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Steve Cohn: The Emerging Crisis in Scholarly Publishing

The director of the Duke University Press says the current system of scholarly communication is in trouble

 

The following excerpt was taken from an April 14 talk on "Scholarly Publishing: Emerging Approaches to an Expanding Crisis," held at the Franklin Center.

One of the questions I was asked to address here is whether there is indeed a "crisis" in scholarly publishing. That sent me to the dictionary to look up "crisis," and that in turn leads me to make a Bill Clinton-like move: It depends on what your definition of "crisis" is.

I do not see an explosion coming any time soon. The current situation feels more like that scene in Star Wars where the small band of heroes is stuck in the spaceship's garbage collector and the walls are slowly but steadily closing in. Such a scenario can lead to fatal problems for the small band of heroes, just as surely as an explosion can.

But then, of course, the world will go on, even as the Empire prevails. So whether you see a crisis in the current situation may depend on the extent to which you think of the small band of university presses, small academic societies, and other nonprofit scholarly publishers as similar to that small band of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and their comrades, who (we are led to believe) have the potential to save the world from domination by evil powers and/or commercial forces.

I do think the current system of scholarly communication is in trouble. Unless some significant adjustments to that system are made fairly soon, I think it is likely that the current trends in the system will in the coming years start to crush nonprofit publishers. If so, the consequence will be that the Empire of commercial interests will prevail, at least for the while, in scholarly publishing

Between Duke University Press and UNC Press you have two university publishers who complement each other very well. We're both indisputably among the top American university presses. But we also differ from each other in a couple of crucial ways:

First, at Duke, as at only a few other university presses, journal publishing is a major part of the publishing program; whereas at UNC journals are a very minor part of the program. At Duke we publish about 100 books a year, and we publish about 35 journals (and all of these journals are now widely available in electronic form as well as in print). In terms of expenses, our books and journals programs at Duke cost about equal amounts: each one of these two "divisions" of the Press has an expense budget of around 4‚ million dollars. But in terms of the revenues that cover those expenses, the Journals Division brings in about 5‚ million dollars, whereas the Books Division brings in about 3‚ million. So the Journals Division cross-subsidizes the Books Division, supporting about a million dollars of Books Division expenses with Journals Division surpluses.

Second, at UNC Press (and this is typical of the presses based at state universities) state- and regional-linked publishing of "trade books"-books meant mainly for non-academic audiences-is a major part of the program: an example might be a book on the Hiking Trails of North Carolina. These books help to support the scholalrly books. At Duke, where our parent institution sees itself as a national and international player, our publishing program is also national and international. We do publish some of those "trade" books every year (around a quarter of our list) that reach out to audiences beyond the academy. But even those books are almost always connected quite closely to our more academic lists, and they appeal in large measure to academic and/or intellectual audiences. Check this out: Our best-selling book ever at Duke University Press is Fred Jameson's Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism-not exactly beach reading. In second place is Eric Lincoln and Joseph Mamiya's The Black Church in the African American Experience-a serious and extensive sociological study, again not light or recreational reading. Maybe Kate can tell us what UNC's biggest sellers of all time are, but I believe UNC's biggest seller in recent years is Mama Dip's Kitchen-a terrific book, and one that is entirely appropriate for UNC Press to publish, but not exactly a scholarly tome.

So we make a good pair: if the two of us see things in a similar light, you can be fairly sure our views are typical of the university press community as a whole.

In looking at the world of scholarly publishing I want to start with a look at journals, because they are at the root of many of the shifts that have occurred in the landscape of scholarly communication over the last few decades.

Journals exist across the academic disciplines (including the professional schools), but they are used and thought of quite differently across the academy. In the sciences, journals are by far the dominant form of scholarly communication (and also the dominant vehicle for academic advancement). Except for a few prestigious overview journals (such as Science or Nature) where the most exciting new scientific developments with broad implications are announced, most of the so-called "STM journals" (the journals in Science, Technology, and Medicine) are looked at by readers mainly for individual articles in their particular area of expertise, while all other articles are ignored or skimmed-and in fact many of the articles in a given issue may not even be understood fully by regular consumers of that journal, because there is so much specialization.

So STM journal publishing is really an article-by-article affair, and the idea of a "journal issue" is fairly meaningless. Journals that are looked at for the sake of finding individual articles work better in easily searchable electronic media than in print-if a particular article needs to be read carefully and saved, it can always be printed on a local printer. Printed journals are not necessary in science, then; but, because of the pace of scientific work, immediate access to the relevant journal literature is absolutely essential to researchers. So there is a great deal of pressure on the libraries to provide full and easy access to the scientific journal literature.

