Download - ScholarSphere

Before beginning my talk, I would like to pay tribute
to my two predecessors for their leadership in getting
AAUP’s house in order. The revision of the bylaws,
which Penny Kaiserlian masterfully oversaw this past
year, was a necessary first step toward implementing
the new strategic plan, which was largely developed
during Lynne Withey’s term in office. It will be an
important part of my job as president this year, and
Alex Holzman’s next year, to carry forward with the
work defined by the strategic plan, and it is great to
have the framework brought about by the AAUP Board of
Directors under Lynne’s and Penny’s leadership in place
now for me and Alex to build upon.
As an acquiring editor whose favorite subject is
political philosophy, I am often tempted to think about
what is happening in our sphere of economic activity
through the eyes of one or another of the great
thinkers of the past. So let me begin this talk with a
quote from Marx: “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s
best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”
Oops, sorry, that was the other Marx, Groucho,
speaking! Here is the quote from Karl I want you to
ponder, from the Preface to A Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy (1859):
“In the social production which men carry on they enter
into definite relations that are indispensable and
independent of their will; these relations of
production correspond to a definite stage of
development of their material powers of production. The
sum total of these relations of production constitutes
the economic structure of society—the real foundation,
on which rise legal and political superstructures and
to which correspond definite forms of social
consciousness. The mode of production in material life
determines the general character of the social,
political and spiritual processes of life. It is not
the consciousness of men that determines their
existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence
determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of
their development, the material forces of production in
society come in conflict with the existing relations of
production, or—what is but a legal expression for the
2
same thing—with the property relations within which
they had been at work before. From forms of development
of the forces of production these relations turn into
their fetters. Then comes the period of social
revolution. With the change of the economic foundation
the entire immense superstructure is more or less
rapidly transformed.”
What strikes me about this quote is how uncannily it
seems to portray the situation in which we exist today
in scholarly publishing, with the legal regime of
copyright as a form of private “property” under
widespread attack as imposing “fetters” on the further
development of the “forces of production” unleashed by
the Internet, which is heralded by many as ushering in
a new “period of social revolution” manifested most
recently by the advent of the Web 2.0 generation and
its practices of communitarian collectivity. The
authors of a new book titled Wikinomics: How Mass
Collaboration Changes Everything (2006) put it this
way: “Leaders must think differently about how to
compete and be profitable, and embrace a new art and
science of collaboration we call wikinomics. This is
more than open source, social networking, so-called
crowdsourcing, smart mobs, crowd wisdom or other ideas
that touch upon the subject. Rather, we are talking
about deep changes in the structure and modus operandi
of the corporation and our economy, based on
competitive principles such as openness, peering,
sharing, and acting globally.” In Marxian thought,
technological advance is seen as the engine of economic
change, and the Internet is a prime example of a “force
of production” setting in motion a revolution in the
“relations of production.”
Although some interpreters of Marx have viewed his as a
philosophy of technological determinism, with a
fatalist tinge to it, others emphasize his political
activism, perhaps best summed up in this pithy quote:
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world in
various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”
This is the message that we in university press
publishing need to heed. It is all too easy to feel
beset on all sides by forces in our environment, both
3
within the academy that informs our values and within
the industry that shapes our economic well-being, over
which we have little or no control, and then to resign
ourselves to passive acceptance of our fate. But this
is the road to perdition, and if we acquiesce, we have
no one to blame but ourselves.
A key to escaping this pessimism and beginning to take
our fate in our own hands, I believe, is thinking
systematically—a lesson I learned many years ago from
my mentor in publishing, Herb Bailey, director of
Princeton University Press for forty years and author
of one of the most insightful analyses of our business,
in The Art and Science of Book Publishing, originally
published by Harper & Row in 1970 and currently in its
third edition available from Ohio University Press.
Among his many accomplishments were the launching of
the effort to use acid-free paper for the production of
books, the instigation of the National Enquiry into
Scholarly Communication in the late 1970s (which was
the last attempt to investigate the whole system
thoroughly), and the report he prepared in the late
1980s for the ACLS on the rate of publication of
scholarly books in the humanities and social sciences.
It was with Herb’s encouragement that I first became
involved with copyright, joining the AAUP’s Committee
in 1972, just as the debates over photocopying leading
up to the passage of the 1976 Copyright Act were
heating up. As the basic legal regime underpinning the
entire publishing industry and affording protection for
academic writing, copyright proved to be a wonderful
introduction to the systemic nature of scholarly
communication. It was also a lesson in the value of
mentoring and of voluntary service in our profession, I
might add—a lesson that I hope many of the young people
in this room will take to heart, as they consider what
opportunities they might have to contribute to the work
of the AAUP while advancing their own careers.
The challenge of “open access” is presenting us now
with a reason to think systematically. The debate in
this arena is all too rife with narrow-minded
perspectives. Understandably, librarians are concerned
about their budgets, under severe stress from the ever
4
rising costs of STM journal subscriptions, and they
have pressed their case for change vigorously, with
assistance from SPARC and other organizations.
