Crisis in Scholarly Book Publishing

Under financial constraint, universities have been unable to provide adequate support both for library budgets and for university presses. Responding to the pressure of shrinking budgets and of skyrocketing costs for medical, scientific, and technical journals, libraries have cut back on the number of books that they purchase. And university presses, suffering severe financial losses as a result of this shift in library purchases and a general decline in book sales, have cut back on the number of books they publish annually in certain fields.

Stephen Greenblatt "Call for Action on Problems in Scholarly Publishing: A Special Letter from Stephen Greenblatt" 28 May 2002. <http://www.mla.org/resources/documents/rep_scholarly_pub/scholarly_pub>

A sampling of essays written on this topic over the last three or four years makes it abundantly clear that what we do not need is more diagnoses of the problem. We've had lots of those... The bottom line is that scholarly publishing isn't financially feasible as a business model -- never was, never was intended to be, and should not be. If scholarship paid, we wouldn't need university presses.

Without a subsidy of one kind or another, scholarly publishing cannot exist. Right now, universities are responsible for finding a way to support scholarly publishing -- but most universities are in perilous financial situations, too. That is the crisis.

Cathy Davidson "Understanding the Economic Burden of Scholarly Publishing." Chronicle Review. 3 Oct. 2003. <http://chronicle.com/free/v50/i06/06b00701.htm>

Boston College Libraries have published a good webliography of articles on the issues surrounding scholarly monographs. It is available at: http://www.bc.edu/libraries/about/scholcomm/s-humanities/

see also:

Holdberg, Jennifer and Marcy Taylor. "Editor's Introduction: Getting the Profession We Want, a Few Thoughts on the Crisis in Scholarly Publishing." Pedagogy. 4.1 (2004): 1-7. <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pedagogy/v004/4.1holberg.html> (SLU Community Only)

Lewis, Philip. "Is Monographic Tyranny the Problem?" PMLA 117: 1222-1224. 2002.

 

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