In the humanities and some of the social sciences, however, journal articles are definitely secondary to books as a means of conveying scholarship: here journal articles are often seen as preliminary or partial studies leading towards a book, and it has been mainly the books that have counted for prestige and promotion. The journals also tend to be read more thoroughly, with readers looking to them as ways to keep up with the interesting work throughout their field, regardless of its direct relevance to the research topic they are working on at the moment. Book reviews are often seen as important, also as a way of keeping up. And many journal issues are "special issues" or contain "special sections," with all the articles therein focusing on a particular topic.

Humanities scholars tend to read through their journals-maybe not cover to cover, but far more extensively than the scientists do. And journals that are read through-like books-work better in print than in electronic media, because print works better for serious and extensive reading. But because of the marketplace pressures it now seems unlikely that any journals at all will be available in print for very long.

While the main audience for journals is individual academics, the main purchasers of scholarly journals have been academic libraries. That is true even for most journals that are associated with a scholarly or scientific society: Because membership prices are kept quite low relative to the prices paid by libraries, the majority of the revenues for a journal almost always come from library subscriptions, and increasingly from campus-wide site licenses purchased and managed by the libraries. And for a journal with no society affiliation, even one that's at the top of its field, the dependence on library revenues is all the more true. Here are a couple of examples, from among our own most important journals, in quite different fields:

- The Duke Mathematical Journal, one of the top journals in general mathematics, has only a handful of individual subscribers. About 99 percent of its revenues come from institutional subscriptions and site licenses.

- The Hispanic American Historical Review, without dispute the leading journal on Latin American history, has over 500 individual subscribers; but it has more than twice as many library subscribers, and those libraries each pay five times as much as an individual does (for that price they get both a print subscription and a campus-wide site license); so, again, over 90 percent of the revenues come from the libraries.

Thus it's the library revenues that allow journals to be self-sustaining, even at a level of individual subscribership that would be completely unsustainable for a magazine. In the humanities and social sciences, university administrations have also traditionally played an important role in helping journals to sustain themselves financially, through support of the costs of editors and editorial offices. But as university administrators and accountants sharpen their pencils in these tight financial times and insist that the journals themselves must pay for these editorial staff and office costs, that sort of administrative and departmental support for scholarly journals in the humanities and social sciences is eroding steadily. And that shifts the burden for financing these journals to the marketplace, and in particular to the library subscribers who supply most of the revenues.

The financing and uses of journals are important to understand in order to make sense of the current situation in scholarly communication, because as I see it the root of the current problem is the increasing dominance of library budgets by the large commercial publishers of STM journals: Elsevier, Kluwer, John Wiley, etc. I strongly suspect that David will agree, and I assume he will talk about this at some length, so I won't.

But I do want to say that in doing what they are doing the STM publishers are not in my view Darth Vaderish "bad guys" (to get back to the image I started this talk with). They are doing just what they are supposed to do in a commercial marketplace-make money for their stockholders, and gain advantage in the marketplace by capturing a greater and greater share of the market. What they are doing to library shelves is really no different than what the Campbell Soup Company is doing by making maybe 50 versions of chicken soup (chicken with noodles, and chicken with Noodle-O's, and chicken with stars, and chicken with rice, and chicken with extra big chunks, and so on)-they are both working to keep their smaller competitors (in the world of publishing, that includes us at the university presses) off the shelves.

All this about journals matters a great deal for book publishing because libraries used to be the financial mainstay of scholarly book publication, too, just as they are now the financial mainstay of journals publishing. Once upon a time, a university press could publish a book that was aimed at a narrow audience with the assurance that it would be bought, if it was any good, by something like 800 to 1,000 academic libraries-or so I am told.

By the time I entered the publishing world twenty years ago, that number was already starting to shrink, and by the 1990s people were starting to talk about the death of the monograph. But publishers are resilient, and many scholarly publishers started compensating for the diminishing library sales by publishing "split runs" in cloth and paper, with the clothbound "library edition" priced several times as high as the paperback, which was aimed largely at junior faculty and graduate students (who can be very active purchasers of academic books, but only if the price is affordable).

