The Future of the Academic Monograph?

["Colin Steele" <Colin.Steele@anu.edu.au>]

The appearance of the interesting article by Chuck Hamaker and Toby Green
on 'The Future of the Book' in Access
http://www.aardvarknet.info/access/number54/monthnews.cfm?monthnews=01
this week reminded me that I meant to comment on this topic when they were
both commenting on Liblicense back in June.

I'm giving a talk on the above topic at the Charleston Book and Serial
Acquisition conference in early November
http://www.katina.info/conference/ and have been doing some background
research.

The following is a selective summary of some of the key documents, which
indicate that the scholarly monograph (not text book) is still an
endangered species and also a faulty mechanism if we are talking about an
effective distribution of the scholarship within the academic monograph.
The continuing low sales of monographs for a variety of reasons mean that
the monograph is often a physical symbol of tenure and promotion rather
than an effective tool of scholarly communication.

�The British Academy Report: "E-resources for Research in the Humanities
and Social Sciences - A British Academy Policy Review", was published in
late May 2005 (url http://www.britac.ac.uk/reports/eresources/index.html )
'In the 1960s and 1970s, far fewer monographs were published than now,
with routine global sales of 1500 or more. But these sales levels were not
sustained, and a declining sales step-curve has been evident throughout
the past quarter century, with a vicious circle of declining sales driving
higher prices driving declining sales. Individual publishers have
responded by issuing more and more individual titles, but with lower
expectations of each. Global sales can now be as low as 250 or 300 in some
fields. At some point in the 1990s, the UK academy ceased to be a
self-sustaining monographic community: the subjects that have survived
and/or thrived in this context have been those (like economics or
linguistics or classics) with international appeal'.

�Professor Blaise Cronin of the University of Illinois, "Mickey Mouse and
Milton: Book Publishing in the Humanities" (Learned Publishing 17(2) April
2004 indicated from a survey of the major Ivy League universities, the
conflicting forces of a scholarly monograph still being an essential
prerequisite for promotion and tenure in those universities, yet the
outlets for monograph publishing via university presses was declining.

.'Regardless of one's view of the merits of open access (and my own
position is obviously in favor of much freer access), these approaches
require careful consideration by historians-if only because external
pressures (from government, from the rising tide of the open access
movement) are likely to force us to re-evaluate our policies sooner or
later. But the more important reason to consider how we can achieve open
access is that the benefits of broad and democratic access to
scholarship-benefits that are within our grasp in a digital era-are much
too great to simply continue business as usual' (Should Historical
Scholarship Be Free? Dr Roy Rosenzweig, Vice President of the AHA's
Research Division, and Mark and Barbara Fried Professor of History and New
Media at George Mason University.
http://www.historians.org/Perspectives/issues/2005/0504/0504vic1.cfm)

�Digital Publishing and Open Access for Social Science Research
Dissemination. Eve Grey and Associates. "a further product of this
pressure towards viability has been extreme convergence in the market,
with university presses competing alongside powerful trade publishers for
the same bookshop outlets - something that does not make a great deal of
sense for the universities." (p7)
http://www.lessig.org/blog/archives/eve_gray.pdf

Professor John Unsworth, University of Illinois, who will be the keynote
speaker at the September 26 2005 National Scholarly Communications Forum
in Sydney on "Open Access, Open Archives, and Open Source in Higher
Education". http://www.humanities.org.au/Events/NSCF/CurrentRT/Current.htm
In the paper of this title he has stated:

If universities don't own the content they produce, if they don't actually
collect it, hold it, and preserve it, then they'll be at the mercy of
those who do. If universities do collect, and preserve, and provide open
access to the content they produce, then the entire balance of power
shifts away from commercial publishing and toward university presses and
university libraries.

Bill Clinton used to say, "it's the economy, stupid." He was right. We
could say, in the same spirit, "it's the content, stupid." We should be
using subsidies to both libraries and presses, and perhaps other means as
well, to encourage (even require) substantive collaboration, with the goal
of creating a system in which there are incentives to lower costs across
the entire system, including authoring at one end, and preservation at the
other.'

�Emerging models of 'public good' for dissemination of university
research. Establishment of digital publishing frameworks on university
campuses ranging in integrated mode from preprint, e-print, digital
thesis, conference papers to published book, the latter often in POD
(Print On Demand) and increasing synergies with and through institutional
repositories.

�Increasing focus on making the University research output more widely
available globally through search engines and open access mechanisms with
consequent rise in accessibility of research material via downloads and
citations.

�The monograph can survive only if the academic community actively support
it ... real benefits could be gained by using new technologies in the
world of academic publishing ... enabling publishers to exercise much
greater control over the management of their resources and stock, through
for example, digital printing and print on demand'. (Professor J B
Thompson, 'Survival Strategies for Academic Publishing', Chronicle of
Higher Education, June 17 2005).

Thompson's fascinating book, 'Books in a Digital Age: The Transformation
of Academic and Higher Education Publishing in Britain and the United
States' Polity Press, 2005 of which the above is an extract, while
extremely comprehensive in a historical framework, stops chronologically
before some of the public good open access initiatives for e-presses and
digital repositories had evolved - see for example, those in the
Australian context, eg ANU e-press http://epress.anu.edu.au/, which has
had very impressive downloads of chapters and full monographs during 2005.

For those not in Australia, they should seek out the inaugural issue of
'Campus Bookseller and Publisher' for August 2005. There are some
interesting articles on the topic of new presses and the role of academia,
eg Dr Leslie Cannold's 'Whither the Publisher?' and the response of
publishers in .

We need to look at models that try and disseminate more effectively the
output of an institution, like California eScholarship, as a public good.
The costs are relatively low compared to the public good input costs, eg
the purchase by universities of large amounts of material which are
relatively little used even in an electronic environment (see the 2005 UK
NESLI report).

The Open Access debate has largely focused on STM articles but the crisis
in scholarly communication for scholars in the Social Sciences and
Humanities, particularly in regard to the ability to publish academic
monographs needs as much attention and could benefit from similar
mechanisms, ie open access on the web within peer review quality
frameworks and print on demand facilities, both locally and globally.

Colin

--------------------------------------------------------------
Colin Steele
Emeritus Fellow
University Librarian, Australian National University (1980-2002)
and Director Scholarly Information Strategies (2002-2003)
W.K. Hancock Building (043)
The Australian National University  
Canberra  ACT 0200
Australia

Tel +61 (0)2 612 58983
Fax +61 (0)2 612 55526
Email: colin.steele@anu.edu.au