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Karin, and others, that the very way in which university presses operate ensures to some degree that these presses do not publish worthless scholarship.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 [log in to unmask]