The futures of scholarly publishing

• Published in: Journal of scholarly publishing 2004-04, Vol.35 (3), p.129-142
• Main Author: DAVIDSON, Cathy N
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Collaboration; Conversation; English; Exact sciences and technology; Information and communication sciences; Information publishing, dissemination and reproduction; Information science. Documentation; Libraries; Multimedia; Publishing. Electronic publishing. Bibliological aspects; Reinforcement; Rhetoric; Scholarly publishing; Sciences and techniques of general use; Social sciences; Student teacher relationship
• ISSN: 1198-9742; 1710-1166
• DOI: 10.3138/jsp.35.3.129

A key feature of academic publishing is that it touches on so many aspects of our academic lives, since it is the chief evaluating and credentialing mechanism upon which the reward system of academe is based. University press publishing has many portals, and, as individuals, we enter variously as students, scholars, teachers, mentors, editors, and administrators. Institutionally, we also have different relationships to scholarly publishing - as professional organizations, private universities, public universities, libraries, electronic publishers, and a range of different presses. It is important to have all of these - individually and institutionally - represented in our discussion because this forecloses the possibility of thinking there is some utopian 'elsewhere' where there is no problem. There is a problem, and we are all part of it. Kate Torrey, Director of the University of North Carolina Press, likes to say, 'we all breathe the same air.' The 'we' in that sentence is not just those in the world of university press publishing but all of us who, in multiple ways, have been rewarded in our professional lives because of work that has been supported by underpaid, understaffed, and overworked scholarly publishers. If we are part of the problem, we all must collectively, and more equitably, contribute to the solution. Among the many worthy possibilities for electronic publishing right now I would include the creation and preservation of more machine-readable databases, multimedia data banks, genetic texts, and multilingual editions of texts. Printing-on-demand (POD) publishing ventures are a promising way of gaining access to books no longer in print and hold possibilities for the future in small fields that will never be able to 'break even' under any financing model. There is also much work to be done with preservation of 'born digital' materials, meta-standards for archiving and searching, collaborative multi-site and multinational projects with open source access for any who wishes to contribute, and many exciting electronic publishing projects. None of these, at present, offers all that university presses do, and most of these electronic projects require either volunteer labour or considerable subsidies of their own. They are thus a wonderful addition to the scholarly arsenal but are by no means a 'solution' to the crisis in scholarly publishing. In the current conversation about 'the crisis,' book publishing is often presented by university adminis