Sanford G. Thatcher, Director, Pennsylvania State University Press

There are many things awry in the system of scholarly communication today, but I want to focus my remarks here on just two of them: the inequities that now exist more than ever among different academic specialties in the prospects for publication of books; and the need to view scholarly communication as a system of many interacting parts if any viable long-term solution to the crisis is to be found.

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)

What then, indeed! Bill Becker, the chief financial officer of Princeton University Press who co-authored the first of these articles with the press's director, Herbert Bailey, and wrote the other two articles himself, had reason to be concerned. I was an editor at Princeton then and began in the early 1970s to build a list in Latin American studies. Over time it became a very distinguished list, but the evidence became clearer with every passing year that it was a field fraught with economic pitfalls. As I wrote in an article I published in the LASA Forum in 1993 under the title "Latin American Studies and the Crisis in Scholarly Communication," "back in the early 1970s...one could still count on selling between 1,000 and 1,500 copies of most new monographs in the field. By the early 1980s this average had dropped to less than 1,000, and by the end of the decade it was moving closer to 500." In that article I gave many examples of the sales of specific books to illustrate the trend, noting in particular the increasing divergence between scholarly value (as measured by book awards) and market value (as measured by sales) and also the growing inequities across subfields, with history being the lowest in sales and modern political economy the highest. The differences were sometimes quite extreme, with a book on 19th-century Brazilian history that won two awards having sales below 500 copies and one on multinational corporations in that same country having sales over 20,000. Worried about the fate of Latin American history especially, Herb Bailey and I tried to persuade the Mellon Foundation to offer a substantial grant to help subsidize publications in that field, but the Foundation, while receptive, decided it didn't then want to support any one area studies field in this way. (I might note that the same foundation later supplied a generous subsidy to help Duke and North Carolina establish a joint program in Latin American studies, including a series of books by Latin American writers translated into English.) My departure from Princeton in 1989 led rather quickly to the cessation of a publishing program in that field there partly, I feel sure, because of the pattern of sales that had developed. Don't ask me why I have started a list in this field all over again at Penn State! It's no accident, of course, that I have been concentrating so far on political economy rather than history.

As a press director now I have to be even more concerned about "the bottom line" and therefore have been compelled to make some tough decisions about what kinds of books to publish. Those of you who read my article in the Chronicle in March 1995 entitled, yet again, "The Crisis in Scholarly Communication" know that at Penn State we have backed off from publishing in the field of literary criticism. My analysis of ten years of our sales experience in literature, further supported by a survey I did of our authors in this field, persuaded me that we couldn't viably continue our program despite the high recognition it had attained. Of the 150 books we had published since 1985, 91% had sold fewer than 800 copies and 65% had sold fewer than 500. (But, just to underline the differences within fields again, the analysis did show that we could continue to publish books in literary criticism that related to gender issues—or any books about Emily Dickinson!) Experience at Penn State also has confirmed for me the sharp disjunction between market value and scholarly value. My favorite example is a large book, supported by a subsidy from the now defunct NEH program, on conversion to Islam in Central Asia over six centuries. Published late in 1994 simultaneously in cloth and paperback, it has won four awards—including the prestigious Albert Hourani Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association—yet has sold fewer than 200 cloth and 600 paperback copies to date. Can anyone doubt, from the lavish praise it has received (one reviewer calling it an "epic book," another "a whale of a book, and not only because of its size," and a "truly groundbreaking study"), that this is a book that well deserved to be published—a foundation block for further scholarship in this field? Can anyone doubt, at the same time, that it makes no economic sense to publish a book with such low sales? If further evidence were needed, I offer you this: between last December and July, ten books published by our press between late 1994 and late 1996 have won prizes; excluding two of these, which were highly illustrated books offered at trade discounts, none of the rest has yet sold more than 500 in cloth, even when published in that format only, nor has any of those issued as a dual edition sold more than 500 in paperback (except one that had the good fortune to be about a Pennsylvania mining town that recently celebrated its centennial). The prizes here include ones for best books in French history, international labor history, political philosophy, Romanticism, and Old Testament studies.

