Sandria Freitag, Executive Director, American Historical Association

Key characteristics

This proposed project aims to create a large (and continuously growing) digitized "database"/ collection of historic studies -- by which we mean both history-proper monographic works but also "area studies" works that are historical in approach. In the context of this conference, the proposal seems especially appropriate, for monographic research lies at the heart of the collection, which will include both new and retrospective (out of print) classics. Eventually, however, we hope to include many other forms of materials for research and teaching (and links to still more, especially journal articles). Here are the key attributes that we think will make the project attractive to libraries, scholars, and others in the educational community who share a commitment to keep monographic research central to larger flows of scholarly communication:

This collection enables institutions to have cost-effective access, but it also provides way for individuals to have an easily locatable, high quality body of work to browse.

Materials would be available digitally, but could be printed on demand. We think this will actually increase the audience/market for small-market materials (there is some evidence for this, as the report from the Columbia project indicated, and the National Academy of Sciences has had a similar experience).

New and complementary kinds of contributions made to the project by a variety of institutional actors (libraries, presses, scholarly associations) helps to spread the risks, responsibilities, and costs currently forcing the downward spiral in monograph publishing.

The existence of a project with this focus on several kinds of actors contributing to a collection that is formatted and accessed in a standardized way enables us to learn things we don't know yet -- such as how scholars will use monograph-length work when it is in digitized form. (Let us take, for example, the point made by Steve Humphreys about his current "fragmented reading" style: he is not alone in this approach to a dramatically expanded body of knowledge, but we do not yet know what will this mean for new forms of dissemination of scholarship.)

Background

Some two years ago, the two organizations began exploring possible approaches to an issue that concerned each of their constituencies from their different perspectives in the "system" of scholarly communication that Colin Day identified for us yesterday.

In interesting ways, the proposal grew out of the extensive discussions already underway for several years, in several venues, regarding developments in the journal world. Humanities and social science publications, both journals and monographs, have suffered enormously, of course, as the costs of commercially published scientific journals have skyrocketed (witness the ARL statistics presented yesterday). Beyond this, however, the movement of humanities and social science journals into electronic dissemination also has become a subject of great interest to scholars, librarians, and those who publish the journals -- which includes both presses and scholarly societies.

Given that over the last two days societies have barely been recognized as partners, let alone a presence in this room, indulge me for a moment in making this point: in the journal world, societies are a natural and easily recognized partner, as most of them own (and finance! the AHA journal takes 1/4 of my annual budget!) the majority of the journals published in their fields. Through venues such as ACLS meetings, or the joint meetings of the ARL and AAUP, societies and their allies have been addressed "what to do about journals" for some time now.

But history (like several other humanities subjects) is a field in which the book-length treatment of specific developments, in detail and over time, lies at the heart of the methods and understandings of rigor characteristic of the discipline. As a consequence, addressing the alterations in scholarly communication via journal articles thus was only a part of the whole world in which historians communicated their scholarship. Solutions for journals not only couldn't address this whole world but, if taken in isolation, might well exacerbate developments around monographs.

Why, then, haven't societies been seen as natural partners for solutions that address this whole world? It is curious that we have been so absent from the imaginations of most presses and many libraries, since there is a continuum along which the creation of new knowledge moves, and societies are involved at virtually each step in that continuum:

• we give (generally very modest but much-prized) grants to support research;
• we sponsor annual meetings which often serve as the first opportunity for scholars to work through their materials and present their research for scrutiny and debate by their peers;
• we provide information about new work in the pages of our journals, newsletters, and annual programs through both advertising and reviews;
• we use peer reviewed panels to award prizes for work once it is published (and overwhelmingly, these prizes are for * in our newsletters and magazines, we cover the transformation of this research into teaching materials.
• we are virtually the only source of dissemination that addresses entire disciplines, rather than very small pieces of the whole. This distinction serves even when we look at the new experiments presented today, where potential solutions that address the monograph crisis have been limited to particular campuses (where a specific library and press try to work together) or to a consortium of campuses. Moreover, everyone recognizes that one of the key characteristics of scholarship in today's world is that it is national (indeed, increasingly international) in scope, and that authors as well as publishers need to have a national, not a campus-focused, audience.

