Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Is there a future for an academic publisher?

The focus of publishing is no longer the production of an elegant book (or some other artefact) at the right price. There was a time that if a publisher produced a book that satisfied the reading habits of a community of readers, the chances of selling copies of it were influenced by the product, its price as well as the publishers marketing efforts.

The role of the publisher is changing in today’s environment, where books and other material overwhelm communities of readers directly presented to them by the authors. The focus has become on building a long-term relationship with a community of readers who come to recognize and trust a publisher’s brand.

Most academic authors do not need a publisher to produce their books or articles. They can easily produce elegant books with computer based page layout systems. Digital print-on-demand facilities also make it easy for the authors to produce copies with minimal up front investment and have them despatched to the readers. In addition the distribution via the web makes the print medium less critical.

Some academic authors find the intervention of a publisher in the production process annoying! Academic publishers demand that all manuscripts be subjected to peer-review. This incorporates a long delay in the production process and in most cases requires the author to revise the manuscript. Publishers also use trained copy-editors who revise the language and style of the publication to a level of consistency within the publisher’s house style with which the authors may not be comfortable.

In my view publishers are winning on two fronts and losing on a third when it comes to academic publishing.

1) Most academic articles are published in established journals and publishers own these. Academics are locked into these brands and attempts to break out of this have had limited success. The publishers clearly add value to the process and their brand helps bring the authors to the attention of an established readership. The idea of “open access” in my view is a red hearing as it still acknowledges the role of the publisher. It only shifts the payment to them from the reader to either the author or a third party benefactor.
2) Reference and textbooks are growing to be the main stay of academic publishers. They meet the needs of communities of readers and publishers are better at finding out such needs and getting authors to fulfil them. As the potential audience for a textbook or a reference book is large publishers are willing to take risks to make them work.
3) It is the publication of research monographs that has most suffered in recent years. The readership for an original idea is small and expensive to reach in marketing terms. Authors are not convinced that they need a publisher's help to reach readers. The publishers see little financial gain in ever smaller audiences for ever larger number of books.

60 comments:

The AI and Finance Group said...

I enjoyed reading your thoughts and appreciate your sharing your history in an earlier blog and your business analysis in the one to which this comment is connected.
Your issue of the role of the publisher from the perspective of the author might be decomposed along a variety of dimensions. If I writing a journal paper as part of my obligation to my university employer, then the criterion of success is partly the academic reputation of the journal. Ultimately the issue is citation counts but this means citation counts to published journal papers and not citation counts for visits to my personal web page. However, if I write a book, then as regards my academic department the book is largely a personal pursuit (not a research one). How many people do I expect might ultimately be willing to read my book? If the number is a few hundred or thousand and I believe that my networking is going to be key to get buying readers, then I might self-publish and keep more or less 100% of the sales price.
I have been a publisher on a very tiny scale. The issue here might also be the extent to which one is intent on making money, achieving some kind of social contribution, engaging in certain intellectual domains, or some combination of these and other pursuits. What will work will depend in part on my objectives.

Masoud Yazdani said...

I think that in humanities books do act as research outcome in the same way as journal articles do in sciences. But your point is valid. Academics have different objectives when they publish

Anonymous said...

I half agree with the third paragraph under this sub –heading. Many (not most) academic authors could possibly produce acceptable looking books themselves – the production process itself is not that difficult – but the complexity of publishing is to do with identifying and reaching the target audience. Here I am referring to the marketing, distribution and selling of books.

However it is the next paragraph with which I wish to try and shift the terms of reference of the debate somewhat. It is probably true these days that most ‘academic public publishers demand that all manuscripts be subjected to peer-review’. It is also the case that this process is crucial in scientific and medical publishing. However it is not always the case in Humanities publishing – particularly in specialist publishing houses as opposed to university presses, for example, where books are published across a wide range of academic subject areas and therefore might require specialist expertise. Nevertheless peer-review in the Humanities is becoming more the norm and for this I largely blame the dead hand of the pressures of the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE).

In my own editorial career as editor of an international intellectual media journal; editorial director of John Libbey Media/University of Luton Press; and in my involvement in British Film Institute (BFI) Publishing over the last 40 years, peer- review was never sought for a very good reason. In all cases my colleagues and I were trying nothing less than to create a new intellectual discipline ie that of Film/TV/Media Studies. A body of literature did not exist (particularly in the early days for obvious reasons) but nor was their a body of experts to whom one could appeal.

More recently there was a second reason for not undertaking peer-review. Many of the books were about the international media industries - this is a fast moving and volatile industry. As Masoud writes peer-review slows the publishing process down and if I had engaged in that process the books would have been significantly out of date by the time they were available for sale.

However there is a third and, for me, even more important reason for not undertaking peer-review. I have always wanted to publish intellectually stimulating and ground-breaking work and not academic articles and books which have a whiff of the dead hand of academe underpinning them. Peer reviewers do sometimes provide intellectually stimulating reports but all too often they do little more than confirm that conventional academic protocols have been observed; the correct number and type of academic references are provided; the book is adequately foot-noted etc. And how does one ensure that the reviewer doesn’t have a small ‘p’ political and academic agenda where they merely reflect their own personal prejudices and hobby-horses.

In conclusion I will offer one small comment on Masoud’s three numbered concluding paragraphs. As publishers we obviously hope to provide readers with high quality books (both in terms of intellectual content and production vales) which will meet their needs and desires. But at the same time I think we should think more ambitiously in simultaneously trying to create new readers and readerships across the world. Obviously the Web is a crucial tool in this process.

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