From the issue dated October 3, 2003
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Understanding the Economic Burden of Scholarly PublishingBy CATHY N. DAVIDSONBy now, everyone has heard of "the crisis in scholarly publishing." You've read
Yet it would be well to remember that the future holds both threats and opportunities. Because we now all know more than we did in the past, there is less hysteria, and we have an opportunity to make some decisions that could reshape, and potentially save, the best aspect of academic publishing -- which is the best academic research. The mainstay of academic publishing is the university press. It has many portals, and, as individuals, we enter variously as students, scholars, teachers, mentors, editors, and administrators. As institutions, we also have different relationships to scholarly publishing -- as professional organizations, private universities, public universities, libraries, electronic publishers, and a range of different presses. It is important to have all interested parties -- individually and institutionally -- represented in our discussions of the future, because looking at the problem systemically forecloses the possibility of thinking there is some utopian "elsewhere," where there is no problem. There is a problem -- and we are all part of it. The "we" is not just those in the world of university-press publishing but all who, in multiple ways, have been rewarded in our professional lives because of work that has been supported by underpaid, understaffed, and overworked scholarly publishers. If we are part of the problem, we all must collectively and more equitably contribute to the solution. I believe we are at a turning point, where many of us want to find systemic and strategic solutions and move beyond hand-wringing and finger-pointing. Pinning the blame is a shell game that constantly diverts our attention from the ever-traveling pea. A sampling of essays written on this topic over the last three or four years makes it abundantly clear that what we do not need is more diagnoses of the problem. We've had lots of those: The problem is we have tied tenure to the publication of the book. No, journals are in trouble, too. It's the scholarly monograph itself. Or curtailed library budgets for humanities books. Price-gouging by commercial publishers of science journals, forcing libraries to spend less money on humanities and social-science publications. Or the problem is chain bookstores. The dwindling number of independent bookstores and their increasing conservatism. The electronic booksellers like Amazon.com, with their heavy discounting. The problem is that Amazon.com is selling used books. That books cost too much to produce. That electronic publishing is too expensive and doesn't work for monographs. The problem is shrinking subsidies to presses due to cutbacks at state universities. The problem is shrinking subsidies to presses due to dwindling returns on endowments and diminished philanthropy at private universities. The problem is that many universities that depend upon academic publications to award tenure don't have presses of their own -- they're mooching off everyone else. The problem is the corporatizing of the university. The problem is the sciences. The problem is the changing demographics of higher education: There are fewer assistant professors and graduate students, who are the primary book buyers. The problem is that the course pack has been substituted for the assigned secondary classroom text. Others insist that content is the problem -- the jargon of postmodern critical theory has shrunk the audience for the humanities. No, because the critical-theory boom has ended, no one is excitedly reading every new book any more. The problem is that, since 9/11, people are watching CNN and not buying books, trade or academic. The problem is that university-press books are underpriced relative to their production costs. The problem is that university-press books cost too much relative to the income of their audience. The problem is too many books. The problem is too few books. The problem is too many books of one kind and too few of another. The problem is that students don't know how to read anymore. The problem is that almost all of the above are part of the problem. Fixating on one component means that we never arrive at a solution. The bottom line is that scholarly publishing isn't financially feasible as a business model -- never was, never was intended to be, and should not be. If scholarship paid, we wouldn't need university presses. Without a subsidy of one kind or another, scholarly publishing cannot exist. Right now, universities are responsible for finding a way to support scholarly publishing -- but most universities are in perilous financial situations, too. That is the crisis. The most basic aspect of scholarship -- the foundation of our profession -- is at risk under the current model of who pays to publish the books and articles we write. Many big issues loom on the horizon. Obviously, electronic publishing holds promise and problems, and we need to sort those out in view of a range of ancillary issues such as the reward structures of our profession (what counts as a refereed "publication"), collaborative models of authorship, and so forth. All those are vitally important and incredibly complex. A book and several refereed articles have been the price of admission to tenure in the humanities and social sciences for decades. It is impossible to change the standard of excellence in a profession as hierarchical and decentralized as ours overnight. As a profession, we need to address the issue carefully and cautiously. Yet there is not time for caution now. It seems that almost every month a new university press is closing down a specialized (i.e., unprofitable) list, firing acquisitions editors, or threatening to close down completely. I am not in favor of uncoupling book publishing from tenure. But I do want to uncouple discussions of re-evaluating tenure requirements from the current economic crisis of publishing. We need to stabilize the losses in the publishing business now. Separately, without the sense of economic ruin so near, we can engage in serious conversations about what kind of profession we want. Coupling an economic exigency with a philosophical reassessment