It is a daunting task to wrap up the conversations we have had over the past two days. This has been an excellent conference, and I doubt that I can do justice to the many interesting threads that wound through our discussion. My remarks will emphasize three issues that undergird our analysis of the future of the scholarly monograph: the behavior of scholars, the characteristics of our disciplines, and changing roles of the players in the monograph market. There are no doubt many other issues that deserve consideration, but let me continue our conversation by developing these three issues. I will then introduce a grab-bag of issues that might have been addressed in this conference but were generally passed over in silence. These issues, while perhaps not so important as those we did discuss, may nevertheless deserve attention in the long run.
Professor Humphreys¹ introspection into how he actually reads and keeps up in his field provided valuable insight into how a scholar actually keeps up with his field. We need more work on the behavioral scholarship of scholars -- how scholars actually learn what they know, and the proportion of their time they spend reading, browsing libraries, bookstores, or the Internet, and talking to colleagues. We also need what they are reading, both original materials and redacted versions that appear in reviews and summary articles. This is more than merely reviewing circulation and sales figures. We need to ask the question Dean Butz asked: What (today) is a scholarly life? But we need to answer the question with empirical data rather than normative views. We know little about how much individuals are interacting between electronic and print media. I am glad to hear that user data are being collected, but this data collection will have to be longitudinal, because it seems likely that not only are there generational differences in the use of information, but there will also be differences over time, even in the behavior of a single individual.
One issue in behavioral scholarship is the extent to which the archival value and the use value of publication have diverged. One dean of engineering recently reminded the engineering faculty of the need to place papers in archival publications. The reminder was necessary because the faculty were transmitting results electronically to lists of interested researchers in the same field. The electronic transmissions were used, while the archival publication merely documented the study. This does not imply that the archival value is disappearing; the archival value is still the basis for the public acknowledgment of discovery. Notice that the archival value in scientific publications is so important that many of the journals list the date on which a paper was received or accepted. It seems likely that rates of divergence between archival value and use value differ by discipline, with ³hot² fields communicating more frequently through electronic media. It is also worth noting that the ³hotter² the field, the more likely that electronic communication is becoming predominant. Traditional monograph publishing runs the risk of presenting only the ³cold² fields to the public.
The significance of discipline has perhaps been under-emphasized in this conference. In every discipline, there is a community of production and a community of consumption. Understanding how the community produces knowledge and how it consumes knowledge is as important as understanding how individual scholars actually use information.
The communities of production differ from each other in time and space. Some of these communities communicate in fast and compact ways. In science, for example, groups work together many hours a week and they may communicate their results to other groups daily. Their students learn to work together in groups, albeit hierarchical ones. They publish many short articles and their journals are archival. Departments in these disciplines may fragment into labs, groups, and subdisciplines. The students are well prepared to be faculty, and the faculty are well prepared to be administrators. It is not an accident that Professor Chodorow is one of the few humanists to serve as provost of a research institution: the scientific model is becoming the default value in the university.
By contrast, within the humanities the community of production is slow and dispersed. Humanities disciplines still emphasize the individual voice, and they feature uncertain mentoring. The humanities graduate student may have infrequent communication with her supervisor, in contrast with the science student who encounters her supervising professor every day. Single scholars find other producers in their specialty somewhat uncertainly over time and space. Unlike the science department, where at least the entire lab group will be interested in similar problems, the humanities scholar may have no one with similar interests available for miles around. Humanities departments fragment atomistically, into individuals, and many of these individuals now find the most exciting work to be done in interdisciplinary areas such as area studies. The humanities department may become intellectually hollowed out, although it still must recommend assistant professors for tenure. As a community of production, many humanities departments aren¹t too communitarian. The isolation of the humanities scholar may be alleviated somewhat with the use of the Internet.
The community of consumption refers to those who actually use scholarly information. The increasingly specialized nature of many disciplines means that small groups of specialists are interested in many monographs -- a small market by definition. Moreover, the apparent community may not be the actual community. A new book looks like it might be marketed to English departments -- but it turns out that the Department of English is not just reading literature. Some of them are reading psychoanalysts, and some are reading anthropology, and others are reading modern philosophy. Thus, as Joanna Hitchcock noted, finding the right market is not a simple matter of buying the right departmental lists. The putative community of consumption is not always the actual community of consumption.
The crisis of the scholarly monograph is making a profitable market between the community of producers and the community of consumers. Two intermediary groups are players in making the market: major providers and major buyers. The major providers of scholarly communication are the disciplinary associations, the not-for-profit university presses, the profit-making presses, and the booksellers. The major buyers are the libraries and individuals. The individuals, by the way, do not necessarily have the $70,000 annual salary that is trumpeted by the American Association of University Professors. One recent survey indicates that the average annual salary for a professor in the humanities is $45,000.