I am deeply disturbed about what this evidence portends for the future of scholarship in a variety of such "endangered" fields or, as may happen, subfields within broader disciplines. University presses have indeed survived by becoming better publishers but also by strategically changing the "mix" of their lists, doing more regional books, paperbacks for the course-adoption market (which itself, however, has been significantly impacted by the popularity of coursepacks), reference books, the trade books that formerly constituted the "midlist" of commercial houses, even fiction. A study conducted by Herb Bailey for the AAUP and ACLS on "The Rate of Publication of Scholarly Monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences: 1978-1988" showed, contrary to expectation, that there had been no decline in the number of monographs published by presses during this period; in fact, the number had increased by 51%, principally because most presses had to grow significantly in annual title output in order to achieve operating economies of scale and other efficiencies. But that study came too early to pick up what by 1990 had become more noticeable, that presses were no longer expanding at that rate or—as I determined from a survey of the top largest presses in that year—planning to exand in the future, which meant that as the changes in commercial publishing continued to offer opportunities for presses to pick up "midlist" titles, their shifting priorities would inevitably lead to some erosion in publishing of monographs in fields where sales were known to be low. (See my article in the Chronicle, October 10, 1990, B2-3.) That erosion has now developed to the point where it has finally become noticeable, to many junior and even senior scholars in these fields, that outlets for their scholarly works are hard to find. And acquiring editors at presses, under pressure from their directors who are themselves concerned by declining subsidies from parent universities (or, what amounts to the same thing, increasing administrative levies), are ever more anxious to focus on getting the most saleable books, not necessarily the best contributions to scholarship (though we continue to hope against hope that there will be some correlation between the two). It is no accident—and, ironically, a comment on how publishers' priorities differ from academic administrators'—that editors fall all over themselves trying to acquire good books in women's studies because that is a field (witness the success of Routledge, for instance) where sales are consistently better, discipline by discipline, than books that have no focus on gender issues. Probably this is at least in part because scholars in this field support each other by buying their colleagues' books. Patterns like this exist in other fields, too, such as classics and medieval studies and even to a degree still in philosophy, where aspirations to build personal libraries of all the core books in the field remain strong as they traditionally have been. If students planning academic careers were to take such evidence seriously, as "rational actors" doing expected utility calculations, then hardly any would want to take the risk of entering fields of scholarship that are being increasingly underserved by university presses. Not only is this not fair to individual scholars experiencing such difficulties today, but it augurs ill for the healthy and balanced development of scholarship in the future. Universities are accustomed to some departments and programs being less able than others to generate revenue and have made the necessary adjustments. I suggest it is time to figure out a way to make these adjustments for scholarly publishing, too.

I have touched already on some of the aspects that make scholarly communication a system of many interacting parts. University presses experience this interdependence perhaps more acutely than some other divisions of universities inasmuch as they inhabit two domains at once—the world of academe and the publishing industry. I mentioned above the shifts that presses have made in response to changes in commercial publishing. Our fortunes in recent times have also been seriously affected by a scarcity of major-media attention to our more general-interest titles at the same time that the proliferation of superstores has made it theoretically, if not so practically, possible for our books to gain more widespread exposure. If a book doesn't sell in a superstore within ninety days of publication, it gets returned to the publisher. And how many of even our frontlist titles, with trade discounts, get reviewed widely enough in that short time to draw customers into the stores? So we are all suffering from esclating rates of returns from bookstores, as indeed most commercial publishers are, too. On another front, the helping hand of government, with the closing of the NEH's subvention program, has been withdrawn, and we all regret its demise—and fear for the future of the NEH itself.

What I want to highlight more here, however, are the interdependencies that affect us within our own university settings. It never ceases to baffle me that, on the one hand, universities continue to enforce ever stringent criteria for promotion and tenure while at the same time withdrawing support—either by decreasing subsidies or increasing administrative fees—from the very agencies that provide sometimes the only avenues for publication by the scholars whose careers are at stake. I noted, with dismay, an ad in Publishers Weekly (August 4, 1997, p. 82) last month announcing the search for a new director for the SUNY Press whose duties would include "insuring the self-sufficiency of its operations." Have university administrators never bothered to learn the history of scholarly publishing? If they did, they would know that university presses were first established in the late nineteenth century to provide a means for dissemination of scholarly knowledge which, in the words of Columbia's president in 1890, is "always of a technical character and usually destitute of commercial value" (Hawes 1967: 30). In others words, the normal market couldn't support this kind of publishing, so a subsidized form of publishing was needed to advance the goals of higher learning. Ironically, in light of later developments, it was "American scholars, particularly in the sciences, [who] met difficulty in having their research published" (Hawes 1967: 30), according to Daniel Coit Gilman, who as president of Johns Hopkins launched the first press at his university in 1878. And thus presses were founded with one of their main missions being to publish scientific journals. We all know, of course, what happened in the wake of World War II when entrepreneurs like Robert Maxwell saw an opportunity to capitalize on the governmental resources then starting to be poured into scientific research and got commercial STM journal publishing business off the ground with his Pergamon Press, with large profits to follow, ultimately at the expense of universities, which missed a golden opportunity here to take advantage of their own publishing operations to capture this business.