This system of split editions (also called "simultaneous publishing") did mean that the books needed to appeal to a wider audience than a narrow set of specialists, or else nobody would buy those paperbacks no matter how cheap. But that fit with the academic trends of the time: the broadening interest across narrow subfields in interdisciplinary work and in what's often called "theory." A book that was "smart" (another publisher's term of art) would have wider implications, even if its topic was fairly narrow; and a "smart" author could be taught to draw out the implications of his or her analysis, even if that analysis was based on a fairly narrow case study, so that the book would be of interest to a wider set of readers and bookbuyers. Thus university press acquisitions editors began to take seriously the task of showing academics (especially the authors of first books, based on dissertations) how to think about audience and how to reach out for a broader audience, whereas in earlier years they had more often been content to allow their authors to write only for specialists.

This new scheme worked for a while. But book sales to libraries continued to decline, both in numbers and even more dramatically so in dollars. Libraries got squeezed by tight university budgets that never, even in the best of years, kept pace with the inflation in journal prices and the proliferation of new journals, particularly STM journals. As the libraries got squeezed, they felt that they had to cut back steadily on book purchases, because they had no choice about keeping the journals. And many of the libraries also at a certain point started to buy paperbacks when there was a split run, rather than the clothbound library editions, and then rebind them in more durable covers themselves (sometimes only after the book showed that it was getting active use). So now the number of libraries who purchase the more expensive library edition is generally in a range from 150 to 400.

With libraries no longer serving as the main financial sustainers of book publishing programs, publishers have become more vulnerable to the marketplace. And, as bookstores have reacted to the current economic situation in recent years, publishers like us are getting crushed. I hope Kate will talk about this more, so I'll be brief: The independent bookstores have been steadily vanishing, pushed out by the chains (and this has been exacerbated by the economic downturn). Booksellers everywhere are keeping their inventories to a bare minimum, but the chain stores especially are looking for "product" that will turn over quickly. That's not our books, for the most part: our books may sell for a long time, but academic books don't generally fly off the shelves as a hot commodity.

All this means that our books are not on bookstore shelves in the same way they used to be, for buyers to find and word of mouth to start. The number of media venues for book reviews, particularly of serious books, has been declining steadily as well-so there goes another source of information about our books.

As a result of these trends, sales of academic books are down-in some cases way down-from what we used to be able to expect. In many cases the sales of our recent books in their first couple of years are about half of what we would have expected that book to sell a few years ago.

What does this mean for university faculty? As book buyers, academics will certainly have to pay higher prices. In hopes of making ends meet, we are (we all are, it seems) raising our prices. At Duke, most paperbacks used to be under $20 until last year. Next year, they will almost all be in the $21.95 to $24.95 range.

