Book publishing is often distilled to a single, romanticized alliance: the relationship between author and editor. Think Wolfe and Perkins. Plath and Hughes (although “author/editor” is too narrow a description of that relationship). Carver and Lish. It is the push-pull between creator and critic, between art and marketplace, that most grips the popular imagination. That relationship also resonates in the world of academic publishing and has remained largely constant even as general trust in the media has been steadily undermined.
In this environment, Cass Sunstein has spoken of “surprising validators” — those espousing positions at odds with their existing ideology — as an effective means of combating political polarization. University presses might be considered an “unsurprising validator” — earnestly committed to the nondogmatic pursuit of objective truth. If journalism is the first draft of history, university presses focus on the second or third or 27th, forged from a peer-review process that identifies mistakes, susses out promising work, and challenges authors to make good books great.
Despite the steadfast nature of this trust dynamic in publishing, scholarly-book publishing has been in a self-professed state of crisis for at least the past quarter century, even as the number of scholarly books published increases each year. This crisis is rooted in the desire of — and necessity for — scholars to publish monographs at a time when sales of such books continue to dwindle. These conflicting pressures are exacerbated by other changes, such as the growth of digital publishing and open access.
The diverse nature of scholarly publishing is one of its defining and most appealing characteristics. It also makes meaningful systemic change difficult. Yet we need to acknowledge certain stark truths if we are to ensure a viable future for this vital part of the academic knowledge system.
We need to establish new standards to improve discoverability and track usage.
What then is the fate of the endlessly debated monograph, that stalwart of the humanities and social sciences, valorized and lampooned in equal measure? (By “monograph,” we mean a highly specialized work that caters to a finite subset of a discipline, and not the more expansive definition of “single-authored work of research,” which can encompass best sellers.) University presses publish thousands of such books a year, many that sell a paltry number of copies in print but constitute the backbone of discourse in some disciplines. The primary value of these books is not that they are read from cover to cover or purchased in print; their value resides in their contribution to a vast corpus of vetted research.
This value is now expressed most effectively online; the primary utility of a monograph is best extracted via digital search and online research. This is not to discount those who do read (including on a screen) in a linear manner, but the reality of how these books are used must shape how monograph publishing evolves.
And yet there hasn’t been a lot of evolution. In 2002, Stephen Greenblatt published an open letter on behalf of the Modern Language Association’s Executive Council. The letter beseeched literary humanists to consider the damage being done by the existing system of credentialization, whereby junior scholars must produce a certain amount of published work in order to advance. This has put junior faculty members in a bind, Greenblatt wrote, as a result of which “careers are in jeopardy, and higher education stands to lose, or at least severely to damage, a generation of young scholars.”
In 2016 — almost 15 years later — Donald J. Waters of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation published an overview, “The Monograph in the Digital Age,” that proposed tactics to resolve the problem Greenblatt had identified. The article highlighted nine aspirational characteristics of the monograph: searchable, portable, high quality, able to support annotations, metrics-based, eligible for awards, digitally preserved, well-marketed, and sustainable.
Are these nine characteristics what the average author or tenure committee looks for when considering a publisher? Probably three of them are: the ones concerning quality, awards, and marketing/accessibility. But scholars in many fields don’t as yet much concern themselves with the other traits, and it is these — interactivity, searchability, metrics, and digital preservation — that will determine whether the monograph takes flight once it fully emerges from its print cocoon.
Online we can see how people engage with a work, and relevance lies in engagement: unique visitors, views, downloads, time spent on a page, shares, citations, etc. Journals have led the way here, but we need to ensure that the metrics used to measure the impact of books are appropriately tailored to the form, and that measures devised for science and medical journals don’t swamp the needs of humanists and social scientists. And we need to stop playing down the role of scholarship simply because it doesn’t sell the same number of print copies that it did in the inefficient, bygone era of standing library orders.
We stand on the cusp of an era when increased digital availability and discoverability will radically improve the research experience and change information-consumption habits. This isn’t a harbinger of “the death of reading.” It merely acknowledges the reality of how most academics work today, and provides new opportunities for research to be more influential, not less.
So what do we need to do to get this digital transition right?
Acknowledge that scholarly engagement with monographs varies from discipline to discipline and that this might warrant changes in some areas that aren’t appropriate for others.
Don’t focus on print sales but on usage and on what that usage enables. This applies to authors, tenure committees, and publishers alike.
Get all backlist titles online, and not just as e-books but in as many forms as possible.
Beware the fetishizing of print. We know, we know, that this is a grim imperative to the book-lover’s ear. We love books too (we’re publishers after all). But a monograph’s jacket and price often say more about the funding of a publisher than about the quality of or audience for a given book.
Devote more resources to digital: tagging, metadata, indexing, citation, etc. We need to establish new standards to improve discoverability and track usage.
Embrace new ways of promoting scholarship, such as organic (e.g., nonpaid) search-engine optimization.
Support — via participation and sponsorship — innovative experiments, such as:
- The University of North Carolina Press’s Sustainable History Monograph Pilot, working to establish acceptance of a new publishing model for specialized scholarship.
- The University of Michigan Press’s Fulcrum and the University of Minnesota Press’s Manifold, open-source platforms, which offer authors the opportunity to create interactive monographs.
- MIT Press’s PubPub, a hosting platform for the multimedia-enhanced publishing needs of journals, books, labs, and conferences.
- The University of British Columbia Press’s and the University of Washington Press’s RavenSpace, a collaborative site for indigenous-studies publishing.
For scholarship that adds value primarily to the more esoteric realms of the academic corpus and that increasingly may not be seen as a reliable investment for publishers (even university presses), we need new models, including “pay to publish.” This leaves unanswered the vexing question of who will pay such fees, since at present most of this research is not directly funded. This can be answered only by collaboration between the various actors involved, and is likely to emerge from experimentation, commercial necessity, and legislation.
The academic-publishing landscape is being transformed by many forces: open-access initiatives such as Plan S; the consolidation of brick-and-mortar retail stores, the dominance of Amazon, and the resultant narrowing of sales channels; the evolving importance of social media in promoting scholarship; the centrality of metadata and online search; and the myriad ways in which researchers increasingly communicate via online communities and social media. In order to meet these challenges, the scholarly community must strike a better balance between preserving the core values of the past and proactively enabling our future.
Niko Pfund is Oxford University Press’s academic publisher and president of OUP USA. Mandy Hill is managing director of academic publishing at Cambridge University Press.
