The Future of University Presses | Peer to Peer Review
. . . and why libraries should be part of it Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN Dec 2, 2010| Photo by Debora Miller |
Most of us are dealing with cutbacks to our library budgets of one sort or another. For years we have juggled priorities and cut corners as insatiable subscription prices for journals and databases have consumed more and more of our budgets. We're wondering when the juggernaut of increasing productivity expectations among the faculty will finally collide with the hard reality that nobody can afford to purchase the burgeoning number of publications (let alone have time to actually read them). We're doing all this while balancing our traditional functions with new digital opportunities and trying to hang onto our fundamental role in encouraging student learning and the discovery and preservation of knowledge. University presses are dealing with similar challenges, which is why I found the recent special issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing on "reimagining the university press" so fascinating.
Tangled threads
As I read the essays by Daniel Greenstein, Paul Courant, Clifford Lynch, Peter Brantley, and others several threads emerged—and sometimes crossed one another and got tangled and knotted.
There seems to be general agreement that university presses need to embrace the opportunities digital technologies offer to create richer content with a wider, more global reach rather than simply digitize print-ready texts and sell them through current channels. This will require a lot of experimentation and new skills, but presses don't have the resources to go it alone; they need to pool their resources to invest jointly in the research and development necessary to create new digital platforms and delivery channels. Sharing production and distribution functions could let presses concentrate on the editorial work that is their core function and will continue to be high touch and labor-intensive, regardless of digital innovations.
On the other hand, even while advocating for a more global reach and greater inter-institutional collaboration, several contributors advocated for aligning publishing programs with local needs and interests. From a tactical perspective, it makes sense to align a university press's work more closely with the host institution's strategic objectives. Rather than being status symbols that are almost totally disconnected from the universities, presses could become bearers of the universities' missions and initiatives. Presses could do a better job of playing to their institutions' strengths, becoming conduits for making those strengths more visible to the world.
As an aside, I wonder if university presses are ever at the table when an institution's strategic goals are under discussion. If the most common way a decision-maker is reminded of a press's existence is through its appearance on budget spreadsheets, it may be tricky to position a press as an essential part of the university.
Digital potential
There seemed to be general agreement that traditional core editorial functions—the work involved in discovering and refining high quality scholarship—would continue to the be the heart of the presses' work, but that the ways that this editorial work is funded and distributed would have to change. So, too, would the process of creating the content. Scholars will have to learn to write differently; the traditions of writing long-form, text-based arguments suited for print won't serve the opportunities afforded by a digital environment. Another idea: one work could be created to serve two audiences. At one level, it could be accessible to a broad audience, but specialists could drill deeper for more detail and elaboration. Analysis and interpretation could be linked to digital archives and primary source collections. Large and complex reference sources and collected scholarly works are currently more likely to be developed by commercial vendors that can charge large annual fees for resources that were once acquired by libraries in a one-time investment; universities could reclaim that part of scholarship that they have largely abandoned.
Producing knowledge isn't sufficient; we need to pay attention to how it finds its audience. We will have to find new ways to subsidize scholarly work and to find some creative ways to share the burden so that it is available to all, yet avoids the risk that one institution facing a crunch will cut off funding for a resource that is too important to too many to lose. Though some of the essays didn't mention libraries at all, or discussed them primarily as a failed market, others made it clear that we will need to stop treating libraries and presses as separate units working at cross purposes. Both are strategic investments in the institution's goal of advancing knowledge. And presses have a lot to gain from libraries if they stop competing with other publishers and vendors of electronic content for a piece of our shrinking budgets.
The most valuable product a press has to offer is quality. What respected presses do well is adopt the best scholarship and make it better. That seems to be an enduring value that will have a place in the future university press. But providing places where innovation and works in progress can be shared publicly before they go stale—that can matter to people outside the university and its disciplinary silos—was also a concern of some contributors. Can presses retain their reputation as gatekeepers of quality, yet provide for more nimble and innovative forms of emerging scholarship?
And, as Michael Jon Jensen of the National Academies Press asks, can we do this in a world with an ecosystem on the brink of catastrophe? Have we envisioned a future for scholarly communication that fails to take into account the looming reality of a very different natural environment? (Though perhaps "unnatural" is more apt.)
Facing the future—together
After reading these essays I remain unsure of how we will solve the nuts and bolts problems of transforming scholarly publishing. I don't know how institutions, facing lower public investment and a lack of public confidence in universities and the expertise they offer, and competing against each other for funds, faculty, and students will be able to overcome their myopia and work together to create a less wasteful and more effective platform for scholarly communication. I'm not sure that faculty who produce knowledge will be able to shake off tradition and rise to the opportunities and challenges of making their knowledge available to a wider audience through innovative channels, not when the rewards system is so firmly tied to the distribution infrastructure of 1950.
That said, I am excited by the possibilities. Can institutions think beyond the mechanics involved in creating knowledge full stop to ensuring that it is available to and discoverable by its potential audiences? Can we focus on what we in higher education offer the world—our expertise and our methods of making and testing meaning—so that it makes a real difference?
University presses and libraries working together have a much greater chance of succeeding than we do working apart. After all, those who use libraries need high quality scholarly content. And, if what presses need is a better ethos of sharing and more robust means of adopting technology to make scholarship shareable and discoverable . . .
. . . uh, hello? If your primary exposure to libraries is just seeing a shrinking number on your profit and loss statement, stop by sometime and let us show you what we do and how connected we are to scholars, future scholars, and to the mission and goals of our institutions. You might learn something useful.
Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her latest mystery, Through the Cracks (see review), was published in May by Minotaur Books.
