences, computer science, and economics. Princeton has long been a leading publishing presence in biology, physics, mathematics, and economics. The Johns Hopkins University Press publishes broadly in biology, life and physical sciences, medicine, and mathematics.
Why are more university presses not already science publishers? Why do books in knot theory and computational biology come predominantly out of Amsterdam and Heidelberg, but not from American campuses? How did science manage to elude generations of editors at most university presses?
University-press editors are overwhelmingly trained in, and enamored of, the humanities. But our apparent indifference to science has more to do with our central, historical scholarly function: to publish research monographs that help our host institutions decide who gets tenure and who gets promoted. (In the sciences, tenure and promotion are driven by the publication of articles in scholarly journals.) Humanities-oriented editors haven’t so much pushed university presses in the present direction as vice versa. Humanities-oriented university presses and the tenure system have attracted editors strong in the humanities. If there were a larger place and a recognizable career path for science editors at university presses, more appropriately trained candidates would flock to us.
There is no dearth of science books to publish. Scientists write scholarly books aplenty. Whereas young scientists intent on securing tenure are generally limited to journal articles, midcareer and senior scientists often opt for the book form because they need the space afforded by books to make their statements. Scientists who wish to consolidate knowledge in their fields write treatises or advanced textbooks. Those wanting to explore the extended details of a single topic or technique write monographs. And those wishing to convey scientific ideas to diverse audiences turn to trade books. However, a glance at the typical American university press catalog would suggest that most scientists burn their keyboards at tenure-celebration rituals. As with their scholarly articles, most scientists publish their books with giant international commercial publishing conglomerates, and at stratospheric prices.
University presses have evolved well beyond our primary role in the university tenure-and-promotion machinery. We excel in the publication of great regional books, art books and museum catalogs, almanacs and atlases, reference works, guides to natural history, filmographies, textbooks, periodicals, and cookbooks. Expanding science lists are the natural next frontier, and scientists should consider some of the reasons they might opt to publish with us instead of with commercial conglomerates:
* University presses provide scientists with a greater variety of publishing choices. Unlike most commercial publishers, which tend to restrict their books and journals to a narrowly defined professional readership, university presses are broad-ranging.
For example, my own list of scholarly -- and markedly technical -- books in economics at Princeton includes research monographs, graduate textbooks, treatises, published lectures, reference works, and books of general interest. They include the text by John Campbell, Andrew W. Lo, and Craig MacKinlay, The Econometrics of Financial Markets; the reference work, edited by John Kagel and Alvin Roth, The Handbook of Experimental Economics; Robert Shiller’s international best seller, Irrational Exuberance; and treatises such as John Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern’s 1944 classic, The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Our list also includes scholarly books that appeal to broader audiences: for instance, The Essential John Nash, edited by the mathematician Harold Kuhn and the Nash biographer Sylvia Nasar, as well as occasional diversions, such as the pseudonymous Marshall Jevons’s economic mystery novel, Murder at the Margin. These books are reviewed in serious publications, whether scholarly (Journal of Economic Literature) or general interest (The Economist and The Wall Street Journal).
Princeton’s economics list provides authors the opportunity to reach not only their fellow specialists, but also a diverse array of researchers, graduate students, and practitioners, as well as readers in contiguous fields like politics, sociology, and mathematics. Comparably diversified academic lists can and should be developed throughout the natural sciences. An excellent example is the Johns Hopkins list in life sciences, medicine, bioinformatics, and genomics, which includes such texts as Population Genetics: A Concise Guide, by John H. Gillespie; monographs such as Central Neural States Relating Sex and Pain, by Richard J. Bodnar, Kathryn Commons, and Donald W. Pfaff; reference books such as The 36-Hour Day, A Family Guide to Caring for Persons With Alzheimer’s Disease, Related Dementing Illnesses, and Memory Loss in Later Life, by Nancy L. Mace and Peter V. Rabins; general-interest books such as Cesarean Section: Understanding and Celebrating Your Baby’s Birth, by Michele Moore and Caroline de Costa; and journals such as Perspectives in Biology and Medicine.
* University presses can make strong, long-term commitments to science. One of our great, but unspoken, advantages is that we are less vulnerable to the violent corporate upheavals symptomatic of commercial publishing in the past quarter-century. Those mergings, purgings, spinoffs, and other restructurings pose a constant threat to authors who worry that the editors and publishers with whom they sign are not the same people with whom they will eventually publish their books. A little turnover is good for any organization or business, but the turbulence endemic to commercial publishing goes beyond being an irritant; it can undermine the very vision of books inspired when authors and editors initially conceive of projects, their purpose, and their readership.
The institutional environment of the university press can provide a real advantage to scientists intent not only on publishing their own books, but also on nurturing larger bodies of work, such as series. At Princeton, where we have been publishing science for generations, series such as our Annals of Mathematics Studies and our Monographs in Population Biology have long served as repositories of leading work in those fields. Our Princeton Science Library series keeps enduring works in the sciences available continuously in low-cost, attractive editions. Furthermore, university presses’ status as campus-based institutions affords us a distinct advantage in entering into long-term copublishing arrangements with academic associations, institutes, centers, foundations, and other organizations dedicated to scientific research and education.
