Future of Scholarly Publishing

Worst Case Scenarios

My second concern, after the corporate makeover of the university, is my conviction that, in letting the temple be turned over to the money-changers, we have allowed those who want to hollow out and thereby desecrate our good books and publications become dominant in a number of fields, most egregiously in the humanities. I believe the commercialization of higher education has caused innovation to come to a standstill in the humanities departments of the university. (6).

Lindsay Waters Enemies of Promise: Publishing, Perishing, and the Eclipse of Scholarship. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004.

My central claim is that the venture capital logic of the nineties, either in it's older "every tub on it's own bottom" form or the more advanced investment/payoff model, has had a devastating effect on some of the institutions central to the academic system. I will be talking about presses, but I don't think they have been singled out or forced to play by different rules. "Excellence, great. Now how are you going to pay for it?" Or, in the case of publishing, make it pay for itself.

Ken Wissoker "An Emerging Crisis: University Publishing and the Humanities." 18 Sept. 2002. <http://www.jhfc.duke.edu/fhi/events/scholarly_pub/2002kenwissoker.php>

The Association of American University Presses has a useful bibliography on scholarly publishing and its future: http://aaupnet.org/resources/bibliography.html.

see also:

Against the Grain 16.5 November 2004 (The issue is devoted to articles on collection development and publishing).

Alonso, Carlos J. "Editor's Column: Having a Spine--Facing the Crisis in Scholarly Publishing." PMLA 118: 217-23. 2003.

Boston College Libraries. "Scholarly Communication." 14 March 2005. <http://www.bc.edu/libraries/about/scholcomm/>

Vaidhyanathan, Siva. The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System. New York: Basic Books, 2004.

 

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