Association of Research Libraries (ARL®)

Kenneth Arnold, Director

Rutgers University Press

If we want to have a visual analog to the electronic book, we can learn a lot from the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, where artworks based on the idea "book" suggest the open architecture of the Internet. These works of art convey content as form. They are hard to imagine and yet have a gracious logic. Some of them are flights of fancy so tangentially related to the book as we know it that we are aware of their book origins only because they are identified as book arts--a series of fans, for example, or an object that looks like a box kite. Others are clearly books. One is a book wrapped in barbed wire. Another is a book that unfolds in a fan shape to reveal a landscape. Another has a light in the binding -- truly an illuminated text.

I begin by talking about the book as art because so many fear that the electronic book will obliterate the book as we know it, leaving us with no tangible object of our literate affection. The electronic book does not replace existing books; it extends our idea of book in new directions. I will suggest that, in the realm of academic publishing, the e-book returns to an earlier mode of scholarly discourse, retrieving the past in a new, useable form.

We all know about, and some of us remember, monotype. When I began working at the Johns Hopkins University Press in 1967, I could still feel the impression of type on the printed page. The changes that ensued, what we called cold type, were an esthetic shock to our systems. They did not, however, materially affect the nature of our work, which was driven by content. Content as form, the book as art work, is related to the hand-held object most of us cherish only in the most tenuous ways. When is an installation no longer a book? How can you tell? In the electronic environment, we encounter the opposite kind of book -- content without form. How do we know what we are dealing with? Does it matter? If a producer says that something is a book, perhaps that is all one needs to know.

We all know that the electronic revolution is about more than scholarly publishing. Michael Jensen (University of Nebraska Press) in a recent e-mail message referred casually to "an online society," as if it were an accepted idea. The Clinton administration, especially St. Al, is talking about a massive investment in information technology designed to fuel economic recovery, which has to be good for you and me. This investment will radically alter the landscape for publishers as some of the largest American corporations capture the electronic and fiber-optic highways. Pending legislation to provide online access to federal information will also improve our capability to communicate electronically by encouraging public access to systems that are presently available only to the elite. The National Research and Education Network (NREN), for example, will soon be able to transmit data at the rate of a billion bits per second. It will also open the doors to a flood of information, much of it unregulated.

Challenging Publishers

What the revolution means to publishers was articulated in June 1992 by Richard Snyder, Simon & Schuster chair: "We're not just a publisher anymore, but a creator and exploiter of copyrights. We sell information in any form, in any way you want it....We are out of the confines of print, although that doesn't mean we are out of the print business. We can sell the same information in various forms. We can take any piece of information--a college textbook or a Securities and Exchange Commission filing--and sell it in print, on line, on CD-ROM, on film and on interactive laser discs." (Publishers Weekly, June 1, 1992) Of course, that is easy for him to say. He has a ton of money.

Notice that Snyder is no longer talking about books, as we understand them, but information. Karen Hunter, of Elsevier, has stressed the importance of document delivery systems as an alternative to traditional journal publication -- again emphasizing the transmittal of information --and this is at the heart of this revolution -- actually needed by a user when that user wants it. Whatever one thinks of Elsevier's motives in pushing document delivery, the point is a good one. As information becomes more widely and rapidly available, people are going to want to control the flow to suit their own purposes, not the purposes of the supplier (i.e., publisher.)

Since many of the people attending this conference spent yesterday -- and some spend every day -- playing on or playing with the Internet, I do not have to tell you that this is a revolution that challenges the way we think. Colin Day, the president-elect of the Association of American University Presses (and not incidentally Director of the University of Michigan Press), has argued recently that the changes we are facing as publishers are "Type 2" innovations. By that he means that the electronic revolution "bears the seeds of the destruction of our business." His reasoning is based on the problem of maintaining control of copyrights, which generate the revenue stream that pays our costs. (Type 1 innovations, he notes, are those that merely change the physical nature of what we sell, for example the shift from hot metal to cold type.)

