Re: Seven ARL Libraries Face Major Budget Cuts

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

I don't share Robert's doomsday view of the future of the 
monograph either. As I've written recently in Against the Grain 
(April), "The Hidden Digital Revolution in Scholarly Publishing," 
POD, SRDP, and the "long tail" have given a new lease on life to 
scholarly monograph publishing and solved two of the hitherto 
nagging problems of the publishing industry:  excess inventories 
and insufficient cash flow. So, it should be possible to carry on 
with traditional monograph publishing, even with sales much 
reduced from times past, for some years to come.

It is important to emphasize, however, in response to Fred's 
comment, that the type of peer review that university presses 
conduct for books is unlike the systems used for journal 
publishing, for society publishing, and for "community" review. 
There is also no counterpart to it in commercial academic book 
publishing, whether or not commercial publishers use "expert" 
reviewers.

The reason is that, uniquely, university presses employ inputs 
from three different sources: their acquiring editors, their 
expert external reviewers, and their faculty editorial boards. 
Each of these brings a different set of skills and perspectives 
to the process. Acquiring editors tend to bring a more eclectic 
range of specialized knowledge to their jobs of selecting and 
assessing than external scholarly reviewers do, and they tend to 
have a preference for championing new directions in research and 
to help younger scholars advance in their careers. Faculty 
editorial boards consist of experts in various fields, but seldom 
is their very special expertise brought to bear in their roles on 
editorial boards since presses publish in a far broader range of 
topics than any small number of faculty on their boards can 
pretend to be really expert about; so, on these boards, such 
faculty act more as generalists, broadly representing viewpoints 
from the different disciplines and sectors (arts, humanities, 
social sciences, natural sciences, professional schools) in which 
they are enmeshed. Mostly these are senior faculty and, as such, 
tend to have a bias for the established wisdom in their fields. 
Thus, as between acquiring editors and editorial board members, 
there is often an interesting dynamic at work whereby 
cutting-edge research challenges established authority. Into this 
mix come the reports solicited from the external experts.  No one 
of these three sources completely dominates the process: the 
decisions made reflect a complex blending of the diverse views 
these three groups bring to the table.

This, of course, differs starkly from the decisionmaking that 
goes on in journal peer reviewing, wherein experts in the special 
field a journal is publishing in serve as both the journal 
editors and the expert reviewers. There is no "generalist" 
perspective represented here, as the journal publishers do not 
get involved in the detailed peer review at all, other than 
providing a system for managing it. (This is why the claim by STM 
journal publishers that the peer review they conduct is being 
appropriated by NIH rings false for the most part; they may pay 
the journal editors, and in a very few cases have some of their 
staff involved directly in the assessment process, but generally 
it is only their "management" of the process that they control, 
not the real process of peer review itself.) Similarly, when 
professional societies run journals or monograph series, they are 
doing so much more on the model of journal peer review than 
university press decisionmaking about what books to publish, 
since they have no counterpart of the press's acquiring editor or 
faculty editorial board. (Their monograph series will likely have 
an editorial board, but it consists, unlike a university press 
editorial board, solely of experts in the subject of the series.)

The uniqueness of the process of selecting books to publish by 
university presses is ill understood outside university press 
publishing circles, but it behooves everyone--especially those in 
libraries who might want to establish publishing operations of 
their own--to realize how complex and multifaceted a process this 
is, and why it is not just journal peer reviewing writ large.

I elaborate more on the special features of this process in "The 
'Value Added' in Editorial Acquisitions," Journal of Scholarly 
Publishing (January 1999), esp. pp. 69-71: 
http://www.psupress.org/news/pdf/THEVAL~1.PDF



>These are serious issues, so please do not take my reply as
>trivialising them, but from my viewpoint the changes taking place
>do not necessarily lead to the collapse of a 'high-quality,
>traditional scholarly publishing regime'. The content presently
>available through scholarly monographs will still need to be
>peer-reviewed and published. Publishing it in a different way
>does not necessarily mean that there will be any loss in quality,
>nor any diminution in the role of university presses.
>
>It may well be that the model will be based around individual
>chapters linked to related periodical articles, because this is a
>model which can meet readers' needs, but this model is not
>incompatible with the branding of the collected content. This
>branding could be on the basis of both subject - as in a
>monograph bringing together work by several authors - or branding
>by publisher, perhaps a collaboration between a university press
>and a journal publisher or a university press and a university
>repository. Quality could be ensured either by peer review in the
>traditional way or through community peer review after
>publication, or a combination of both models. Could the business
>model could be built around the packaging and the branding,
>covering first copy costs through a low payment for an electronic
>copy and asking for a higher payment for print-on-demand? I do
>feel that relieving pressure on library budgets through changes
>in the way journals are purchased could release funds for
>research monograph content under this model.
>
>This model may not be 'traditional' in the sense that it moves
>away from the way monograph content has been disseminated for
>quite a few years, but it retains the essential elements the
>research community has always believed to be important, while
>adapting to the new environment. Change need not lead to
>collapse.
>
>Fred Friend
>JISC Scholarly Communication Consultant
>Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL
>