From the issue dated August 13, 2004
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Presses Seek Fiscal Relief in Subsidies for AuthorsUniversities would provide money to underwrite their professors' books
Publish or perish is the timeworn mantra in the humanities and social sciences. Yet what happens to this ironclad rule of scholarly life when the publishers of academic research themselves begin to perish? The 90 institutions of higher education that have their own academic presses now bear all the costs of a system used by most if not all universities. And many of those presses are under increasing pressure from their parent institutions to break even. The presses at the University of Idaho and Northeastern University, for example, have announced that they would shut down. Many other presses face deep cuts. Philip M. Pochoda, director of the University of Michigan Press, is among those asking when and how institutions without presses will "pay their fair share for this whole network that is supporting and undergirding their tenure and promotion? They're riding free on this system." One proposed solution now gaining ground is that universities and other institutions that support academic research create a pool of money to provide subsidies for authors to help offset the costs of publishing. Under this plan, all institutions would contribute to the pool, and give authors $5,000 to $10,000 in what are called "subventions" that they could take to an academic press interested in publishing their book. Universities and colleges that require books and journal articles for tenure and promotion but do not maintain their own presses might be asked to contribute more than those that do. The proposal is not likely to be widely adopted overnight. Gradual adoption by university consortia appears more likely. The proposed subsidies might help even the playing field for different disciplines, says Pauline Yu, president of the American Council of Learned Societies: "This is part of what I see as universities' obligation to provide research support to humanists and social scientists in the same way they do to scientists." Indeed, subventions are already being used with some success in the sciences. There, new faculty members receive publishing subsidies as part of their start-up allocations for research -- in part because some science journals levy page charges. Supporters of the subsidy scheme also suggest that the quality of academic publishing may rise in such a system. The money disbursed to scholarly presses, which would cover an average of 20 percent to 40 percent of their costs of producing books, could encourage them to publish works more in line with their scholarly missions and priorities, rather than those simply likely to recoup their costs of publication. Some institutions without presses want assurances that any plan would not hurt them in its initial stages. Constance C. Hungerford, provost of Swarthmore College, says she sees the logic of a subvention fund. But, she adds, "our preference will continue to be to contribute to our own faculty on a case-by-case basis. I'm not persuaded that we would get our money's worth out of a general fund, and in the current budget climate, the argument that we should help support the system of academic publishing isn't very persuasive." Nonetheless, Duke University's provost, Peter Lange, reports that fellow provosts of major institutions have responded enthusiastically when he has presented the idea, and says the need for a remedy is indisputable. "Academic presses are facing substantial difficulties," he notes, "and at the same time this is having an impact on the development of knowledge, especially in specialized areas of the humanities and some areas of the social sciences, as well as the career prospects of the junior faculty." Collective Security So how would such a system work? One key element, after such a pool was created, would be to find "honest brokers" such as the American Council of Learned Societies and the national organizations of various disciplines to administer the fund. Some leaders within the Modern Language Association and the American Council of Learned Societies, as well as the Association of American University Presses, have endorsed the idea. All three organizations have discussed, and even advocated, a national subventions pool. But Ms. Yu detects some hesitancy. "Nobody wants to do it unless a critical mass will make the commitment," she says. Ms. Yu envisions her organization's role as that of monitor, ensuring that such a program runs with impartiality. For example, the council could help make sure that presses did not determine which books to publish solely on the basis of the availability of a subsidy. Of course, before the plan could go forward, many individual universities would need to sign on to the concept. Duke has "under very serious consideration" a plan to start its own program of such subventions, says its provost, Mr. Lange. Duke would support first-time authors on its own faculty, but the institution would intend its program primarily as a show of support for a national fund. "It makes most sense if we get some collective agreement, or at least enough other schools see the merits of it," he says. One of the most vocal proponents of the plan has been Cathy N. Davidson, Duke's vice provost for interdisciplinary studies. But she notes that a subsidy program would be expensive; it might cost $100,000 a year, initially. And that amount, she admits, would not go far, at $5,000 to $10,000 a pop. Even so, she says, adopting a program would remind other institutions that "scholarly publishing is not commercial, and anybody who publishes a book should be backed up by their university." The Big Squeeze Finding remedies to university presses' financial problems is essential if they are to retain their traditional role, the plan's supporters warn. Often, academic