For all of these reasons, then, I was not surprised when people both within the AHA community and outside it began asking me if the AHA could help to "solve" the "crisis" of the endangered monograph, especially since many of the fields in which our members worked were the small-audience fields we noted yesterday. When the ARL responded to these comments with an innovative and problem-solving enthusiasm, the shape of a new kind of experiment began to emerge. Several shared interests of librarians and scholars have shaped the crafting of this proposal -- including our determination to pro-actively understand the potentials and problems inherent in electronic dissemination, as well as our concern for preserving the essential functions of scholarly communication.

Over the past 2 years, then, the two organizations have taken this proposal up through our respective governance structures in order to refine it to meet concerns of our various committees and respective boards, and also consulted with other societies and organizations (including folks at presses) to ensure that it would meet the needs it attempted to address. We will have an open meeting following this conference to further this discussion, and invite anyone here to attend. The outline we hand out today will be revised at this meeting, when we delineate more specifically the roles to be undertaken by each of the collaborators in the project. Then we will move on to the real nitty-gritty of our planning phase -- the formation of a formal collaborative organization, and the seeking of funding and in-kind support from each of the players and beyond.

Basic Premises and Needs to be Met

Since anyone interested can refer to the outline of the project itself for specifics, I would like to focus here on the premises that informed the shape of the proposed project, and then move on to the needs we have tried to address. First, the premises:

• that there are certain key attributes to the current system of scholarly communication that must be preserved -- most especially quality control/gatekeeping (both in terms of peer review processes and the assignment of an imprimatur to assure potential readers that this is "cream of the crop" of scholarly output);
• that there are a variety of actors whose contributions have been crucial to scholarly communication, and that they are all in the enterprise together -- Colin's "system";
• that the roles and especially sole economic responsibilities we had in the past -- as presses, societies, libraries, authors, and consumers -- cannot be sustained under the present economic circumstances and changing environments;
• that, increasingly, no one actor or set of actors can be responsible for keeping monographic research alive and circulated;
• that any successful proposals to sustain the dissemination of new knowledge will therefore involve a variety of actors who can help share the tasks, costs, and responsibilities;
• and that the volunteer activities of scholars not just as authors but as those who seek out new work (as series editors for presses, as journal editors, as peer reviewers) lies at the heart of the communication network, and can most easily be tapped by scholarly societies in ways that represent an extension of current practice but could work as a new kind of contribution to "the system."

(I might note that this may be one of the few "shifts" in function that Colin identified that would not be regarded by researchers as a misuse of their training and energies.)

Acting on these premises, we then sought to address the needs that have emerged as monograph publishing has declined to the "crisis" stage:

1. rethink the roles and tasks involved in order to facilitate collaboration among the main actors, while covering the costs and addressing the institutional needs of the various actors;
2. preserve the most important aspects of the current system;
3. be innovative in addressing the challenges in assuring broad access (distributing to 300 libraries will not solve the problems; we need ways to reach individual scholars as well as consortia);
4. which also means being creative about how to cover costs -- think about new ways to distribute these costs among the players, and about generating "R&D" to set up new framework for the system to work.

(In this respect, we might note that the computing folks did something completely different from recourse to the Mellon Foundation -- the supporter used by virtually every project reported here today: they calculated their financial needs, divided by the number of members they had in their society, and levied that extra charge on members to create an R&D fund. Now, I have learned in the last three years that historians would be unwilling to pay such a cess, but I think a small-scale version of that might be one way to think about the contributions made [perhaps in-kind] by societies. We will, indeed, need to be very creative and innovative to succeed here.)

We invite many of you in this room to join us. While monographic publishing faces a changing future, it can still have a future if we work together to create new approaches and roles while protecting central contributions and values.