From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 4 Jun 2014 09:11:44 -0500
I won't attempt to defend the tenure system, which may indeed produce
incentives that do not always serve the best interests of the academy,
nor would I want to argue that all books published by all academic
publishers, commercial and non-profit alike, are important
contributions to scholarship. But I'd like to remind Karin, and
others, that the very way in which university presses operate ensures
to some degree that these presses do not publish worthless
scholarship. Not only are there readings by a relatively informed
staff editor and, for those manuscripts not initially rejected by the
staff, further readings by experts in the field (typically two, but
sometimes even more), but then every book that gets published has to
survive the gauntlet of review by a committee consisting of faculty
members, which can number from three or four at the low end to over
twenty in some cases (like the University of California Press, which
serves a whole system). Most of the members of these editorial boards
are NOT specialists in the fields of every manuscript they review.
Indeed, they function more as informed generalists in making these
decisions, which means that they are making judgments about merit that
go beyond their own special niches. This process, therefore,
represents a collective judgment of quite a few well-informed people
who have decided that a book is important enough to enough students
and scholars to justify the expense of publishing it. How anyone can
claim that such a process results in the publication of books that no
one needs or wants to read is beyond me. That claim can only rest on
a lack of understanding of how the process works.
Sandy Thatcher
P.S. I deal with this process in more detail, and focus on the unique
contributions of acquisitions editors, in this essay:
https://scholarsphere.psu.edu/files/sf2686078
From: Karin Wikoff <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 3 Jun 2014 05:41:03 -0400
It's beyond the scope of this forum, perhaps, but I would add to the
reasons why "an awful lot of these books probably shouldn't be
published." People who were never cut out to be authors are forced to
publish in order to get tenure. Some may not even care about the
topic, but just cast about for SOMETHING so they can meet the
requirements to keep their jobs, be promoted, have security in their
positions. This is a problem with the tenure system -- I'm not
against tenure per se, but I am against a one-size-fits-all set of
requirements to obtain tenure. If you haven't something to say, you
shouldn't be forced to write and publish just to keep your job. You
may be a phenomenally good teacher without having something new to add
to the literature. That goes for articles as well as books. If so
many weren't forced to "publish or perish," I daresay the quality of
content would increase.
Maybe one reason some of those books sit on the shelves untouched is
because they don't contribute anything of value to the field (says the
author of an itty-bitty library textbook).
My opinion only -- but it feeds into the problem being discussed here.
Karin
Karin Wikoff
Electronic and Technical Services Librarian
Ithaca College Library
Ithaca, NY 14850
Email: [log in to unmask]
On 6/3/2014 12:17 AM, LIBLICENSE wrote:
From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 2 Jun 2014 11:12:32 +0000
Rick, I take your point, but I'm puzzled by your claim that "an awful
lot of these books probably shouldn't be published." Why not?
Because in the case of many of these books, virtually no one needs to use
them or wants to read them. They are purchased by institutions in the
(mistaken) hope that they will prove useful to the scholars or students
those institutions serve, but instead they end up sitting on shelves and
are never (or virtually never) used. This is not necessarily any
reflection on the quality of the scholarship they contain Ð it©–s a
reflection on their relevance, which is, very often, so narrow and limited
as to make them effectively useless to anyone except the authors (whose
tenure bids they made possible).
Please note: I am not saying this is the case for all scholarly
monographs, only that it is the case for too many of those that are
published and then purchased by libraries.
---
Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dean for Scholarly Resources & Collections
Marriott Library, University of Utah
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