I have a few comments about the major providers and the climate of uncertainty in which they function. First, the disciplinary associations currently raise a substantial fraction of their annual revenues from their journals and other scholarly communications. It is common not only for the journals to represent a significant cost, as Sandra Freitag mentioned, but also to represent as much as one-third of the annual income of a scholarly association. They may be expected to struggle to keep this income, even if the journals are provided electronically or in some other format than traditional paper. As matters now stand, the disciplinary associations and the university presses are rarely allies and may well become adversaries contending for the acquisitions dollar.
The not-for-profit university presses have made the point here that they add value to the publication process, a value that deserves compensation. This point is not well understood elsewhere, even in universities. The costs of the peer review and the editorial process are not likely to decline even if the manuscript is eventually presented to the public electronically. This value-added needs to be more widely quantified and understood, and Marlie Wasserman¹s discussion was a good pointer in the right direction.
The for-profit publishers appear to be in considerable disarray and headed for a reorganization that will be oligopolistic. It¹s not clear that they have much of a role to play in our discussions today aside from the possibility that some mid-list publication may be abandoned to the university presses. The market forces that have squeezed monographs from their lists, however, can be withstood in the not-for-profit sector only for a limited time.
Finally, the booksellers are also engaged in a major shake-out. The proliferation of superstores may temporarily lead to more stores, but it also seems likely that the retailing of books is also heading toward oligopoly and a constriction in the number of books that will be carried. In the long run, we may have fewer, larger bookstores that are similar to one another in lay-out and purchasing. The advent of amazon.com and other electronic booksellers may expand the market, but it¹s too soon to tell.
Universities serve both as the providers of monographs, through their presses, and as buyers of monographs through their libraries. It is worth considering some of the shocks that universities are facing over the next decade.
Although the sub-title of this conference emphasizes the gaining of tenure, tenure itself is probably more controversial now than it has been for the last half-century. Post-tenure review, now being adopted at many state-supported institutions, is likely to affect the production of scholarly monographs. Older scholars who might not have produced an additional book might now feel the need to do so, creating an intergenerational competition between tenured and untenured faculty for the already scarce spots on publishing schedules. Many of you editors in the audience are about to hear from faculty from whom you have heard little for a long time.
Parental outrage over the cost of undergraduate education has led to an urge to find scapegoats for the rising costs. Two likely suspects have been fingered: research and graduate students. There is in particular an ongoing attack on graduate education, arguing that time-to-degree is too long, that undergraduates are subsidizing graduate tuition waivers, and that predoctoral students are becoming too expensive relative to postdoctoral students. If graduate schools downsize, one result might be a scaling back in the production of dissertations and thus of monographs, but it could also result in a downsizing of the intellectual market for many scholarly monographs.
There is no question that distributed computing has changed our lives, and it has made possible the distribution of electronic dissertations and monographs, the World Wide Web, and the many electronic experiments discussed these past two days. Less clear to most of us is how we are paying for it. Most universities are facing major new costs in the acquisition and maintenance of computing equipment, and we have little understanding of the costs of maintaining servers and on-line access. The myth is that distributed computing is free; we know that is not true, but what it costs and who is bearing those costs are not clear.
Demands for distance learning are insistent at many levels of higher education, but universities cannot have such programs accredited without keeping up the library resources to provide education equivalent in quality to the on-campus education. This requirement is likely to spur further availability of on-line resources for the distance learners, but these will be library funds unavailable for other acquisitions.
Distance learners other than universities have sometimes evinced far less concern about students¹ access to materials. The expansion of the non-traditional forms of higher education is potentially a threat to the existence of smaller and weaker colleges, just as the Barnes & Noble Superstore may pose a threat to the local neighborhood bookseller.
It makes financial sense for libraries to form consortia to buy highly specialized materials, and it makes sense for copyright holders to resist the consortia so as to sell separately to each library. Who will win in this struggle remains to be seen, but producers should make some careful cost-benefit analyses before hiking the prices yet again in a false belief in acquisitions inelasticity of demand. Dr. Wedgeworth¹s data were stark enough to convince anyone.
Peer review approval is one of the distinctive criteria of the scholarly monograph. Peer reviews are also used for many other purposes in the scholarly world, including review of journal articles, hiring and promotion decisions, grants and fellowship awards. Many schools care a great deal about having peer review validation of their faculty¹s hiring and productivity, while offering few rewards to their own faculty who serve as reviewers. Indeed, some of the worst abusers are university systems that require increased burdens on peers elsewhere, and at shorter intervals (see post-tenure review, above). Editors and department chairs are already complaining about the difficulty of finding reviewers. Maybe we should consider whether we are overloading the current system.
The issue is not merely whether monographs ³should be² print or electronic; the issue is also one of what the electronic medium allows in terms of the evolution of a completely new genre. The non-linear book, the music dissertation with embedded sound, the piece of film criticism with embedded clips, the holographic article in architecture lie within our grasp. How these novel forms of scholarship are regarded -- especially those that seem dangerously close to entertainment -- remains to be seen in both scholarly evaluation and in the marketplace.
