From the issue dated June 28, 2002
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...but Presses Must Stress Ideas, Not MarketsBy MALCOLM LITCHFIELDFor the past 15 years, rival experiments have been taking place in universities
The shift to a commercial model has become a familiar story for many presses. As library demand for academic books has declined, presses have lost their safety net and increasingly courted the "general educated reader." Shifting from low-key, low-budget marketing tactics, presses embarked on ambitious publicity campaigns and hired sales representatives to encourage prominent bookstore placement. Increasingly, presses paid certain authors advances against royalties, once extremely rare. University administrators, noticing that trend, seem to have concluded that there must be money in monographs after all, at least if their increased pressure on their presses to break even or, more daunting still, contribute to the university coffers is taken at face value. Given the market-oriented behavior of their presses, that conclusion does not seem particularly odd. Yet statistics from the Association of American University Presses suggest that scholarly communication remains unattractive from a commercial standpoint. Especially disappointing for presses that hope a strong marketplace presence is the key for financial health, an almost perfect correlation has developed between the amount of money spent on marketing and the size of the annual loss. Average marketing costs for university presses, expressed as a percentage of sales revenue, increased from 17.4 percent in 1998 to 19.2 percent in 2001, while the average net operating loss grew from 10.8 percent to 19.7 percent during the same period. An increased commercial marketplace presence seems to have hurt -- not helped -- the finances of scholarly communication. Of course, the marketplace for books and journals is not the same thing as the marketplace of ideas, and too many in the current system confuse the two. It is possible for a highly influential idea to meet with only a tepid commercial response. Articles published in a low-circulation journal can have high citation numbers. Similarly, it doesn't require a great deal of cynicism to see that many of the books that are highly successful in the commercial marketplace offer little of value to the marketplace of ideas. Moreover, the demands of the commercial marketplace have nothing to do with the medium of communication. As the Harvard lecturer Marshall Poe has noted (The Review, May 3), his experience in self-e-publishing still required marketing tactics: Arranging for book reviews and selling the work to libraries were the two market activities he deemed essential. Whether the medium is paper or digital bits, the commercial marketplace expects certain behavior, which inevitably increases costs. Could it be that backing away from the market model would be to everyone's advantage? Might it be possible to rescue the marketplace of ideas from the commercial marketplace? For an alternative to the market model, look at what has taken place in another corner of the university. While university presses have been experimenting with exploiting the marketplace, university libraries have been acquiring electronic information-management expertise. University presses have been perfecting the "push" technique of getting their product into as many hands as possible; university libraries have been perfecting the "pull" technique of facilitating easy searching across the many data stores in the modern library. The University of Michigan's Digital Library, for instance, is an exciting example of this new world. The university's corpus includes 57 different electronic collections, comprising some 5.8 million pages of text and more than 2 billion words. Currently a user can employ a single search to look through 23 of these collections. The California Digital Library is a similarly ambitious project that allows the user to search across hundreds of resources at once. What might scholarly discourse look like if it did not have to operate in the commercial marketplace? There are undoubtedly several answers, but I can imagine a scenario where university libraries were given the mandate of making available (and keeping permanent) the entire research of their university faculties. As part of the hiring process in that scheme, a faculty member would give the university blanket electronic rights for all work completed during his or her employment. Every article, book, research note, letter to the editor would be given to the library for cataloging, digitizing, and archiving. Under existing copyright law, this would amount to a simple licensing agreement between the faculty member and the university. Authors would of course want to retain the right to pursue other forms of publication for their material, so the license would have to be nonexclusive. The benefit is the potential for a much wider readership, which is very often the primary goal for a scholar. The university library would become the portal to all knowledge generated at that university. The aggregate of those repositories, then, would become the marketplace of ideas. The individual academic would remain free to put his or her work into the commercial marketplace, where publication rights could still be bought and sold. But the law of supply and demand would be at work in a more natural way than the current subsidized system. A large portion of academic work does not have sufficient demand to offset costs of traditional print publication and presumably would not be published under this proposal. Instead, the community of scholars interested in the work would access it through the library portal. For academics whose work does appeal to a sufficiently large audience to make print publication viable, the existence of an electronic version in the library portal would likely have no impact on book sales, as has been demonstrated by the National Academy Press, which has seen traditional print sales increase by mounting full texts on its Web site. Would university presses continue to exist in this scenario? Probably some would, and many would not. Universities that were interested exclusively in contributing to the public good of facilitating scholarly communication would pour their money into this "knowledge base" instead of subsidizing their presses. Other universities would value the recognition that comes from having their imprint in the marketplace and might continue to subsidize a press strictly for that recognition. Still other universities would allow their university presses to remain open to see if they could survive in the marketplace without subsidization. If they could, fine. If they could not, then the presses could be closed without a guilty conscience, knowing that the universities, through these electronic portals, would still be doing their part to preserve and disseminate the work done by faculty members. In any case, no press, subsidized or not, would feel the need to publish work that did not have a commercial value, since easily searched electronic repositories would ensure that all work was available to whatever community wanted to use it, no matter how large or small. The books and journals marketplace would become a true marketplace rather than an artificially subsidized one -- and, to a significant extent, the marketplace of ideas would no longer be dependent on the marketplace for books and journals. How