Librarians have been suffering ever since. In their turn, however, preoccupied as they have understandably been with the ravages that STM publishing has wrought on their budgets, librarians have been prone to seek solutions—particularly in their forceful assertion of "fair use" rights—that have threatened to undermine the economic basis for the very publishing that university presses do, and in response the AAUP has had in many instances to take sides with the AAP and other private-sector allies in defense of copyright protection, as in the Texaco case. University presses have also needed to fend off what we view as short-sighted efforts by faculty—heedless of the long-range impact of their photocopying activities on the future of scholarly publishing in their own fields—to appropriate publications in coursepacks under the guise of "fair use"—efforts that notably failed in the two major cases decided to date. Scientists, meanwhile, seem blissfully unaware of what their priorities, in demanding maintenance of costly journal subscriptions, have done to the possibilities for career advancement by their colleagues in the liberal arts, who can't readily find publishers for their monographs. As another example of interdependencies with negative consequences when viewed from a larger, systemic perspective, consider the following: some universities insist now on two books as a prerequisite for tenure, but some universities are also insisting on having all dissertations archived and made accessible in electronic form. The latter is surely a benefit in some ways, as the UMI microfilm copies of dissertations were always costly and cumbersome to use, but think about the reaction of a scholar who is told by a press that since her book is based on a dissertation and the dissertation is readily accessible electronically from any point on the globe, the "value added" by revisions isn't sufficient to make a case for its publication? If the opportunity to publish a first book is undermined by this new accessibility to dissertations, how many young scholars are going to find a way to complete and publish two books within the six-year period normally allowed, especially in disciplines where empirical research requiring field work is required?

This is an example where the advent of Internet-based technology may be something of a mixed blessing. Others at this conference will be exploring how electronic technology may provide solutions to the problems we now face in scholarly communication. In my view, which I think will be substantiated in presentations on other panels, such technology offers only a very partial answer to the problem of cost, yet may have much more to offer by way of opening up new opportunities. For example, while I much admire the initiative and dedication of the ELT Press and other such ventures (and believe that this model of micro-publishers, like micro-breweries, may well be an important adjunct to university press and learned society publishing in the future), it strikes me that there is no net gain here in the economics of scholarly publishing but only a reallocation of costs to different areas of the university, especially in the time of faculty who undertake these ventures. This is also true for those proposals to fund startup new electronic journals within universities, which make even less sense in that they would involve high-paid science faculty in doing tasks for which lower-paid university press personnel are already better trained. But opportunities exist, I think, if only people will focus more on not just replicating print publications in electronic form but exploring ways to enhance them and even alter them significantly—which is a vision that underlay our hopes for the CIC project that will be described to you tomorrow. I have in mind here continued updating of documents, hypertext linkages among them (e.g., between books and journals or both of those and government and other databases), and hierarchically layered texts. This last notion particularly intrigues me. I first encountered it in an article written by Cornell librarian Ross Atkinson for the journal College & Research Libraries (May 1993). His term for this document structure is "concentric stratification," which "might consist of a top level that would contain some kind of extended abstract; this level or stratum would then be connected to the next level, and so on. Each succeeding level would contain the information in the previous level, but would provide in addition greater degrees of substance and detail. Scholarly communications that would require an extended context, and would therefore deserve a monograph in the paper environment, would in the online environment merely include more levels than would a communication that would in a print environment have been published as a journal article" (Atkinson 1993: 210). As hinted here, Atkinson sees electronic publishing as breaking down the dichotomy between monographs and journal articles, and he also sees reading shifting from a linear form to something "that is done, so to speak, in three dimensions: first, one can read horizontally or linearly within any level of a given publication; second, one can read vertically or hierarchically through the levels of any particular publication; and, third, one can read referentially back through the constituent citations (be these explicit or implicit) into other texts on the network." It strikes me that this approach opens up a terrific opportunity to make available often esoteric research to a variety of audiences, ranging from lay people and journalists wanting basic information about new research results in down-to-earth language to highly trained specialists who want every last detail including references to data on which the results reported are based—and everyone in between. If this becomes the future path of scholarly publishing, I can readily envisage roles for university editors, reference librarians, and public information staff—not to mention computer experts—to play in creating such multifaceted, multilayered documents. We need experiments, in a project like the CIC's or elsewhere, to explore the possibilities that the new technology offers for a new form and content in scholarly communication.

