Feature Articles

The Specialized Scholarly Monograph:
At the Crossroads of Redefining Scholarship and Scholarly Publishing
by Bob Nardini, Regional Vice President YBP Collection Management & Development Group

Every so often a conference takes place where no one checks their watch or dozes off, and when it's time to break up, the audience isn't ready for home.  YBP recently had the honor to be a supporter of "The Specialized Scholarly Monograph in Crisis, or, How Can I Get Tenure If You Won't Publish My Book?" - a superb meeting in Washington, D.C. on September 11 and 12, masterfully organized and run by three co-sponsors, the Association of Research Libraries, American Council of Learned Societies, and Association of American University Presses.

A Rare Gathering

     Across those two days, twenty speakers, almost uniformly articulate, engaging, and interesting, provoked a similar quality of question and comment from the floor and during the breaks.  Among the 150 attendees - disparate groups who all too rarely rub elbows - were 40 librarians, mainly directors and collections officers; 44 representatives from university presses, most of them directors and chief editors; 32 officers of scholarly societies or persons from other small publishers; 27 deans, provosts, and scholars from universities and colleges; 4 members of the press, including writers from the Chronicle of Higher Education and the Associated Press; and a handful of others.

Crisis or Chronic Illness?

     "Was there a crisis at all?" was a question asked more than once, and one answered in different ways.  Kate Torrey, director of the University of North Carolina Press, the welcoming speaker, posed it at the start, wondering if the monograph wasn't perpetually in crisis.  She quoted a UNC predecessor, who said fifty years ago that, "The university press exists to publish as many scholarly books as possible, short of bankruptcy."  Rutgers University Press director Marlie Wasserman added flesh to that tale, presenting figures to show that Rutgers, factoring in overhead, loses some $8,000-$13,000 on typical monographs.  Sandy Thatcher, director of Penn State Press, agreed with that dismal accounting and observed that the "crisis" had gone on so long that "chronic illness" might be more accurate.  Torrey noted that a "monograph," as opposed to trade books and titles with course adoption potential on the UNC list, has expected lifetime sales of under 800.  Other university press representatives stood up to say that 800 sounded more like a bestseller to them, and that sales of 250 today weren't unusual for titles that once would have sold more than 1,000 copies.  Joanna Hitchcock, director of University of Texas Press, suggested wryly that scholars submitting specialized manuscripts to a press should be asked to include proof of purchase seals for past monographs.

The Monograph's Role in Academia

     To the university press directors then, something is clearly occurring, whether crisis or chronic illness.  The ultimate producers and consumers of scholarly monographs-scholars themselves-were of mixed mind, however, debating with deans, provosts, and with one another the proper role of the monograph in establishing academic credentials and the state of health and ultimate value of peer review and tenure.  They visited and revisited the salient point that the humanities, where the monograph is most central, had lost ground to the sciences and social sciences- in terms of prestige and the concrete rewards flowing from prestige-in society at large and even within the university itself, a root cause of any difficulties the monograph might be suffering.

     Stanley Chodorow, provost at the University of Pennsylvania, defined a monograph not in terms of sales, but as a book treating "a narrow topic in great detail," and as having moral value, saying something "to human beings, as well as being about human beings."  Himself a medieval historian, Chodorow argued that the monograph must be saved, in no small part as a means to certify scholars; but Chodorow as provost declared at the same time that the monograph must come closer to paying its way, and that publication in electronic form will be the best solution.  Technology needs to advance, he said, to the point that a computer screen can mimic the characteristics of the codex.

Thunk vs. Click: A New Means of Certification

     R. Stephen Humphreys, professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, wasn't so sure that all the monographs need to be saved in the first place.  He contrasted his days as a young scholar thirty years ago, when two to three books per year of significance were published in his field of Islamic history, to the present day, when the tide of books overwhelms anyone who might have the impulse to read exhaustively - an impulse, he suggested, barely anyone has.  Scholars seldom buy or read their colleagues' books, he revealed, and confessed that he was not even on intimate terms "with my own personal library."  Much of today's output, in Humphreys's judgment, is faddish and without lasting value.  The glut of books is, in his mind, a product of unrealistic standards for hiring and tenure, and the publishing crisis, "in reality is the crisis of the academic profession" - a profession in need of a new means of certification.  Even so the miracle of electronic publishing remained, to him, a "miracle in progress," and Humphreys saw nothing to soon replace the monograph as a scholarly vehicle; and when it came to certification, he noted, nothing could match the monograph's "thunk," when "dropped on your chairman's desk."  That "thunk" was heard all conference long, in fact, repeated by one speaker after another, in part to draw an easy laugh from the audience, but partly to illustrate the monograph's concreteness - in an historical as well as a physical sense - when contrasted with any potential electronic successor.