* University presses bring geographical advantages to the task. While the big science-publishing conglomerates are headquartered in places like the Netherlands and Germany, the majority of leading scientists work in North America. University-press editors, whether they’re in Gainesville, Tucson, West Lafayette, or Vancouver, are often literally only a stone’s throw away from excellent prospective science authors. Economists argue that local connections, if anything, hold more value than ever for idea-based enterprises such as publishing because those endeavors depend to such a great extent on a rich and continuous exchange of information. Brilliant publishing still thrives, as it always has, on the sustained personal contact, history, and other forms of capital stored in the crosscutting relations of authors, editors, marketers, booksellers, and readers.
An editor starting a new list in, say, geology, at a university having a leading geoscience department has a tremendous advantage over competing editors halfway around the world in developing local contacts, then extending them through regional, national, and international networks. Some people will argue that the Internet is obliterating geographical advantage in communications. But a close look at successful publishing suggestsotherwise. Consider the Harvard Business School Press. In its brief history, the press has drawn extensively on local as well as national and international authors, exploiting its close connection with the Harvard Business Review and other links in the school’s and Boston’s publishing environments. Scientists should consider the power of place in the interest of new and exciting publishing ventures.
* University presses provide scientists with ready access to new and multiple markets. Scientists, like all authors, want to see their work reach the largest possible readership. The kind of advanced scientific textbook that may get lost on a commercial conglomerate’s list is likely to receive lavish treatment at a university press because it is so important to defining our presence in a chosen field and to our economic well-being. University presses equipped with course-adoption marketing facilities for their humanities titles can easily adapt such operations to the advantage of scientists. Moreover, we are well poised to bring scientific knowledge to other audiences that can easily elude monolithic commercial publishers. University presses, staffed with publicists and marketers in daily contact with the national and international news media, to say nothing of campus booksellers and the major chains, are much better positioned to convey news of great scientific work than are top-heavy and remote science-publishing conglomerates operating far from the vital publicity nodes. Witness the market synergies achieved by the Johns Hopkins Press in the life sciences. Scientists can and should explore the potential complementarities in these relationships.
* Scientists will find university presses distinctly qualified to produce beautiful books. Appearances may seem a secondary consideration in the choice of publisher, but aesthetics matter greatly in the publication of scholarly books -- especially science books, whose authors traffic in complex visual imagery, whether of nanostructures or supernovae. As the annual “AAUP Book, Jacket, and Journal Show” catalog demonstrates, university-press design and production departments regularly create groundbreaking, innovative designs in the most graphically demanding of subject areas, including art history, architecture, photography, and urban design. Scientists interested in testing that claim can also study the magnificently designed and produced field guides to nature published by many American university presses. Creative collaborations between scientists and university-press design departments could mark a new and exciting initiative in science publication.
Once American university presses are primed for science, with authors at the ready, how can they go about capitalizing on the promise of a new era of scientific publishing? First, by recognizing the remarkable publishing potential inherent in science and technology and by studying it in detail. Then, by discovering, through self-selection, which presses are best prepared to attack particular scientific fields and subfields. If science comprised only the central fields of physics, biology, and chemistry, in addition to mathematics, one might argue that scholarly publishers -- commercial as well as a few university presses -- were already serving them adequately. But science is a vast continent, and beyond the horizon lie literally scores of disciplines: engineering, geosciences, operations research, management science, agricultural and environmental science, decision sciences and statistics, and the expanding applied and industrial sciences, to name a handful. University presses are particularly well positioned to publish successfully in the applied sciences where campus research connects to local industry, such as computers, robotics, and biotechnology. A few dozen university presses snappily competing for the best applied- and industrial-science works could help animate the public understanding of those pursuits.
In return for launching new lists in science, American university presses will gain access to a stream of intellectually enriching and financially rewarding texts and professional books in lively, long-term markets. Those vital new income streams will help support the continued publication of our cherished humanities lists. But we get much more than that. We gain the chance to refresh our own editorial cultures with a supply of exciting ideas from people in the academic world whose ideas may be unfamiliar, but whose work increasingly defines contemporary life.
A move so bold would have a strong social as well as material payoff for scientists and humanists alike. C.P. Snow posed this prospect to intellectuals of his time when he insisted: “Closing the gap between our cultures is a necessity in the most abstract intellectual sense as well as in the most practical. When those two senses have grown apart, then no society is going to be able to think with wisdom.”
Certain scientists will dismiss such an approach as pie in the sky, a distraction, or both. Some librarians, now intent on the relaxation of copyright as the only solution to a commercial monopoly, will regard the approach as inadequate. More than a few university-press executives will balk because they consider science publishing too expensive a venture -- too risky. I would argue that it is riskier for university presses not to enlarge our scholarly scope and revive our professional culture in the process.
Peter J. Dougherty is group publisher for the social sciences and senior economics editor of Princeton University Press. He is the author of Who’s Afraid of Adam Smith? How the Market Got Its Soul (John Wiley & Sons, 2002).
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 50, Issue 16, Page B10