is to put together the proverbial apples and oranges -- and it will lead to bad business decisions and inequitable professional fixes. I am, therefore, going to propose a number of ways that the current costs of publishing can be distributed more equitably across the profession. Before I do, however, I want to make a few personal declarations. The first has to do with being a vice provost at a research university. When you are part of the provost's office, which oversees not only all the costs of doing academic business but also the tenure process, it is impossible not to see how much the fate of publishing, libraries, and scholarship are intertwined. If you are a provost trying to save money by asking your university press to bring in more revenue (making cost a major goal in book acquisition), then you are in an untenable position if you are also trying to maintain quality-based publishing standards for your faculty. At the same time, no university has enough money to finance everything, and every university wants to keep its standards. So a provost at a university with a press is in an impossible and seemingly insoluble double bind. One of my motives is to provide practical solutions to help universities move beyond that impasse. My second personal declaration is affective. I like the scholarly books I'm reading these days. I know it is more sophisticated to make jaded remarks about the decline in the quality of scholarship, but I don't believe there has been a decline. In fact, when I recently had to write a substantial new introduction to a reissue of one of my books, Revolution and the Word, I embarked on a crash course in books and articles written on 18th- and early-19th-century American history and culture over the last 15 years. I will confess: Reading scholarship as voraciously as any graduate student preparing for a prelim has been an exhilarating -- and even inspiring -- experience. The future of our profession is in good hands -- if there is a future. I have been especially excited by the dozens of first books I've read by junior scholars scrabbling their way toward tenure. Then again, why should that be surprising? Many of the now-classic texts were written by junior scholars. Would they even be published in the present environment? Because I am married to an editor and work in the provost's office, I am not allowed to have a connection to my own university press these days. However, simply being a scholar and an adviser of graduate students makes me intensely aware of the dire straits of scholarly publishing. Indeed, my recommendations have almost nothing to do with "saving" university-press publishing. Quite frankly, I am not interested in propping up fragile university-press businesses if what they offer us is simply a watered-down version of trade publishing. I've published several books with trade publishers; they do a good job of getting those books out to a large, general readership. My motivation is to find ways to save the kind of scholarship that academics are trained to write and that is the basis of teaching and research at colleges and universities. At present, university presses provide the most careful, impartial, and efficient system of brokering, networking, evaluating, editing, publishing, and distributing serious scholarship. They do that exceptionally well when their acquisitions programs are not skewed by economic pressures. In the future, we may come up with better and more cost-efficient ways to publish our books. At present, however, if we believe in the value of scholarship, then we who hold leadership roles in our profession have to figure out the best ways to support university-press publishing and to rally the support of the profession as a whole behind it. What we need is acknowledgment that scholarly publishing costs more than we are spending on it. It needs substantial subsidies, and it needs new ideas about where those infusions of capital might come from and how costs might be dispersed more equitably among those who benefit most from scholarly publishing -- namely, scholars themselves. In that spirit, I'm going to throw out 10 small, practical, and workable ideas for how to distribute the economic burden of scholarly publishing. Not all are new; all need to be tested; some might be tried and then discarded if they prove untenable. I offer them less as solutions than as potential models for thinking about our collective responsibility. No one model will work. The point is to spark ideas, galvanize energies, and then sit down together and see what we can do. 1. Pay our dues. What if we committed all our professional associations to a combined, considered, and well-publicized effort on behalf of scholarly publishing, emphasizing the responsibility of every individual and institutional member of the profession to the greater good that is academic research? The Association of American Universities could, for example, recommend that every member of the profession who is tenured or coming up for tenure be a dues-paying member of at least one national association affiliated with the American Council of Learned Societies, plus one other interdisciplinary field, subfield, or regional organization. That should be extended to the sciences as well since, indeed, the outrageous costs of scientific journals are a key part of the problem. The dues should be sliding (as they generally are), based on salary. And a percentage of the total dues should be reserved for book subsidies that would be given to university presses, as should a portion of conference fees from any conference where a book prize is awarded. The details of how the subsidy would be put into effect require working out. In awarding book prizes, for example, money could be given to all university presses entering the contest as well as shared between the winning author and the press. That would, essentially, be a reverse entrance fee to subsidize publishing in the field in which the prize is awarded. Singling out just one title isn't sufficient to support a whole list; you need a developed list in an area for all kinds of reasons. As scholars in the field of the history of the book have shown, you need to support a network of reviewers, a reliable standard of peer evaluation, a target market (whether that be reached by a booth at a conference or a mailing