publishers must do more with less, and place projected sales figures ahead of scholarly considerations. The red ink and closures in academic publishing have a number of causes. The library market for scholarly books has been on a long slide since the 1970s. The market for textbooks, a traditional cash cow, has weakened, too, as course packs have risen in popularity. And most presses receive little or no financial support from their home institutions. Yet though many presses have reduced the number of books they publish in the humanities, the presses' struggles to survive in the book market have produced an academic-publishing glut. The average number of books published by each academic press more than doubled between 1963 and 1988 -- from 41 to 88 -- and has stayed steady since, according to figures from the Association of American University Presses. On top of all that, the demand for books has not been sufficient to allow their prices to keep pace with inflation. Between 1989 and 2000, says the presses association, academic-press book prices rose 14 percent, and commercial scholarly-book prices increased 23 percent, while the Consumer Price Index shot up by 39 percent. Added to those woes is the ignominy of presses' being told that they are not pulling their weight by their home institutions, even though, on average, they recover 87 percent of costs from revenues. That is "an almost unheard-of level of cost recovery for any university unit," said Douglas Armato, director of the University of Minnesota Press, in his inaugural speech as president of the presses association in June, in Vancouver, British Columbia. He said that university administrators rarely acknowledge just how much better university presses have done since the 1960s and 1970s -- when academic publication was close to fully financed by universities -- at "paying as much attention to scholar-readers as scholar-authors, to serving the wider public and not just those who reside within the academy." Testing the Waters Subventions, which many presses already request or require from authors, help offset the relatively high cost of publishing scholarly books in small press runs. Just how badly underwriting is needed, says Ms. Davidson, is evident from the experience of first-time authors in the humanities, who are increasingly being told by academic presses that they do not publish first books at all. That reluctance does nothing to encourage second books, either, she observes. Institutions that already have subvention programs say interest is high. Since 1997, the University of Texas at Austin has distributed $30,000 or more a year using donations from the cooperative society that runs its campus bookstore. Authors may publish with any academic press and need not be tenured to apply. Textbooks are not eligible. Yale University provides up to $5,000 to younger faculty members in the humanities. Ohio State University approves subsidies up to $2,000, but requires that the money come equally from departments and academic divisions. Other institutions with similar programs include the University of Iowa, North Carolina State University, and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Some academic organizations, such as the American Musicological Society, also provide publishing subsidies, as do some government granting agencies, such as the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. Proponents of a wider subvention effort point out that even modest subsidization could go a long way toward balancing academic presses' books. A typical budget for an academic book is $25,000 to $30,000. Presses frequently recoup only one-third to one-half of costs through sales. A variety of ideas is necessary to advance the health of the academic-publishing "ecology" made up of presses with varied goals and practices but united by a "collective mission," says Mr. Armato. Yet, he and others agree, the one feature of any scheme must be that it leaves undiluted the intellectual marketplace of the peer-review process. "The danger facing us is the temptation to ... divorce our role in bringing to a broader public the knowledge and research created by scholars from our financial imperative to be self-sustaining," he said at the presses meeting in June. Other observers are more cautious. Carlos J. Alonso, the editor of PMLA, the journal of the Modern Language Association, said in a speech to the American Council of Learned Societies in 2003 that the subsidies model is an inventive way of upholding "the intellectual project that book authorship represents." But if publishers came to expect subventions, he said, it would be impossible for them "to claim that a manuscript had indeed undergone the normal review process," with its emphasis on "the intrinsic merits of the manuscript." A further danger, Mr. Alonso suggested, is that the more common subventions become, the more likely is "the sort of overpublication decried as one of the principal factors that brought us to the present pass." And, he notes, a subvention pool would always be at risk from higher-education budget crunches, such as those that many public institutions have been facing. Perhaps, some observers say, academe should simply eliminate the link between book publishing and tenure-and-promotion deliberations. Lindsay Waters, executive editor in the humanities at Harvard University Press, has called for an overhaul of that requirement in his book Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship (Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004). But Mr. Waters also says that short of that radical change, "title subsidies can make a difference. It's interesting how little money, comparatively speaking, would be enough to make the budget for a book come out OK." http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 50, Issue 49, Page A1 |
Copyright © 2004 by The Chronicle of Higher Education