The Futures of Scholarly Publishing :: Education Library Reading Essays

Traditionally, university libraries, flush with funds, have been the mainstay of scholarly publishing. They bought all the latest, most important books and maintained subscriptions to all the important journals. But in todays environment of budget cuts and rising tuitions, many libraries (especially those at public universities) are being compel to cut back. Retailers, meanwhile, are increasingly corporate. In an age in which book-selling is dominated by chains like Borders and Barnes and Noble, it is increasingly difficult for scholarly books to reach their market. uncertain of being able to recoup their losses, publishers are less and less willing to take on academic booksespecially those which do not have agile appeal to a broad audience or are unlikely to be used as textbooks. Meanwhile, university faculty in the humanities whose tenure prospects direct on being able to cite book credits are scrambling to be publishedand are finding fewer and fewer publishers wil ling to cause their work. These are just a few of the factors behind the current crisis in academic publishing. In a meeting of the American Council of Learned Societies last year, panelists Carlos J. Alonso, Cathy N. Davidson, tin M. Unsworth, and Lynne Withey discussed these and other important issues in-depth, and their remarks were published in an ACLS occasional melodic theme entitled Crises and Opportunities The Futures of Scholarly Publishing. The panelists were a diverse group, representing several different perspectives on the publishing crisis. Carlos Alonso is a Professor of Romance Languages and Chair of the Department of Romance Languages at the University of Pennsylvania Cathy Davidson is Vice-Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies and Director of the hindquarters Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University John Unsworth, at the time of last years ACLS meeting, was Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the Univer sity of Virginia and Lynne Withey is Director of the University of California Press. This paper addresses each of their remarks in turn, closing by relating those remarks to the experience of the Clemson University Digital Press. In his remarks to the ACLS, Carlos Alonso addresses two main issues in scholarly publishing the relationship between event and tenure, and the difficult issue of funding scholarly publication at a time when most public universities are facing significant budget cuts.