Disappointingly, however, administrators at the top
levels, where one might expect thinking systematically
to be part of the job description, have been prone to
propose solutions that are narrowly tailored to solving
the STM crisis, with little regard to how those
solutions might affect the functioning of the rest of
the system of scholarly communication, including
university press publishing of both books and journals.
The impetus for the AAUP Statement on Open Access was
precisely to open some eyes at these levels, and among
faculty also, about possibly deleterious consequences
to the system as a whole of various solutions being
proposed. Even more recently, we are witnessing a wave
of advocacy by university administrators of faculty
retaining most rights in their works when they sign
contracts with publishers, with little understanding of
how the granting of only nonexclusive rights, for
instance, undercuts the economic basis of our
publishing operations. I am encouraging the AAUP
Copyright Committee over this coming year to draft an
advisory notice in response to such ill-considered
proposals, which while purportedly aimed at correcting
problems with STM publishing are being written in ways
that do not limit their application to just STM
journals or even to just journals but encompass books
as well.
We need to get our own house in better order, too, if
we are to respond knowledgeably and persuasively to
such challenges. I take this to be one principal
message of the soon-to-be-released Ithaka Group report
on “University Publishing in the Digital Age,” which
has been shared in draft form with press directors but
once distributed in final form should be read by all
press staff. Because the staff in journals departments
of presses have already been exposed to the challenges
of operating in a digital arena far more than their
colleagues on the book side have been, I believe it is
imperative that we not allow their knowledge and
experience to be undervalued and underused. I will
therefore be proposing to the AAUP Board of Directors
5
tomorrow that a Task Force on Books and Journals be
established to provide a stimulus for thinking
creatively about how to bring books and journals staff
together for fruitful exchange of ideas at AAUP annual
meetings, in professional development workshops, and in
other ways. It would be most unfortunate for us to
allow a new “digital divide” to widen even further
between book and journal content in academe, and this
Task Force can help us look for opportunities for
building bridges between the two. This effort should be
one way of implementing recommendations of the Ithaka
Group, which has raised the alarm about this “digital
divide” and is seeking ways to help presses do
something about it. As Peter Shepherd, the head of
COUNTER (the organization that has set standards for
usage statistic for journals and is now working on
standards for e-book usage statistics) said in a recent
issue of Against the Grain, “it is clear that in an
online world, many of the traditional distinctions
between books and journals are becoming blurred, not
only in terms of technology, but also in terms of
business/distribution models, which will have
implications for how publishers and librarians organize
themselves.” Here it is worth noting also that in the
AAUP Statement on Open Access we were able to provide
financial data only about member presses’ book
operations; the absence of data about journal
operations was conspicuous and embarrassing. I am
asking the new Task Force also to work with the
Scholarly Journals Committee and the Business Systems
Committee in studying the feasibility of renewing the
collection of journals operating data annually, last
done systematically in the early 1990s.
Another manifestation of the failure to think
systematically in higher education is the plight of the
revised dissertation as the typical first book of many
junior faculty in the humanities and social sciences.
The recent MLA Report noted the problem in passing
toward the end, but offered no ideas for dealing with
it, other than its overall emphasis on reducing the
emphasis on the monograph as the “gold standard” for
promotion and tenure. The problem, in a nutshell, is
this: P&T committees “rationally” decide to make
6
completion of a book or two a sine qua non for career
advancement; librarians “rationally” decide not to
order books based on dissertations through their
approval plans because they already have access to the
dissertations through the ProQuest subscription
database; ProQuest ”rationally” decides to maximize
its income on dissertations by licensing their sale
through Amazon; and university presses, faced with
expected lower sales of dissertation-based books,
“rationally” decide not to publish them. Each
individual decision is “rational” for the particular
actor involved, but when combined the decisions add up
to an irrational and dysfunctional system. As a first
step in getting a better handle on this problem, I am
proposing that the AAUP include in its annual survey of
titles published a line that calls for each press to
identify the number of books published that derived
from dissertations. And, perhaps with support from some
other organizations like the ARL and the MLA, we might
collect these data retrospectively over the past five
years to get a trend line for analysis of how big a
problem this is getting to be. Ideally, this could even
be broken down by discipline. The new initiative
announced last month by the Mellon Foundation to help
with the problem of publishing first books and books in
fields underserved by publishers now, it seems to me,
cannot adequately deal with the problem until we have
such data and a better grasp of the special problem
affecting books based on dissertations.
Karl Marx may have failed at predicting the downfall of
capitalism, vastly underestimating its adaptability to
every sort of seemingly revolutionary challenge and its
ability to coopt radical strains in society (from
Haight Asbury to P2P file-sharing), but he did teach us
the value of understanding our world in holistic terms
and thinking about it systematically. To survive in the
“brave new world” we now inhabit, the AAUP needs to
keep its vision trained on all the elements of the
system of scholarly communication of which we are a
part and to keep open our dialogue not only with our
fellow publishers (whose views on copyright, for
instance, we mostly but will not always share) but also
with the administrators, librarians, and especially the
7
faculty with whom we have common cause in serving our
mission of “disseminating knowledge…far and wide.”