list). The reverse entrance fee allows for block, or list, subsidies, ensuring the health of the field and not simply of the winning entrant, and allowing costs to be dispersed beyond the specific university to the interested parties of a professional organization. Of course, the American Association of University Presses would also have to take a responsible leadership role. If offering subsidies encouraged publishers to expand their size, operations, and costs, then five years out we would be back in the same losing situation we are now, only more heavily taxed. Any professionwide effort on behalf of scholarly publishing would have to come with equal assurances from AAUP's members that they would earnestly address the situation and work in a coordinated fashion to stabilize the economics of scholarly publishing. I imagine that would require agreements among university presses that would be challenging, since university-press publishing's lack of a vigorous profit motive does not prevent it from being extremely competitive. And that's a good thing, since competition is one way that we ensure quality, rigor, progress, and the promotion of cutting-edge thinking. It requires others more conversant with the business of academic publishing to figure out how to preserve competition, control expansion, and agree on methods for revenue sharing. If the NCAA can figure that out, the AAUP should be able to come up with something satisfactory. 2. Publish it electronically. Why couldn't representatives from various professional associations form a task force to make a thorough and collective evaluation of electronic scholarly-publishing efforts to date? That could include both a cost-benefit analysis relative to other publishing ventures and an exploration of the issue of changing professional standards for electronically published scholarship. We're learning, fast, that electronic publishing isn't easy, and it isn't cheap. It's not the whole alternative to conventional publishing, and it isn't going to solve the publishing crisis. Will it work in certain situations? Is it sometimes cost-effective? Yes. Is it a substitute for conventional publishing? Only we can decide, collectively, if that is to be the case. 3. Offer start-up packages. Several people have suggested book subsidies as part of start-up packages for junior faculty members in fields that require books for tenure, analagous to start-up packages that began to be offered to researchers in the sciences some decades ago as the costs of establishing a lab or buying specialized equipment became a necessary part of making a career in the sciences. Some observers are now arguing (rightly) that those in the book-publishing fields need start-up packages to subsidize publication of their work. I like that idea very much, except that it comes at a time when universities are being forced to cut their budgets. Add-on subsidies just pit a university press against, say, the new humanities center. Why make that bargain? A strategic way of promoting start-ups is for a group like the ACLS or AAU to make a recommendation that universities take their projected 2004-5 salary levels -- across the board, in all fields -- and subtract $500 in order to offer new (and maybe also current) faculty members that amount plus a guaranteed publishing subsidy. I'd suggest $10,000 per book in book-publishing fields and an analogous amount (probably discipline specific) in fields that stress articles or scientific papers when the publisher is a university press (rather than a commercial enterprise). The numbers work out about right given attrition rates of untenured faculty members (those who never would draw from the book-subsidy pool) and investment possibilities for the pool. Needless to say, I would prefer that faculty salaries continue to rise and there be a book-subsidy pool. That is not realistic in the present economy. The redistribution of income that I am suggesting amounts to a realistic investment in the future. In the last academic year, one of my former students (an Americanist, by the way) received a dozen form rejections from publishers saying, "We do not publish first books in literary criticism." He couldn't even get a first reading of his manuscript. And if no one is publishing first books, how will he ever publish a second one? I know my student would have preferred a modest decline in his assistant-professor salary. I see no reason why such an arrangement could not be adapted to senior as well as junior faculty members -- and might even be an incentive for those struggling with that crucial post-promotion book. At 10K a pop, a press publishing 100 books a year would have an infusion of a million dollars. That could go quite a long way to ending the red ink for publishers and the universities that help support them. 4. Scale the subsidies. For those colleges requiring scholarly books and journal articles for tenure and promotion, but that do not themselves have and support a university press, book subsidies should be twice the regular amount. We all need to take collective responsibility for the good now provided to the entire profession by those universities that do support scholarly publishing. 5. Take tax write-offs in lieu of royalties. Many professors receive tiny checks every year from their publishers. One of my first books brings in somewhere between $37 and $50 a year. What if, instead of a check, university presses sent a royalty statement and gave authors an option: Either request the check or send back the statement and ask that it be converted from income to a tax-deductible gift to help subsidize (check the box) first books or books in fields X, Y, or Z. The same option could be offered in lieu of advances or reader's fees, too. Each book so subsidized would have an acknowledgment that indicated, "A subsidy for the publication of this book was made possible by generous authors committed to the survival of university-press publishing." A small token in a larger project of cultural change. 6. Stamp out course packs! Professors need to be aware that every course pack assigned is a university-press book unsold. University-press books are often cheaper for students than course packs, and certainly less hassle than taking on all the copyright issues these days. And it is good for everyone, including the instructor, to read a whole book occasionally. 