Eugene, Oregon
May 13-15, 1998
Peter Givler, Executive Director
Association of American University Presses (AAUP)
I'd like to tell you a little bit about the Association of American University Presses, which I think will explain some things, perhaps, about my take on the Roundtable. The Association of American University Presses (AAUP) has 118 member presses, all of which are not-for-profits. The core group are the 86 presses that are affiliated with major research universities--those are full members; we have other categories of membership for museums, scholarly societies, research institutes, etc. Collectively, the publishers in AAUP publish roughly 10,000 books and over 700 scholarly journals a year. In recent years, with the push toward electronic publications and all of the various things that have come out of that, our members have collaborated with libraries on a variety of projects.
One recent example, of course, is the Columbia International Affairs Online project, the collaboration between Columbia University Press and Columbia Library, and I know that Jim Neal has been very involved with Johns Hopkins University Press and Project MUSE, putting all of their journals into one large electronic collection. One of our members, New York University Press, is even housed in the library.
AAUP has been working for the last five or six years now with ARL on a series of conferences; one was held last October on monograph publishing, and we are at the beginning of planning another one with ARL, ACLS, and the Association of American Universities.
As further evidence of our wish and willingness to cooperate and work with you in finding solutions to these problems, the AAUP board of directors has just formally endorsed SPARC. This is something we do want to work with you on in general. I know of one of our members in particular who is having serious discussions with SPARC about starting a new science journal under SPARC.
Of course, the serials crises has affected us as it has affected you. I don't need to say much about that. It's pretty obvious to all of us. The pressures on your budget have had the effect on university presses of substantially reducing monograph sales, in particular to university libraries and to research collections. That reduction in sales has been dramatic and severe. A rule of thumb that was used when I got into university press publishing 17 years ago was that for a respectable, decent monograph in a particular field a publisher could count on a seven or eight hundred copy sale to a core market of libraries. That core sale now for a book that is a good piece of scholarship not written by anybody with particular stature or visibility in the field--be it a first book or second book--is down to 200 copies or less. And it is sad to say that even the very visible authors, those with a high reputation in the field, sometimes still don't sell more than 500-600 copies. This very depressed market for the monographs has done two things. One of them is, of course, an increase in prices for the monographs, because as the market shrinks that spreads a greater percentage of the fixed costs over the fewer numbers. The arithmetic is inescapable as the prices go up. The other thing that's happened is that university press publishers in general try to be very creative and imaginative in their approach to publishing for very small markets and most of them find ways of cross-subsidizing internally, publishing books that are going to bring in more money to try to support the ones that aren't going to bring in much money.
We've also had our battles over funding with the universities as press operating subsidies are being cut. But one of the things that I think is most distressing about this crisis is the long-term consequences: What flows directly from the cutbacks in your budget is that it has seriously compromised and to some extent jeopardized our ability to publish in certain fields where the field itself may be a small one. Even very good work being made available in that field is difficult to publish. It is a very serious problem. It is one that university press publishers talk about a lot.
So, with that as a general context, I was delighted to be asked to participate in the Pew Roundtable. The issue is as serious for us as it is for you. And the fact that both ARL and AAU were sponsoring the Roundtable meant that the Roundtable would have the chance to address this problem with the backing of some organizations that have substantial authority in higher education, where some things can really be done.
What about the report itself?1 It begins with a brief history and analysis of the problem, which we all know pretty well. It then concludes with five recommendations, which I'll just quickly list:
Speaking with the publishers and in speaking directly to you as librarians, it seems to me that only the second and fourth of those recommendations affect us directly. And the second recommendation is one, of course, that you have been acting on for a long time and will continue to do so. Further, investing in electronic forms of scholarly communication is an exciting idea, and I hope that word "invest" is not used as a metaphor but means that real money will start to come into this avenue.