Colin Day states the issue facing scholarly publishers -- and indeed all print publishers -- this way: "The university press community does have to develop and promote a view of how scholarly communication should exploit the strengths of these new technologies while preserving the essential contributions that we make to the process of scholarly communication." I think that is clear enough and mostly right. Everyone in this room knows that we are having this conference in part because the traditional work of scholarly communication for both producers and consumers is indeed threatened. The sales of scholarly monographs have plummeted, and university presses have been scrambling to make up the shortfall in revenue by publishing more saleable books of all sorts, from cookbooks to baseball and fishing books. In 1987 I made the case for such a shift in a speech at the Tuscon meeting of the AAUP, arguing that the abandonment of traditional modes of publishing was necessitated by economic realities and the needs of the academic community. That is still the case.

At the same time, the serials crisis has led librarians to challenge the assumptions on which journal publishing has proceeded. The cost of serials has consumed too much of the library treasure. To its cost, the AAUP has slighted the problems of those university presses that depend mightily on journals income -- and has therefore ignored the importance of journals in this revolution. The electronic revolution began with journals. The problems journals face have become those electronics have addressed. David Rodgers of the American Mathematical Society has already done in this regard what most of us are still imagining. He is simply waiting around the corner for us. The journal model of disseminating information has become the cutting edge for electronic publishing. Because the people who run journals departments have been marginalized in the university press world, the managers of our presses have been slower to understand the issues than they have. Many university publishers, probably even most, still don't understand the issues, in part because they do not publish journals and in part because they do not want to understand the issues. What is at stake is not only the survival of the present system but of the university press and research library whose fates are inexorably linked.

University presses began as the publishers of journals and evolved into publishers of mostly monographs -- which I define as relatively short, specialized books emphasizing research method as much as or more than content. These monographs were designed primarily as tools by which scholars could communicate with and evaluate each other on common ground. Clear methodology ensured that one scholar could understand how another scholar reached a particular conclusion. Thereby, the bricks of knowledge were firmly cemented into place. Or something like that. Young scholars attained promotion and tenure by participating in this process. Older scholars mentored younger scholars, established schools of thought, controlled what got published. This was called peer review. University presses, owned and operated by major research universities, became central to this system.

This is not news to anyone. However, the monograph as a viable economic base for university presses is now dead. The society itself is changing, and younger scholars are increasingly as interested in what someone has to say as in their research methodology. They want content. Academic writing has discovered point of view. Nonetheless, universities still must train people to do research, and scholars are still expected to show that they know how to do the work of their profession. If the university press ceases to publish monographs, how will scholars demonstrate their skills and advance in those necessarily incremental ways the work of their disciplines? How will the dialog of the academic world continue? This is the question my colleagues ask themselves in bars across America. A variant is: Can the e-revolution be held off until I retire?

A University-Based Strategy

I have been thinking about these issues intensively for about five years, faced as all academic publishers have been with the economic realities of our profession. Roughly a year ago I learned about the Docutech system being developed by Xerox, which suggested a way to manage short-run or on-demand books on paper. About the same time I discovered the Internet and the communications issues raised by the new electronic technology. What prepared the ground for me was Ann Okerson, who when she spoke at the AAUP meeting in Naples, Florida, suggested that university presses who ignored the new systems of communication and the intensifying crisis in libraries, risked losing ownership of scholarly information itself. I took this to be a wake-up call.

I organized a committee at Rutgers University -- consisting of the head of the university library, the director of university computing services, and me -- to discuss the implications of the new technologies. We prepared a grant proposal to study a new approach to scholarly communication, integrating these three traditionally separate functions. We are still waiting for a decision on that grant. The idea behind our proposal is a relatively simple one. The university should be at the center of scholarly communication, not the university press as presently operating.

We envision a university-based publishing center to which the press contributes its editorial expertise and marketing skills. Utilizing the computer capabilities of the university, the librarians' expertise as managers of information, and the press' experience in developing quality projects, this publishing center will be able to take advantage of the new technologies without bankrupting the university press. In such a system, research centers will also find it easier to disseminate the results of their research projects efficiently and economically. The publishing center becomes an organizer and disseminator of a university's intellectual property.

Sandy Thatcher (director of the Pennsylvania State University Press) has proposed a similar arrangement that would take advantage of an existing network among the so-called "big ten" universities. I believe we both applied to the same foundation at about the same time. Neither of these proposals will be productive, however, without strong administrative support from research universities. Right now, as I have argued elsewhere, university administrators are largely unaware of the crisis in scholarly communication and the implications of that crisis for the work of education.

The real problem is much larger than university presses and research libraries. It is about the national priorities of higher education. The investment necessary to turn the system around has to come from deep pockets -- large corporations, governments, foundations. There is no evidence that any of those bodies is interested in putting money into the rescue of the system of scholarly communication as it now exists or as we imagine it might exist.

