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| Scholarly Publishing | For Knowing Where, When and How to Publish in The 21st Century Scholarly Publishing Environment | |
Sample Newsletter
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| Scholarly Publishing | For Knowing Where, When and How to Publish in The 21st Century Scholarly Publishing Environment | |
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Want A Bigger, “Crossover” Audience For Your Next Book? Try Hiding the Footnotes A recent book titled “Fortune Is a River: Leonardo da Vinci and Niccolo Machiavelli’s Magnificent Dream to Change the Course of Florentine History” (the Free Press) had footnotes almost as voluminous as the text itself. But rather than trimming any of the detailed notes, the book’s author, Roger D. Masters, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, took all the space he needed by putting the footnotes on a World Wide Web site. Sources cited on the Web include maps and illustrations by da Vinci, as well as personal reminders and memorandums. The printed book still contains footnotes that credit quotations and specific pieces of evidence. But the on-line notes offer deeper sources that will be of most interest to scholars. For readers without Web access, the notes are available by mail. Mr. Masters says that putting his footnotes on the Web gave him the opportunity to write his book for a general audience without skimping on material that would demonstrate its scholarly value. The result of that approach, he says, is a work that is both a trade book and a scholarly book. And by cutting a hunk of pages from the printed work, he says, his book is cheaper to publish and more accessible to general and scholarly readers alike. Caution: Internet (WWW) Publishing May Hurt Your Career Scholars who seek to publish papers that have appeared online can encounter widely divergent policies among journal publishers. Some editors will automatically reject such articles, feeling that they have already been“published”. Other editors may reject them, perhaps, to make the point that electronic publishing threatens the very existence of paper journals. This issue is taking on new importance, as scholars increasingly post drafts of articles, which are sometimes called electronic preprints — or e-prints — on special Web sites that are designed to distribute them quickly and easily to colleagues around the world. Some journal editors now feel that, in the electronic age, they need to think about what“a finished piece of writing” means. Editors of many journals also fear that the Internet will “scoop” them by widely disseminating important papers, reducing scholars’ need to read — and subscribe to — printed journals. That fear is intensified by pressure from libraries, which have been cutting journal subscriptions to deal with tight budgets and rising journal prices. The Trade Wind Blows Strong at Johns Hopkins Press A clear sign that UP publishing may soon be indistinguishable from trade publishing is that JHP, one of America’s oldest and biggest university presses, has gone outside academe for its new director, James D. Jordan, a former vice-president at W.W. Norton. He replaces Willis G. Regier, who had been at the helm of the 120-year-old press for only three years. The press says Regier was asked to resign, but he claims he was forced out in a palace coup. Oddly, the university’s public-relations department didn’t mention Mr. Jordan’s previous experience when announcing his appointment. An official said it was just an oversight. Why was Jordan selected to helm an academic press, and such a large one as JHP, which publishes 170 books and 52 journals a year, and has a staff of more than 100? According to Jordan’s own comments, Hopkins wanted a chief who could keep a close eye on the bottom line. Jordan was quoted in The Gazette, the university’s faculty/staff newspaper, as saying,“You have to run a publishing company like the business it is.” Although Jordan is a book-publishing veteran, he’ll nonetheless have to learn the press’s lucrative journals division, which has distinguished itself since 1995 for publishing many journals electronically. 1 Fish Head & 1 Cohn Head = More $ at Duke What is a university press to do when it has exceeded its parent university’s budget by over a quarter-million dollars? That was the challenge facing Duke UP five years ago when it decided to hire not one but two heads: Since 1993, Stanley Fish served as Duke UP’s editorial director, acting as a liaison between the press and the university, while Steve Cohn directed publishing operations, attending to daily decision making. On October 1, however, Cohn became the press’s only director, as Fish, a professor of English and law, whose five-year DUP contract had been set to expire, prepared to become dean of the college of liberal arts and sciences at the U of Illinois at Chicago. Does this return to the conventional leadership structure mean that the duo solved DUP’s financial crisis? In a word,“yes.” Duke gained a reputation as a top publisher of cultural-studies books and journals, its list of new titles grew quickly, to nearly 100 (an increase of 50%), and sales increased from $3.5-million to $6-million. Now the only question is: Will Fish be lured back to DUP to save Cohn from drowning in the murky waters of UP publishing? Only time will tell. The Hold-Your-Copyright Revolution Has Begun Steven E. Koonin, provost of the California Institute of Technology, has proposed a revolutionary idea that could change the power relations between authors and journal publishers, and maybe even threaten the existence of many journals. The idea is that, instead of authors signing over journal article rights to publishers, as is typical, the Institute and its faculty members would turn the tables: Journal publishers would be informed that they could publish articles by Caltech researchers only if the authors and the university retained copyrights to the material. Doing so, Koonin argued, would give Caltech researchers control over their written work, enabling them to distribute it online without worrying about getting permission from publishers. As it is now, some publishers prohibit professors from posting their articles on even their own World-Wide Web sites, and most publishers don’t allow researchers to distribute published copies of their work to large numbers of peers. The whole proposal is a revolt against the current system, which Koonin sees as, well, revolting. As things now stand, journal publishers get articles free from university researchers, and then they make money by selling the same articles back to the universities that employ the researchers. The universities that must pay for the articles have already, of course, paid for the research in the first place! What exactly does Koonin want? He says he’d like to see Caltech’s faculty members jointly own and retain rights to journal articles, and then license those copyrights to publishers on a limited basis, e.g., give a journal