What we are all finding, of course, is that the experience of the publishers who have been involved in these areas--the pilot programs, experimental programs, and electronic publishing--is that it's quite expensive. You save money on paper, printing, and binding, but you pick up a whole new category of expenses as well as the kind of price that you pay as a pioneer in anything, perhaps for having to learn as you go, so it is not an easy or inexpensive way to do it, although I think it is an exciting way to work.
I will just comment briefly on the other three proposals, which I see as good ideas, but ideas that have to be implemented at a university-wide, system-wide, or even nation-wide level. It's difficult for me to imagine how you and I can have as much influence on how they are implemented as can the provost of the university in general.
The first recommendation, then, is to end the preoccupation with numbers. As James Gardner pointed out earlier, this is a standard criticism of the concept of publish or perish, one that has been around about as long as that phrase has. There has always been criticism out there that the emphasis on publication would or could lead to valuing quantity of publication over quality, and it seems to me that if saying this would change it, well, we've said it already. It hasn't changed anything.
In fact, the measurement of faculty performance using the quantitative indices is just as entrenched and widespread as ever. There are some good or understandable reasons for that from the administrative point of view, if you're the department chair or the dean reviewing the tenure or dossier from somebody when you have ten departments within your area of responsibility and you're getting reports on people who have formed specialized research in 50 different fields. I don't know how that arithmetic works out, but it is very easy to see quickly that no single dean or university administrator could have the knowledge to evaluate the work so that the judgment about the quality of the research gets deferred to the referees of the journals and books. This is a perfectly sensible thing to do--the administration can then look at the quantity of research, see how much is there. And quantity can be as little, for example, as one book required for tenure--I'll come back to that in a few minutes--or, in some fields, a dossier of 50, 60, or 70 articles.
What we need to keep in mind, though, is that there are serious faculty rewards for the way that this evaluation system works. It's not to say that it couldn't be changed, but, as it exists now, the rewards for just keeping the status quo are in fact very substantial.
I would like to just talk about those rewards for a minute. The report itself refers only once to this and points out that for the faculty the rewards for publication are indirect, and then it goes on to say that it affects the ability to get tenure, to get promoted, to get outside offers from other institutions, and so on. Well, indirect they may be, but I think that characterization glosses over just how serious and substantial those rewards are. When I was at Ohio State, six or eight years ago now, I figured out that to take the position of assistant professor in the department of English at Ohio State and then to get tenure and become associate professor at the time that I did, that move all by itself carried with it an automatic 17 percent salary increase. That number has dropped since then, but let's say it is ten percent. So, to keep the arithmetic simple, if somebody who is coming up for tenure makes $30,000 a year, a ten percent increase means not only a $3,000 raise, but, with the operation of tenure, that $3,000 increase stays with you until you retire. And $3,000 a year over 30 years is $90,000. That is constant dollars; if you factored in inflation, it's substantially more.
Well, there are a lot of other factors at play in the considerations, and publication certainly isn't the only one, but it is the scene in a research university. You can do a lot of things, but if you are not publishing, you won't get tenure. And the more you publish, generally speaking, the greater those rewards come to you in this indirect way. The connection is indirect, but the effect on people's livelihood, how they raise their families, and on just about every other aspect of their lives is profound.
So for the faculty in a research university, publication is quite literally the point of the realm. And if I have just one overall observation--I won't say it is a criticism--of "To Publish and Perish" it is that the faculty point of view was not represented. I pointed this out during the conference itself, and a couple people mentioned how, indeed, they were still editing a journal while they were being provost or still publishing, yet nonetheless maintained an active scholarly career. My only response to that would be that yes, okay, they are, but they're also doing that as a night job. Their day job is as an administrator in the library, publishing association, or university as a provost, president, whatever. So that even though they may believe quite honestly and understandably that they understand the faculty point of view, the fact of the matter is that there was really nobody in the conversation there whose real livelihood on a day-to-day basis depended on, or was affected by, publication. That's a limitation. The point of the Pew Roundtable was to, as I understand it, mobilize a view, bring it into the conversation, and get everybody talking. That's fine. I'm glad we did it, but I hope that in the future such conversations will bring the faculty into this full discussion a little bit more. When the faculty does come into the discussion all of the conversations that you and I have had about copyright will immediately become more complicated. The faculty are in the unique position of being both the users and the creators of scholarly knowledge, and so they have a stake in both the user interest that you've been representing here and their own stake in the creation and publication.
