The very first sentence starts: "People are convinced
there is a crisis in university press publishing . . . ."
This "crisis" has long been with us. In 1997 at a
conference co-sponsored by the AAUP, ARL, and ACLS I gave a talk
titled "Thinking Systematically about the Crisis in
Scholarly Communication" for which i provided this
background:
But first
it may be useful to offer some historical perspective on this
so-called crisis. It has, in fact, been with us for so long now that
maybe "crisis" is really a misnomer--"chronic illness"
may be a more accurate description. The librarians in this audience
will be familiar with a now classic NSF-funded study by Bernard Fry
and Herbert White published in 1975 that found, for the period
1969-1973, that the ratio of book to journal expenditures in the
largest academic libraries had dropped over that five-year period from
better than 2 to 1 to 1.16 to 1 (Fry/White 1975: 61), with every
expectation that this trend would only get worse--as, indeed, it has.
(Recent ARL statistics show the decline in
monograph purchases since 1986 among these libraries to have been
nearly 25%.) Fry and White's prognosis for university presses was
particularly gloomy: their situation, they said, "can be
described, without exaggeration, as disastrous. Already heavily
encumbered by operating deficits..., university presses appear...to be
sliding even more rapidly toward financial imbalance" (Fry/White
1975: 11).
This
precarious situation was viewed with alarm by university presses
themselves at this time. A series of articles appeared in the journal
Scholarly Publishing in April 1972, July 1973, and April 1974 based on
successive surveys of presses covering the years 1970-1974. The first
article, entitled "The Impending Crisis in University
Publishing," "clearly indicated that presses were in the
midst of a period of extraordinary financial stress, which posed a
serious threat to the continuing survival of many of them"
(Becker 1974: 195). The next two articles bore the titles "The
Crisis--One Year Later" and "The Crisis--Is It Over?"
The somewhat encouraging conclusion of the last article in this series
was that, "except for the smaller ones, presses for the most part
have managed to survive their financial difficulties quite well by
making a host of adjustments, including radically increased book
prices, substantially lower discounts, economies achieved in book
production costs, slashing staffs, publishing more books with sales
potential and fewer which cannot pay their own way, special inventory
sales, and so forth." But, the author wondered, how much more can
such methods be used without becoming at some point self-defeating.
Ominously and--as we can now see with the wisdom of
hindsight--presciently, he ended by pointing to "the increasing
danger that presses will turn more and more to publishing books on the
basis of saleability rather than scholarly merit." And, while
noting the temporary mitigating effects that a generous grant from the
Mellon Foundation to presses for publishing books in the humanities
might have, he asked: "But what then?" (Becker 1974:
202)
As Jim said, "There must be some smart people doing some
good work" because we still have a lot of university presses
continuing to function and performing their service for academe and
the public good.
Sandy Thatcher
From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 8 Jun 2017 09:10:29
-0700
The Chronicle of Higher Education today
has results of an extensive survey of University Press leaders and
others on the vexed future of that community. The following link
takes you to the landing page for the feature, but that comprises only
a list of links to sub-topics, most of which are paywalled.
Worth an exploration if you have access. Their introduction:
"We asked publishers, press directors, editors, scholars,
and other insiders for their views on the state and future of academic
publishing. Of the people we contacted, including the heads of nearly
every one of the Association of American University Presses' 143
members, 46 sent back responses to our questions. We got back a
surprisingly wide range of views - and good ideas on how university
presses are preparing for an uncertain future.
At the end of a quarter century of
attending meetings and reading articles discussing the crisis in
University Press publishing, I observe that for there to be still 143
players standing in that space suggests that something is working.
There must be some smart people doing some good work.
Jim O'Donnell
ASU