As book authors, academics in the smaller fields will suffer the most. (This is one of the main points of Stephen Greenblatt's famous letter last year on behalf of MLA-and it makes sense for such a letter to come from MLA, because for reasons I don't have time to explain, literary criticism may get hit the worst by the current shifts.) Sales pressure on acquisitions decisions is an ordinary fact of life for us these days: If a book's topic is narrow and our editors cannot see at first glance how it can be broadened in its implications and readership, we probably won't even agree to send it out for review to find out just how brilliant it is. What does less revenue mean for us? Less revenue means reduced production quality-so far, for us, only in small ways that we hope you won't ever notice. But we see many of our colleagues succumbing to the economic pressures and giving less and less quality control in every area: copy-editing and proofreading and design and typesetting and printing. Less revenue constrains our marketing resources, and thus our ability to get the word out about our books. Obviously, that matters to authors as well as to readers. Less revenue means that we have to think more and more about financial matters. Every hour we spend in a managers meeting figuring out how to avoid the layoffs that we have seen at a number of our fellow presses is one hour we were not able to spend on other publishing questions. And less revenue means we sometimes need to make decisions that we feel are necessary for short-term survival, even if they are not the best solution for the long term or have detrimental long-term effects. Finally, less revenues means that we have more and more moments of feeling discouraged and dispirited. It is hard to keep up our morale when we feel more and more like a not-very-successful commercial enterprise. If money dominates our thinking, then money-related successes or failures tend to color our view of the Press, no matter how successful we may be at enhancing our reputation and publishing outstanding and prizewinning books and journals. So what do we plan to do about this situation at Duke University Press? First, in Books: We do not at this point plan to make drastic changes in our book publishing program. On the whole, we like it the way it is, and we think it's getting better and better. We don't plan to make no changes at all, of course; but we want those changes to be evolutionary, changing as scholarship changes and as our own interests and capacities change. We have worked very hard to build the program we now have-I expect that in a vote of our peers Duke would win hands down as the university press book publishing program that has grown in size and reputation the fastest and come the farthest in the last decade or so. We do not want to give up ground that has been so hard won. This intention to hold onto the program we have built is, to be honest, probably not a plan that everyone at the Press would agree with, so I need to be careful about saying "we," as I just did. There is considerable concern, especially among our journals managers, about the need for continuing huge cross-subsidies at a time when our journals program also quite urgently needs investment money, in order to keep up with the now-rapid technological and marketplace changes in their own area. If cutting back or drastically reorienting our book publishing program would reduce those cross-subsidies substantially, some at the Press would be all for it. But, unless and until things get a lot worse, I would not be for it; and, even in our very flat administrative structure at the Press, I do get the final say. I also think that maintaining the size and the strengths of our current book publishing program is most important to the Duke faculty, as represented by our faculty Editorial Advisory Board, which has been enormously supportive to us. We do need to make some adjustments to accommodate to financial realities. Price increases of a size that a few years ago would have seemed to us unconscionable and destructive are one such adjustment. Looking actively for some book projects that can make money, to help support the money-losing projects, is another. We may now be able to attract more "big books" by established scholars, given our stronger reputation (though in fact many of our best-selling books in recent years have been first-time books by people who are marginal in the academy, and thus free to write in accessible ways about such topics as women jazz musicians of the 1940s, or tattoo culture, or Jamaican music). We do expect to chase actively after subventions for individual books and for book series or publishing areas, in ways we have not done much of so far. But even these adjustments will, I fear, just keep us in place-it's like running up the down escalator, but it's what we'll need to do if we want to sustain and develop the book publishing program that we have built. In Journals, on the other hand, we see growth and change as essential. The big publishers are dominating the market. We need to get bigger in order to be seen as a major player when it comes to such things as negotiating with library buying consortia. We also may need to find ways to form coalitions with the other large university press journal publishers. We also see technological development as absolutely essential. We have fallen behind the commercial publishers, with their capital resources, and even behind the top few university press programs in terms of our technological capabilities, and we do need to catch up, or else the best and strongest journals will go elsewhere. Above all, we want to accomplish all of this with and through a program of adding STM journals to our publishing program. There are multiple reasons for doing this: First, an STM journals program fits with the university's plans to strengthen the sciences, and it will connect us to this growing part of the university with which we have not in the past had much contact. Second, an STM journals program promises to bring us financial surpluses over the long term: The only publishers who are reliably making money on publishing these days are the commercial STM publishers, and we believe that we can bring in more modest surpluses ourselves, even as we apply nonprofit pricing and publishing policies. Third, because of the growing discontent with commercial STM publishers, we think there are a number of journal editors and scientific societies that would prefer to work with a nonprofit publisher such as a university press, and there are very few other nonprofit publishers with the capacity to take on such journals at the moment. Fourth, if we are successful, our STM journals program can serve as a model for other university-based efforts to move STM publishing away from the commercial publishers and back into the nonprofit sector-and particularly back into the universities, where most of the scientific research is conducted. Because of our experience with a top-level math journal publishing 15 issues a year, our addition this year of a medical journal called Neuro-Oncology, and our extensive experience with production of images in our humanities journals, we feel that we have most of the key ingredients for an STM journals program already in place. We needed a major upgrade of our electronic infrastructure to be competitive in this arena; the University (meaning Peter) has already agreed to fund that upgrade, which there was no way we could have afforded ourselves, and it is now underway. The next step is to bring in expertise in STM publishing and in the acquisition of STM journals, and that is something that Peter has also agreed in principle to fund until the program can become self-sustaining. So we do have a long-term plan that we hope will put us on a solider financial footing for the long haul than we have right now. As I see it, how to get our vehicle into that long haul, without allowing it to get broken beyond repair by the burdens we are now carrying, is the present problem for us to solve. I'm an inveterate optimist, and I have a hell of a good team to work with, both at the Press and in the University administration. But still I have plenty of days when I don't see how we're going to make it. And because of the strength of our journals program, our ability to envision a journals-based financial solution for the long haul is not typical of all or even most university presses. There is a set of dangers, perhaps, in universities giving their presses too much financial support. The presses might not then be as entrepreneurial, or efficient, or businesslike in their practices as they would be under some amount of financial pressure. But there is also a set of dangers in universities not giving the scholarly communication system enough support, whether that support is given directly to the presses, or provided through support of libraries, or provided through publication support for faculty members. The main dangers I see for university presses, assuming that we do survive, are loss of quality, commercialism, and discouragement. I do worry that we are getting perilously close to every one of those consequences. Steve Cohn is director of Duke University Press.