So, although bringing faculty in will complicate the conversation for all of us, without that participation I don't see much hope of coming to some sort of coherent, reasonable set of views or principles on which everybody--as a community of higher education--can agree. Yet that's very important to do.
Charles E. Phelps' (Provost, University of Rochester) proposal for decoupling certification from publication is the most ambitious and most imaginative of the Pew recommendations. There is something there that is genuinely new. Precisely because it is genuinely new there are a lot of problems and questions about implementation. I will just quickly point out one that occurs to me. The basis of this model would be that the primary responsibility for vetting the scholarly work would be turned over to the scholarly societies, who could redistribute the work electronically. There is a real difference in the way scholarship is done in the sciences and the way it is done in the humanities, and, to some extent, in the social sciences. Scientific knowledge grows incrementally. If you're a scientist in a particular field who is active and up to date, you have a pretty good idea of what's known and a pretty good idea of where the cutting edge is and you're able to evaluate new work in relation to a body of knowledge that isn't just yours but one on which all of your peers pretty much agree.
In the humanities, however, it is quite a different situation. As John D'Arms pointed out yesterday, the humanistic disciplines are the primary disciplines for interpreting the past and that is a process that goes on and on and every new generation has to understand the past in terms that are comprehensible to it. So that facts, if you will, are just the start of the process in the humanities. What we look at may begin with, "Yes, okay the facts check out," but then the second question is a really important one, "Does it square with what we know?" Then the next question is, "What's the point of view?" Is there, in John's phrase again, a kind of human voice behind us? And what is it saying? What is that unique angle of vision? And how does that angle of vision enlarge our own imaginative grasp of the material?
It is quite a different process than the evaluation of scientific knowledge, and, I believe, not one that is congenial to having a kind of centralized sort of governing body evaluate it. There is no sort of agreed upon body of information. The serious part is that point of view is obviously a subjective judgment. When I did mention this possibility to the executive director of a scholarly society in the humanities, she was horrified at the very idea. She just said, "Can you imagine what a political nightmare it would be for us, as an association, to start evaluating the works of our own members? It would just be crazy."
It is a problem that has been brought up before in relation to the syndication problem. The recommendation to decouple publication and faculty evaluation is an interesting and very ambitious proposal, but one that I also feel libraries and presses just have to sit back and watch and see what happens. I'm not sure there is anything we can do directly to help this one along. I think the changes that it would require in the system of scholarly publications are so profound and so widespread that it really has to come--if this is going to work--from the senior administrators, and it has to work its way through campus by campus to change that culture.
Just to wrap up with comments on the two other proposals, proposals two and four, well, for the recommendation to "be smart shoppers," that's what you've been doing, and it will certainly continue. Proposal four asks that you invest in electronic forms of scholarly communication and try to open things up there. I think the sense of this proposal was that this is not going to change anything tomorrow or next year, but it should be part of a long-range effort to reorient the method of scholarly communication. And I think it's the one that affects you and me, librarians and publishers, or at least has the potential for affecting what we do most concretely on a day-to-day basis.
If the universities at large can follow through on this, it will give us new resources with which to work, and with those resources we can then begin to make some headway. In my way of thinking about this--and I hope yours, as well--SPARC is the perfect kind of example of a project that would benefit from this kind of backing and support from the university, and I'd love to see that happen.
I'd just like to conclude where I began and say again that the AAUP member presses are very concerned about these issues, just as you are, and we will be delighted to work with you however we can in trying to find ways to address them.
Thank you.
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