The future of scholarly publishing has been debated extensively for years. There's no question that there is a crisis and that it's been building for complex reasons for decades now. The digital turn is a part, but not all, of the story.
The question of how to manage and finance the dissemination of scholarly work is a large one. The Open Access movement--here is one influential articulation of open access--argues that free availability of the results of scholarly inquiry is both an intellectual and a social good.
In societies such as Canada, where the cost of scholarly research is very largely borne by public funds, open access is increasingly perceived as a public right, for instance by Michael Geist. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, for instance, has in principle an open access policy. Yet there are no teeth to it, because the implementation proved contentious.
Notwithstanding the observation that a very basic open-access requirement would not be hard to put in place at SSHRC, such a policy still begs the question of how universal open access scholarly publication could be achieved and sustained over the long haul, for we have yet to figure out precisely who is going to bear the considerable costs of keeping scholarly publishing going under this new model. There are of course institutional repositories, and Canadian universities libraries are really stepping up to the plate in this area, but my own sense is that right now, at least, IRs are working best as a supplement to more conventional modes of scholarly publication, and are not likely to replace them any time soon.
And in the meantime, university presses, which have for so long been the backbone of scholarly dissemination and credit in the humanities, are struggling to figure out new economic models.
What will be the future of the scholarly monograph? The University of Michigan Press announced last year that it would shift almost entirely to publishing digitally or through print-on-demand: "digital publishing is so much less expensive -- with savings both in printing and distribution -- the press expects to be able to publish more books, and to distribute them electronically to a much broader audience." And yet that move seems not to have helped Rice University Press,which having failed at the traditional model in the mid-90s, was reborn as an all-digital imprint a few years ago, and is now being shut down again. This is not necessarily because there is no future in digital publishing, as a former board member argues, but it does seem more than a little ironic that this comes right on the heels of the press's impressive publication, only a few months after the event, of the Shape of Things to Come deliberations on online scholarship, many of which focused on challenges of sustainability. The speed of publication of a collection of essays on a timely topic seemed to embody the promise of a digital press. The Rotunda experiment at the University of Virginia Press is an impressive one, but when one looks at the list of universities that subscribe to its rather pricey online edition and collections, it's nowhere near as long as would be the list of purchasers of major, top-quality print editions of the kind that Rotunda makes available digitally. And there isn't of course just one mode of publishing digitally, and a press that is willing to work with authors to produce innovative online editions will have a higher overhead than one that is using a more standardized approach.
Things are looking better for open-access journals, and Canada's own Public Knowledge Project's Open Journal Systems can take a large share of credit for helping many journals around the world migrate to digital form or start up in digital form. But someone still has to sustain the hardware and the server software on which these journals run, and figure out how to migrate them as systems and standards change. SSHRC's new program to support open-access journals looks like a great step in the direction of figuring out new means of sustaining these new modes of publication. But how does this program look to editors of scholarly journals? Will it be able to sustain the costs of digital publication? And could something similar be imagined for open-source monographs, especially with innovative models of peer review And what digital scholarly productions that aren't fish or fowl but some other kind of beast than those forms that emerged from print culture? How can they be sustained? And what about literary publishing, a whole other kettle of worms?
3 comments:
One of the questions connected to this topic that has interested me the most is the question of form and its relation to medium. That is, can the model of straightforward digitization, in which the academic monograph precisely as it stands is imported into the digital realm, prove successful? Or is the monograph a form that developed out of/in conjunction with, and is therefore only suitable to, the codex? I don't think it's any coincidence that online open-source journals have proven more successful than full digital books thus far. Similarly, academics cannot afford to ignore that the modes of knowledge production that flourish in a digital environment -- Twitter being the obvious example -- are nearly antithetical to the monograph.
Carlin Romano's article for The Chronicle of Higher Education, "Will the Book Survive Generation Text?", asks a similar question. The example of Twitterature (Penguin 2009) is apt, if only because the news-making book's attempt to condense great works of literature into tweet-length blips of information reinforces the point that form and content are never wholly divisible. Ultimately, however, Romano fails to distinguish between the "demise" of a particular form and the demise of all knowledge and human learning and cultural value as we know it (though he pokes fun at his own apocalyptic tone as he does so).
Putting aside the hyperbolic vitriol in Romano’s tone, however, I wonder if it’s possible to strike a balance between associating the decline of the book (“the weightiest, most important, most enduring forms of communication”) with the loss of thinking itself, and uncritically embracing new forms of academic knowledge production (“silicon syndrome”). What might that inbetween space look like?
On the subject of print vs. digital publication, this interview with Peter Rukavina is also really interesting.
An interesting thread, and I want to complicate this a tad by looking at how new technologies can recreate a 'market' for older technologies. Specifically, print on demand enterprises are now exceedingly popular, more so, in some cases, than a shift to soley digital repro, although the irony is that such a shift to dig is what creates the necessary framework for a print distribution network. How is this different from oldschool vanity presses (I'm thinking literary rather than scholarly here)? Take a look at Lightening Source and how it presents itself. It does not promote itself as a self-publishing house as much as a printing/distribution network, and it expects to serve small, medium, and large publishers (rather than individuals). It does so by insisting that the work submitted to them for printing be appended with ISBNs and the assumption there is that work will be vetted by editors before going to press. It's not a full-on failsafe, but it does on an online scale what espresso book machines http://www.ondemandbooks.com/hardware.htm do on a hardware scale. What is interesting about this whole phenomenon, though, is that it isn't a 90s version of "let's publish online once we find someone to write code" but is a seamless (or almost seamless) movement from writing/design to production/printing. The major difference between traditional offset and espresso style or lightening distrib is the simple issue of warehousing. With the former, you have to have a stock room and the costs, which are similar per unit, can feel exorbitant if you end up with remainder copies. In the latter case, you print to deliver so there is virtually no need for stockpiling. Anyway, just some thoughts about how dig tech is changing how we see the 'book' and how we produce it. Currently, btw, the espresso tech is probably equivalent to what used to be lower-end, offshore production values of ink, paper, quality. That will change in the days ahead, no doubt, so that the coffee table book coming off a major offset will be virtually duplicated by this process, changing, once again, how we publish.
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