The continuing excess of Ph.D. recipients in comparison with the number of entry-level teaching jobs is worse in some disciplines than in others, but few fields have a seller¹s market. With a plethora of available candidates, university administrators may view each tenure decision as another opportunity to increase the marginal quality of the faculty. Far from reducing their requirement for a book for publication, they may instead choose to make the Type I error over Type II error in making tenure decisions. (In statistics, a Type I error consists of falsely rejecting a true hypothesis, and a Type II error consists of accepting a false hypothesis. The analogy here is to rejecting a candidate who is actually a sound prospect but has not book to provide the evidence, versus accepting a candidate with lower levels of skill but an indifferent book.)
Despite the appearance of the preceding section, it was not my promised grab-bag of issues. What follows is my grab-bag. These are issues touched on only lightly, if at all, in the course of our conference, but potentially affecting the environment of publication.
Many dissertations ultimately find their way to a university press, optimally in a greatly revised form, where they emerge as scholarly monographs. Thus, to many people a dissertation is a lengthy scholarly treatment of a topic that is a progenitor of a monograph. That definition, however, has often gone by the boards in the sciences, where the dissertation is likely to be three articles loosely tied together with enough integrative material to fool the graduate dean. If your graduate dean is not aware of this trend, your graduate dean is not reading enough dissertations.
The advent of the electronic dissertation is another important event with potential impact on the monograph market. Virginia Tech is well known for its initiative in requiring dissertations and theses to be published on the Wen. My own school has accepted its first CD-ROM dissertation, an analysis of non-verbal communication with embedded video clips of the primary data. The Texas faculty have required a gradual move to electronic publication of dissertations over the next five years, and University Microfilms is preparing for this option.
In the humanities, there has been great concern about having students develop a voice, but much less concern about developing an audience. This is one point that I believe Dr. Nathan was making, probably with greater tact than I. The lone-wolf model of humanities scholarship often leads to the very lengthy time-to-degree in the humanities. Graduate students labor in isolation, occasionally offering up a draft to a busy supervisor for comment, but rarely learning to work in collaboration. I fear that this model, so entrenched in the humanities, would also undermine the effectiveness of the post-doctoral fellowships proposed by John D¹Arms, although I applaud his sentiment for more collaborative work. Because the health of the scholarly monograph may be closely related to the health of the humanities, we may all have an interest in the extent to which humanities is learned by osmosis.
Perhaps because of the interest in the solitary voice in the humanities, the common voice of the humanistic disciplines is rather muted. I have heard scientists in promotions conferences speak of how a scholar has produced ³a book, but nothing peer-reviewed.² In a field that has privileged the ³I² over the ³we,² there grows up a myth that the accumulated wisdom is no more than personal opinions. The well-publicized culture wars have convinced some constituencies that humanists had no way to resolve positions in the wars except by a prior political persuasion. Science, its rhetoric and characteristic operating methods are becoming the default templates for how universities operate. This explains, perhaps, why a new assistant professor in science can unblinkingly ask for start-up costs in six figures, while a new assistant professor in humanities goes begging for a monograph subvention. This developing imbalance can be redressed, but only with some efforts by the humanistic disciplines.
The Internet is the ultimate vanity press, and an e-publication will never have what we have come to label ³the thunk factor.² Nevertheless, University presses need to communicate the value-added by their peer review and editorial processes. Just as we rely on scientific journals to separate the real science from the junk science, so our presses should help us distinguish between real scholarship and junk scholarship. This does not limit the presses to paper only; their Web sites could be peer-reviewed Web sites and not merely cobwebs (rarely changed or visited sites).
Learned societies have an important role to play in scholarly communication beyond their self-interest in subscription revenues. Learned societies must think about the meta-communication of their fields : how to communicate about communicating. There is a role for the learned societies to play in advising acquisitions editors and librarians. They also have the greatest interest in accessibility, especially accessibility for scholars in other countries, independent scholars, and technology have-nots.
Libraries, already challenged to form strategic partnerships with other libraries, might well consider the possibilities for alliances with presses as well. Libraries face increased service demands from distance learning and from alumni groups that require continuing education. Increasingly, the research library will be defining its mission and its constituencies in broader terms, even as it struggles to provide materials in different formats.
What is the future of scholarly monograph? I belief its epitaph is premature. The scholarly monograph will survive, but its economic model has to change. Electronic publication might save the monograph in something like its present form, but e-publication more likely to result in the evolution of new genres beyond the monograph. Micropublishing may be one answer, and new organizational alliances may be another. What has been exciting about this conference is the fearless look at the future and its emphasis on the importance of scholarly communication. While no one has Œthe¹ answer, I believe that the people gathered here are the ones who will discover the answers.