would such a portal system affect scholarship? For one thing, there would quickly develop a need for a search engine that could successfully peruse and access information within all these repositories. Assuming that searching technologies kept pace with this growing digital corpus, one benefit might be that scholars in disparate disciplines would more easily find the common questions that are being researched from a variety of points of view. Multidisciplinary work might well be enhanced. Whether readers would embrace the digital format of this content is another question. Current research suggests that users like the searchability that comes with digitized content. But print still wins over digital when it comes to understanding sustained, nuanced arguments. No matter what the economic benefits, this suggests that there would be significant cultural hurdles to overcome in making this kind of portal system a reality. For instance, I would not envision any peer review for items deposited in this aggregated knowledge base. As any editor knows, the costs in time alone in securing peer reviews are significant, even when dealing with a discipline in which one is presumably an expert. To require library portals to review such a wide range of topics as microeconomics and micropaleontology, musicology and morphology, would burden the repository with an immense cost. To what extent should academics expect work to be peer reviewed before it is read? Could academics function happily in a caveat lector environment? Those are vexing questions that demand careful thought. My own view is that the peer-review system brings some significant downsides to the ideal of free intellectual exchange. There are clearly indicators that the review system prizes conformity over creativity, making it difficult for truly innovative work to find publication. Moreover, every editor knows that the process is not nearly as objective as one might like, at least in the humanities and social sciences, where reviewers are not replicating experimental results. Perhaps the whole notion of ex ante reviews can be replaced with ex post reactions. Imagine that the electronic repositories I have in mind were also to include community-friendly features, such as a place to review work that you have read. In an ideal world, that would foster academic dialogue while helping potential readers determine whether a specific work was worth their time. If the convention became commonplace, perhaps the number and quality of these impromptu peer reviews might become as important as citation statistics. But what about tenure and promotion cases? University presses, by publishing the work that counts in a tenure decision, currently play a key role in the process. Probably nowhere in the academy is so much energy expended trying to parse out the signals that come from commercial publication. Where is the work published? Is the candidate's book out or merely in production? In our field, is Journal X more prestigious than Journal Y? What are the relative rankings of University Press A and University Press B? The digital repository would essentially remove those cues from tenure and promotion decisions. That would probably be the biggest cultural hurdle for the model I am suggesting to overcome. As a publisher, though, I've always been amazed at academics' willingness to take such publication signals seriously. The assumption is, of course, that the commercial marketplace is an excellent stand-in for the harder-to-measure marketplace of ideas. I think that if departments were to spend as much energy reading and debating the work of their faculty members as they do trying to come up with relative rankings of all the various publication venues they see, the whole process might work more efficiently -- and would certainly be grounded more obviously in the marketplace of ideas without the distortion that comes from cues in the commercial marketplace. Would this imagined scenario solve all the problems surrounding academic communication? Probably not. Is it even remotely likely to happen? Again, probably not. The cultural hurdles are most likely too great to overcome. Tenured professors would have little reason to comply with the request to grant nonexclusive electronic rights to their institutions, and untenured faculty members are generally given no incentives to operate outside the established norms. Nevertheless, I think this thought experiment validates some important arguments: * Scholarly communication is a public good. University administrators frustrated with the amount of money going to university presses need to be reminded that subsidizing scholarly communication cannot, by definition, be free. Whether by continuing to subsidize the traditional university press system, investing in new methods for facilitating scholarly communication, or providing publication subsidies directly to faculty members, every institution of higher education that values scholarship has an obligation to contribute to the public good of academic discourse. * To use the marketplace for books and journals as a proxy for the marketplace of ideas is to undermine (and potentially overprice) the scholarly enterprise. Moreover, a subsidized commercial marketplace is never an efficient one. Money currently being used to prop up an artificial environment (i.e., making public goods function in a commercial marketplace) might have greater impact if invested in a more direct solution to the scholarly communication problem, such as the library-as-portal system proposed here. University presses frustrated with the apparent lack of money coming from university administrators need to be reminded that the system they often defend includes a marketplace component that may be at odds with the most efficient use of university funds. * Regardless of the medium, real and significant costs are involved with disseminating scholarly research. In the current environment, those costs are shared among faculty salaries, library budgets, university-press subsidies, journal editorial-of-fice grants, and reduced teaching loads to faculty members who edit series or journals. Too many institutions today are trying to save money in one area of the process only to find the costs popping up again in another area (and sometimes at a higher rate). An obvious example is cutting subsidies to university presses only to have university libraries pay higher purchase prices for material from university presses. The two extremes of questioning or touting the value of university presses miss the truth that publishing is but a part of the complex web of academic communication. * The presumed electronic revolution may affect scholarly communication in ways much more dramatic and fundamental than simply changing the medium of communication. Especially in the academic community, we should dare to think large, bold thoughts that revolutionize the current world. Then we should bring all the analytic tools available to us to dissect the effects such proposed changes would have. Let us neither as university presses glorify the status quo nor as university administrators search for an unrealistic deus ex machina for the very real, very pressing challenges that currently face scholarly discourse. Malcolm Litchfield is director of the Ohio State University Press. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B9
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Copyright © 2002 by The Chronicle of Higher Education