exclusive license to publish an article for a period of time, or promise a journal that the author would not allow the paper to be published for profit in any other forum. Before promoting such details, however, Koonin has to convince professors that keeping their copyright will not jeopardize their careers. Junior faculty members, especially, worry that publishers will reject any manuscript for which professors refuse to sign over the copyright. To them, adopting Koonin’s plan can threaten their chances at publication and even tenure, ultimately. If Caltech professors eventually devise a policy that enables them to retain the copyrights to their papers, it could radically alter the dynamics of journal publishing. The publishers, after all, don’t want to lose control over copyrights. And if professors control the right to put their published articles on the Internet, then the works would be freely available to everyone. Under this scenario, the publishers want to know how can they compete and earn income? Koonin has little concern for the journal publishers’ plight. Course-On-A-Disk Could Signal the Rise of the“Virtual Professor” A film professor at Ohio University, Rajko Grlic (pronounced“GUR-litch”) has put his introductory film-making course on CD-ROM, with everything from lessons on sound and lighting to a fast-forward through film history. The result is one of the most ambitious recent attempts to bottle course content in an electronic form that can be sold in stores. The course,“How to Make Your Movie: An Interactive Film School” ($89.95 retail) is packaged like a video game and distributed by Electronic Vision, a software company that will share any profits with the professor and Ohio University. The CD-ROM’s intended audiences include college students in introductory film courses and professors looking for a tool to help them set up a course. Mr. Grlic, who wrote, directed, and produced the three-CD-ROM set, decided to try the more creative multimedia project instead of a conventional book. The task proved to be daunting, involving 80 people and taking about three years to complete. A distinguishing feature of the CD-ROM is that it can provide examples that would be impossible in a printed textbook, e.g., a virtual lighting studio lets students turn on lights in various positions to see how different combinations appear when seen through the camera’s lens. The CD-ROM is also a reference tool, with listings of film festivals, descriptions of popular equipment, and a bibliography of recommended books. The flashy CD-ROM seems like just the kind of product that some educators fear could replace faculty members as colleges look to technology to cut costs. But Grlic is quick to say that is not his intent. In addition to the disk set, this fall Ohio University will offer an on-line film-making course based on the CD-ROM and taught by Mr. Grlic, for $6,000 tuition. The Revolution in University Press Subsidy Publishing: From “Parents” to Professors Until a few decades ago, American university presses were fully or largely subsidized by their parent universities, which founded the UPs. In short, the parent universities put up the money for their presses’ operations — including editorial staffs, buildings, equipment, printing, marketing, sales, and distribution. This system of subsidization existed to support the special “mission” of the UPs, which was, of course, to disseminate scholarly knowledge to the academic community through books and journals. Profit was considered a distasteful motive for making a publishing decision. If a book sold a few hundred or even a few dozen copies, but was considered worthy of publication because it advanced scholarly knowledge in a discipline, then it was published. After all, if the UPs would not take on this task, who would? Certainly not so-called “trade” publishers, whose raison d’etre is to make a profit from book sales, even if nonpecuniary motives sometimes influence their publishing decisions. Along with the subsidization of UPs by their “parents”, the presses also benefitted greatly from the university libraries, which were akin to loving, spendthrift “uncles and aunts.” They could be counted on to purchase a goodly number of UP books and journals, and thus they also lent economic support to the UPs. Under this system of financial support — which was further shored up by occasional grants from government and various types organizations — UP books did not have to make profit from sales. When they did, however, that was reason for special celebration, since the money was made from fulfilling the “mission.” Today, there are approximately 104 full members of the American Association of University Presses (AAUP), spread around the country — from California to New York, Washington to Florida, Mississippi to Massachusetts. Over the years, some have naturally grown wealthier than others from sales, and some have accumulated thousands of titles in print while others have only hundreds or even dozens of titles in print. But the one thing that virtually all UPs share today, is that they have lost their subsidizations, in whole or in part, from their parent universities; and they have also lost a good deal of their financial support from the libraries that historically purchased much of their output. The reasons for these changes in scholarly publishing subsidization are complex and would take a book to explain fully and well. But along with the decline in traditional financial support, several things are clear, which together constitute a revolution in scholarly publishing. For one thing, the UPs have been more or less forced into a “profit-or-perish” situation, and thus increasingly attempt to publish as many “crossover” and trade-oriented books as possible. Second, and related to the above, the UPs now explicitly distinguish between their “mission” books (i.e., scholarly work for limited academic audiences) and their crossover and trade-oriented books. Third, the UPs increasingly rely on a new source of subsidization, especially for their “mission” books: the very professors whose work they publish. These payments are typically called “author subventions,” and may come from either departmental subvention funds or directly from the authors. Initially, this practice of UPs accepting payment from authors to publish their works was highly controversial, because it smacked of “vanity publishing,” as Beth Luey explained in the first edition of her Handbook for Academic Authors (Cambridge University Press, 1987). She went on to say, however, “In fact, it is not the same thing. . . .[because] University presses that request author subventions separate the decision to publish from the author’s willingness to pay. If the manuscript does not meet their standards, they will not publish it, even if the author offers money. . . .University presses ask for subventions not to enhance their profits but to enable them to publish books that otherwise would not make economic sense” (p. 76).
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