     The group least captivated by "thunk," was the one that pays for and daily handles monographs on a mass scale, librarians, to whom the sound was prosaic.  Librarians concluded years ago that they no longer could buy and otherwise support the specialized monograph very well, and instead were on the lookout for alternative ways to disseminate extended works of scholarship.  Scott Bennett, university librarian at Yale, asked university presses why they remained preoccupied with such works and presented elaborate sets of data to support his conclusion that a digital archive might prove to be the one economical alternative to the present monographs world, but only after some years.  Robert Wedgeworth, university librarian at Illinois-Urbana, saw little or no future for the specialized monograph as we know it, predicting a transition of perhaps 15 years, after which such scholarship would be routinely composed in electronic format and integrated into library, campus, and consortium networks.  Carol Mandel, deputy university librarian at Columbia, discussed the library's "Online Books Evaluation Project," an ongoing study comparing use patterns for a small group of monographs made available to users in both print and online versions, reporting preliminary data showing the electronic books receiving three times the use of their print counterparts.  Sheila Creth, university librarian at Iowa, outlined plans of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation - the Big 10 universities - to form a cooperative electronic publishing venture among the CIC's university presses, libraries, computer centers, and scholars.

Alternatives to Print

     Do electronic monographs make economic sense?  The general alternatives examined were print-on-demand, which several speakers, including Colin Day, director of the University of Michigan Press, concluded is uneconomical and otherwise impractical, merely a shifting of costs instead of a savings; publication on disk, likewise; and Scott Bennett's digital archive.  Some possibilities with promise were put forth by others.  One was dual print-electronic publication, with some university press representatives speculating that electronic publication might actually increase the market for printed books.  Monographs in a particular field packaged and sold together, rather than published alone, was another idea to which heads nodded, with some agreement that the publishers positioned to produce them would be scholarly societies, since they would be best able to draw and hold an audience within a given discipline.  More than once it was noted that such packages would probably, in turn, be purchased by consortia of libraries, rather than by individual libraries.

E-Publication Experiments

Other speakers described several specific electronic projects designed as alternatives or supplements to print publication of monographs.  Kate Wittenberg, editor-in-chief of Columbia University Press, summarized "Columbia International Affairs Online," which has recently made available, on a subscription basis, electronic texts representing journal abstracts, working papers, conference proceedings, and full-text books.  Norris Pope, director of Stanford University Press, addressed a collaboration between Stanford's press and library, now in its formative stages, to publish online texts in Latin American studies.  (HighWire Press, another Stanford project, is already active in publishing electronic versions of journals from scientific societies.)  Sandra Freitag, executive director of the American Historical Association, spoke about the AHA's hope to construct a database of significant historical works.

     All speakers noted that these projects were "experiments" at this point, some not yet funded, others seeded by grant money.  There was one alternative to university press monographs, introduced as the "micro-publisher," that was not experimental, but a live and going concern more or less paying its way.  The "micro-publisher" is a print publisher in an academic department, dedicated to producing specialized scholarly books for a small readership.  (Someone made an apt comparison to the micro-brewery).  This story was told by Robert Lagenfeld, whose ELT Press operates from the English Department at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, publishing books in a sub-field of English literature.

Diminished in Print

     Nearly everyone agreed that the specialized print monograph was not likely to die, but would survive in diminished numbers alongside an electronic universe to take shape over the next ten years or so.  Clifford Lynch's vision seemed the clearest, although even Lynch, executive director of the Coalition for Networked Information, could only speculate that the monograph would probably evolve into some different genre altogether-if grafted onto an electronic stem, shaped by the habits of a generation used to composition in a new style of discourse, one suited to highly collaborative work on living, multi-source documents, visually rich, extensively linked, read in short "chunks," and always bent toward the "what's new?"  Lynch forecasts doom for attempts simply to reproduce the monograph as we know it online, in the form of "electronic paper."  And, he noted that any future system of formal scholarly publishing and certification, electronic or otherwise, will compete for readers and for influence with parallel systems of informal comment and recommendation within online communities of interest.

     When conference organizers announced that the papers might be published, the inevitable question was a magnet for any and all speculation-in print or electronic format?  The answer to that micro-decision will reach us soon, but only over a period of years will the larger questions be clearly answered, as we watch economic, social, intellectual, and technological forces converge upon the specialized scholarly monograph.