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The short
answer is because of the changes in reading nature of scholars switching to
online search.
Most
researchers find their sources via online search, which is facilitated by
metadata descriptions that accompany journal articles and increasingly books. However,
there is one category of scholarly work that is gradually becoming obscure due
to lack of metadata of its own, that is chapters of an edited compilation. Of
course as a book a collection of essays would have its own metadata, that
acknowledges the editor and provide a general description of the book. However,
the individual chapters unlike journal articles are not provided with
independent descriptions of their content via their own metadata that would
allow them to be found. They are locked inside a book that gives them poor
visibility to their potential readers.
In
addition as a publisher we are finding it increasingly difficult to peer review
edited compilations to the same standard that we do so for journal articles and
monographs. They come as part of a package that the book editor has curated to
convey a theme. However, what do we do when some chapters do not meet the peer
review standard while others do. Removing the lower quality chapters destroy
the theme for the book. Should we reject the whole book just for a couple of
poorer chapters?
As a
responsible academic publisher we have been trying to find solutions to these
issues. Our first reaction was to reduce the number of edited compilations we
accept. However, this has not been popular with our community who still see
this as a good way of reaching an audience quickly. In particular editors of
such books do not lose anything, it
is the
contributing authors who are short changed.
An
alternative is to persuade editors to guest edit a journal on the proposed
topic of their book first before the material is reissued as a book in its own
right. In this way we address both problems of online access and peer review in
one go. The articles being part of a journal get an independent DOI (Digital
Object Identifier) and metadata so they can be individually accounted for and
found. Also the journal publication will add the peer review process as a matter
of course and the book editor will be left with high standard of articles to
curate them into a book later.
While
some of our community have accepted the merit of the above solution others find
the delay in the publication cycle (that pre publication in a journal brings with it)
unacceptable. Most of our journals have material in their pipeline and would
fit a special issue within a 2 year time cycle. Our book programme on the other
hand has a 12 months turn around from a successful peer review.
As a
third option we have been looking at is the possibility of publishing edited
compilations as if they were journals, giving their chapters metadata and DOI
via hosting them on our journal platform. This may increase costs, not solve
the peer review problem but offer a solution satisfactory to some. However we
have seen some editors object to this as they see their anthologies as multi
authored books that should be read from beginning via the middle to the end.
These editors see disaggregation of the book as detrimental to the coherence of
their efforts in putting the collection together.
While as
publishers we may not be able to satisfy the needs of every scholar in the same
way we shall try and address the challenges of change in technology and reading
habits.