Our conversations at meetings such as these are useful, just as our ongoing discussion on the net and among ourselves in various bars is stimulating. A few of us are actually engaged in some experiments. Rutgers will begin publishing books on disk in the Spring, in collaboration with Floppyback Publishing International. We think that the disk-based book is a good way to begin experimenting because it allows us to move in any of a number of different directions from that information format. Many of us are fooling around with the Voyager toolkit. Scott Lubeck at the National Academy of Science Press will soon publish a book on the Internet and is also an Alpha site for Docutech. We are planning to put our catalogs of books in print on the net. As an industry, we are not idle. But in a sense we are only playing around. The problem for most of us, the more traditional presses and research libraries, is structural, not technological. And that is one of the reasons we do not know quite what to do.

In her Logos article of a year ago, Ann Okerson made the case that universities should reclaim control of the copy rights they generate. This sort of thing is already common in the area of patents and other kinds of intellectual proper ties created by universities. Leaving aside the copyright technicalities raised by her position, I want to say that Ann is basically right, although I do not agree that scholars should simply become publishers of their own works in all situations and at all times. I am not an anarchist, and neither is Ann. But she is right to call the present system dysfunctional.

Richard Dougherty as long ago as Spring 1989 analyzed the present crisis perceptively in an issue of Library Administration and Management. The publish-or-perish syndrome, he argued, fuels the publishing engine and produces, as a result, too much stuff. Specialization in academe and the reward system that drives scholars to publish create publications, both books and journals, that are unrelated to the demand for the information they contain. In his article, Dougherty argued that the university should become a base for publication very much as Rutgers has proposed in its grant application. Such an approach would involve the universities more deeply in the system of scholarly communication as both an information and economic enterprise. The issue of owning copyrights would then become central in the university set ting and therefore manageable -- because administrators would begin to pay attention.

In the online Humanist Discussion Group back in May 1991, Robin Cover alarmed a number of people by suggesting that the present scholarly publishing system rips off scholars who should take control of their own work and self-publish on the net. Cover is an anarchist. He questions the role of the publisher as "authenticator" and owner of academic work. The scholar who produces and uses scholarly work buys it back through university-subsidized programs. Cover properly notes that publishers did not create this situation. They merely exploit it.

The point raised by Okerson, Dougherty, Cover, and others is a good one, and many of us know it. The question is, what do scholarly publishers add in value to the work of scholars? We know something about that in terms of print technology and the present system of publication. In the electronic realm, we haven't a clue. We want to argue that imprint matters, and it well might, depending on what we mean by imprint. If we are to survive past the millenium we need to figure out the answers.

Sandy Thatcher has pointed out that in the future university presses will publish more than one kind of book. We already do that. But it is clear to me that university presses will not exist if they do not publish at least certain kinds of books -- those that in some way benefit the university parent. We are not free agents, not even those presses among us that have independent wealth. Trade books have public relations value, and textbooks contribute to the educational mission. So we do them. But what of the needs of the scholar? What of the research mission that set university presses running in the first place? What, God help me, about the monograph?

Long Live the Monograph

We need to stop thinking of monographs as books. In many ways, they never were books. The form evolved to feed professional, economic, and often ego needs. It evolved beyond reason. If you look inside the average scholarly monograph, it is almost entirely support structure, a very bony fish: reviews of literature, chapters on methodology, bibliographies, appendices, extensive footnotes. The flesh may be sweet but there is precious little of it.

If we see the monograph in the electronic age as more like journals than books, we are likely to understand better how to think about them in the future. Using existing search mechanisms, scholars can access electronically the table of contents and introductory chapters of a monographs. The scholar might want to preview the methodology chapter or the conclusions, perhaps only the bibliography. In other words, the scholar only asks for the chapter or section he/she wants, not the entire work. In fact -- and this is critical -- there is no single work, only a cluster of related materials, connected perhaps in nonlinear ways. The publisher may even supply those connections in ways the author had not considered. Reviewers' comments may also be available. This is the same system by which document delivery works and can easily be accommodated on the Internet. The problem of producing books on the net disappears because the book form as a vehicle for scholarly research has become cumbersome and artificial. The question -- how can we produce monographs on the Net -- is the wrong one. The monograph is an unnecessary mental construct.