7. Battle the commercial science publishers. Universities and their presses would do all of academe a service if they challenged commercial publishers like Elsevier Science by producing refereed journals at reasonable prices. I'm not sure that, in the end, publishing scientific journals would help university presses out of their financial crisis, but it would be a major contribution to research if they published journals that cost less than the $20,000 a year Elsevier bills libraries for journals such as Brain Research. The other benefits would be to libraries (which spend an ever-greater portion of their funds to buy commercially published science journals) and to scientists (who often use research funds to pay to have their articles published in such journals). 8. Use the university's teaching and research mission to promote scholarly books. Every university home page should have links to university-press books that deal with topics of importance to courses, initiatives, conferences, invited speakers, and so forth. Presses could also be woven more into the fiber of their universities: Try special alumni catalogs, alumni book clubs and press discounts, or university-press books with handsome book plates as the routine prize for service (instead of the dorky five-year pin). Gift certificates for the university press in the welcome baskets of incoming students. Graduate fellowships partly paid in scrip (say $500 a year) that could be used to buy university-press books. Even simple kinds of in-house advertising could pay off: bulletin boards with tearsheets for current books in the field posted outside every department, offering graduate students discounts on selected backlist books, etc. 9. Strengthen relations between the university and its press. Faculty members who serve on university-press boards need to emphasize to administrators the scholarly contribution a strong press makes to a university, including in areas where the university itself may not have a strong reputation. It costs far less to build a publishing reputation in a high-prestige area that doesn't have high student enrollment than it does to create a new department. An exciting press can also help attract and retain exciting faculty members; it can sponsor workshops to help provide mentoring to graduate students. In other words, rather than being seen as a drain, the university press needs to be touted as an asset. 10. Collect the data. In the current conversation about "the crisis," book publishing is often presented by university administrators as if it is an add-on to already expensive fields in the humanities and narrative social sciences -- those fields considered to be "soft," "weak sisters," "incapable of supporting themselves." I'm not so sure. I want the data. What if all of our professional associations in the scholarly disciplines worked together to challenge our business schools to try to model the economics of the contemporary university? How much do those fields that rely on published books actually cost a university? If we did a full accounting, with such factors as space, maintenance and replenishment of equipment, personnel, salaries, start-up packages, labs, postdocs, staff members, cost sharing, grant revenue, and distributed tuition costs, would the humanities actually be the major drain on university expenditures? It may turn out English departments are cash cows -- in which case it is only right and just that literary scholarship get some returns in the form of book subsidies for all its institutional heavy lifting. Will we quickly solve "the crisis in academic publishing?" No. If we go out and form task forces and action committees, if we manage to work together in a model of collective action, will we make the problem go away? I don't think so. But we don't have to. What I'm proposing is something far more modest and bolder: that we put into effect adjustments that will improve the situation for the present. After that, we must continue our collective watching to ensure that the adjustments are working, that they are not having unanticipated negative results in one sector that will eventually hurt every sector. Right now, we are putting far too much effort into analysis of the problem and not enough into change. We must learn from the plug-and-play model of business. We need to try one thing -- and then try another. We are not in an environment where long-range planning makes sense, because all the conditions are in flux at once -- market conditions, tax structures, demographics, state spending, technology infrastructure, new methods of evaluating productivity, and so forth. We need to be vigilant to the ways that the economics of publishing might change again (and they most assuredly will), and have the dexterity (and the mandate) to adapt accordingly. Universities do not have unlimited resources; if they did, we wouldn't have a "crisis." We can't keep shifting the blame, looking for individual fixes and then lamenting when another press loses its intellectual mission or lays off its literature editor or curtails its monographs. We academics cannot continue to see ourselves as innocents in a process whose fate is decided by others. Innocence is not bliss -- it is professional suicide. The problem of university-press publishing is our problem. We need to solve it. It undermines all we stand for as a profession if the only way scholarly presses can survive is by looking for books that sell. French history is less valuable than Latin American history because it doesn't sell as well? That's preposterous. Until we realize, as individuals and institutions, that we cannot expect something for nothing, the current situation will deteriorate even further. As P.T. Barnum predicted: "When people expect to get something for nothing, they are sure to be cheated." Cathy N. Davidson is vice provost for interdisciplinary studies, co-founder of the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, and a professor of English at Duke University. This essay is adapted from a talk at the 2003 annual meeting of the American Council of Learned Societies. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 50, Issue 6, Page B7
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Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education