Before closing, I'd like to issue a warning that I hope all of you will take seriously. We stand poised now at the dawn of a new era in learning where technology, in allowing for innovation in both research and teaching, holds forth tremendous potential for greater productivity. But we in universities are not alone in seeing this potential. Commercial firms are gearing up to get into the business in a big way. An ad in Publishers Weekly a few weeks ago (August 25) with a headline quote from Bill Gates announcing a "technotainment" conference to be held in New York at the end of this month put the point bluntly: "The reason behind the theme [of this conference] is both a celebration & the establishment of credibility of an observation. The observation is the emergence of an extraordinary group of creative ideas, programs & products that address parallel systems of learning independent of our various entrenched educational systems. These ideas have been created by those in the information & entertainment industries, thus the name 'Technotainment'. This is clearly the great American business for the 21st Century—the business of learning." That is about as clear a warning shot across our bow as we are going to get. This reminds me of Columbia professor Eli Noam's conjuring up of a vision, in an article entitled "Electronics and the Dim Future of the University," of a McGraw-Hill University "awarding degrees or certificates, just as today some companies offer in-house degree programs. If these programs are valued by employers and society for the quality of admitted students, the knowledge students gain, and the requirements that students must pass to graduate, they will be able to compete with many traditional universities, yet without bearing the substantial overhead of physical institutions. It is likely that commercial publishers will assemble an effective and even updated teaching package, making the traditional curriculum at universities look dull by comparison, just as 'Sesame Street' has raised the expectations of pupils for a lively instructional style" (Noam 1995: 248). I'd urge, then, that we need to be ready for this challenge and not let another opportunity—as we did with STM journal publishing—slip out of our grasp and beyond our effective control. If universities have been groaning under the burden of high fees for STM journals, imagine what the fees will be for fancy distance-learning modules, developed in universities but then ceded via copyright transfer to commercial companies for exploitation!

What we in universities desperately need, in order to ward off such future calamities, is a great deal more attention to the interdependencies of our academic world and an effort to think about what we do as a complex system where each part has an effect on every other. This is a recognition that was once given at the highest levels of university administration when the National Enquiry into Scholarly Communication published its final in 1979 with this statement in the Foreword: "During the period of the Enquiry we came to realize more clearly than any of us had earlier realized the truth of one axiom: the various constituencies involved in scholarly communication—the scholars themselves, the publishers of books and learned journals, the research librarians, the learned societies—are all components of a single system and are thus fundamentally dependent on each other. Moreover, we found that this single system in all its parts is highly sensitive to influence from two outside factors—the actions of the funding agencies, and the developments of the new technologies. Given this interdependence among the various components and influences within the system for scholarly communication, it follows that the numerous problems which the system faces can be effectively solved only if individuals working within one part of the system are fully mindful of the other parts before decisions are taken. What is called for, therefore, is markedly increased consultation among the leaders in the various components and influences. Let us hope that ways can be found to make such give-and-take a regular practice in the process of decision making." I can only say "amen" to that exhortation—and hope that this conference will begin a process that restores this need for systemic thinking as a high priority among our university administrations.

References

Atkinson, Ross. 1993. "Networks, Hypertext, and Academic Information Services: Some Longer-Range Implications." College & Research Libraries 54/3 (May): 199-215.

Bailey, Herbert S., Jr. 1990. The Rate of Publication of Scholarly Monographs in the Humanities and Social Sciences 1978-1988. New York: Association of American University Presses.

Becker, William C. 1973. "The Crisis—One Year Later." Scholarly Publishing 4/4 (July): 291-302.

———. 1974. "The Crisis—Is It Over?" Scholarly Publishing 5/3 (April): 195-210.

Fry, Bernard M., and Herbert S. White. 1995. Economics and Interaction of the Publisher-Library Relationship in the Production and Use of Scholarly and Research Journals. Washington, D.C.: National Science Foundation.

Harvey, William B., Herbert S. Bailey, Jr., William C. Becker, and John B. Putnam. 1972. "The Impending Crisis in University Publishing." Scholarly Publishing 3/3 (April): 195-207.

Hawes, Gene R. 1967. To Advance Knowledge: A Handbook of American University Press Publishing. New York: American University Press Services, Inc.

National Enquiry into Scholarly Communication. 1979. Scholarly Communication: The Report of the National Enquiry. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Noam, Eli M. 1995. "Electronics and the Dim Future of the University." Science 270 (Oct. 13): 247-249.

Thatcher, Sanford G. 1995. "The Crisis in Scholarly Communication." Chronicle of Higher Education (March 3): B1-B2.

———. 1993. "Latin American Studies and the Crisis in Scholarly Communication." LASA Forum (Winter): 10-14.

———. 1990. "Scholarly Monographs May Be the Ultimate Victims of the Upheavals in Trade Publishing." Chronicle of Higher Education (Oct. 10): B2-B3.