The present shape of the monograph evolved to meet the requirements of book publishers, not the needs of scholars. We know this is so because scholars no longer buy monographs and seem to get along just fine without them. They serve in their present published form no useful purpose. In place of the monograph as book we need to put information supplied and reviewed by scholars onto electronic systems run by university library and computer centers for access by other scholars. This does not require fancy formats and design. Nor does it require paper, although paper can be produced via Kodak or Xerox systems like the Lionheart or Docutech.

What is needed is a way to decide what information to put on the system, manage the data and access to it, and license use in a way that protects the producer. Everything needs to be available on demand. The technology for this approach exists. What is needed is university support and money. The scholars also have to address the question of validating the work of their colleagues in this new environment. That is the scholar's problem not ours. The solutions require close cooperation among the partners in the communications enterprise.

In talking about issues of copyright in the June 8, 1992, Publishers Weekly, Paul Hilts made a point about the need for cooperation that is relevant here: "The scholarly publishing and research community must resolve dilemmas that the new technology poses for intellectual property relationships. Indeed, one can argue that its continued existence depends upon an equitable and workable solution. Researchers -- and the libraries and publishers that both serve and profit by them -- must decide what sort of society they want in the information age, and then define the role of the scholarly publisher in that society. They must decide what intellectual property is, and then make their voices heard in the debate over who shall benefit from that property. And the scholarly publishers whose livelihoods depend on clear, enforceable intellectual property law must work with Congress to make new laws to serve that vision."

This brings me back to the point. University presses cannot bring about any of these changes alone. Nor can research libraries. The question is in part whether we will be involved in any significant way at all. The leaders of our industry, along with research librarians, need to work more intensively to create a national consensus in higher education on the new form of scholarly communication to be owned and operated by universities. In addition to form, of course, the system needs content, which is what university presses and scholars have traditionally provided.

The monograph is dead. Because university presses and research libraries have depended on the monograph, we are also in danger of being exterminated. Publishers can protect themselves by publishing more saleable books, as we are doing now. Publishers and librarians can convert journals to electronic formats, although the commercial publishers may have already lapped us on that front. Libraries have been hard at work redefining themselves for several years and will surely survive in some form in the electronic age. But they too need content, and preferably content of value, something worth archiving. It is by no means obvious that the proper supplier of content is the university press, nor that the appropriate repository is the library. Some might argue that we are in fact two drowning swimmers who have found each other -- and will surely perish.

Our job, as I see it, is to work with scholars to redefine the form and content of scholarly communication. What do scholars want? We need to ask them that question and then devise ways, along with them and the universities, to give (preferably sell) them what they want. My guess is that the product will look a lot like some of the interactive exchanges on the net, perhaps even like Stevan Harnad's electronic journal Psycoloquy. It is not going to be easy to make money doing this, and that is why university administrators need to become involved.

Should university presses be developing and managing electronic systems? Or should we in effect farm out distribution to other organizations, the managers of platforms and electronic systems looking for content? I think we need to do both. We need to develop systems that meet particular needs in our environment and we need to license content to others. We also need to publish regular books and develop with Xerox, Kodak, and anyone else who will work with us hardware solutions to on-demand texts and optical storage. Xerox and Kodak are both eager to work with us. They already understand what the problems are. We are not yet talking to them, however, about the big issues.

In order to retain control of their intellectual property, university presses and universities will have to manage avenues of distribution as well as content. The federal government will undoubtedly begin looking for ways to spend money on the information society in the very near future. University publishers and research librarians should be talking to university presidents right now in a systematic and national way about the needs of the scholarly communication system and the opportunities for growth and change.

The monograph is a symbol for the serious situation we face. We do not need to resuscitate the monograph. We do need to re-imagine scholarly communication systems. What is lacking in the present environment is a coherent vision of the future and support for realizing that vision. We cannot afford to tune ourselves to caution. Some of us believe that we have no more than five years to re-invent ourselves. If we do not, our precious monographs over which we have labored so carefully for so long will be like the art objects in the Minnesota Center for Book Arts: works of admiration and even grace, small triumphs of the spirit adrift on a sea of babble. And indeed we might honor them in just that way, but we will not survive with such a limited vision. I prefer that we look at those artworks in another way, seeing in them a metaphor for our collective future: imaginative reconstructions of our lives.