Mellon Foundation Assesses the State of Scholarly Publishing - Chronicle.com
Mellon Foundation Assesses the State of Scholarly Publishing
Annual reports aren't exactly beach reading, but for anyone interested in the current condition of scholarly communication, the just-published 2007 report of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation—particularly the essay on "Scholarly Publishing Initiatives" by Donald J. Waters and Joseph S. Meisel—is a page turner.
The foundation's deep pockets and commitment to humanistic research give Mellon a unique role in the university-press world. It's part fairy godmother, part life coach, and part enigmatic guru. When Mellon speaks, presses listen—and this year Mellon has spoken more frankly than usual, pushing its constituents to learn how to work better together, while reassuring them that what they do is vital and should endure.
Nearly a year has passed since the foundation made the first awards in two new series of publishing grants: one designed to get presses to collaborate on new series of monographs by junior scholars in underserved areas of the humanities, and the other to persuade presses to form partnerships with their home institutions on projects that further the scholarly agendas of both (The Chronicle, November 9, 2007).
The 2007 report offers a chance to take a first look at whether the new grant-making strategy is paying off. And it hints at where the foundation thinks scholarly publishing has gone wrong lately—and what may put it right again.
The Power of Positivity
Part of the trick to weathering a crisis, if that's the right word for what scholarly publishing faces, is not being told what to do but simply that you will pull through it. The Mellon report avoids the hot-tempered talk and hot-button issues (it offers no opinions about open access, for instance). It neither downplays nor overplays the gravity of the situation.
"There are difficult problems in scholarly publishing, and as we mentioned in our essay, the language of 'crisis' has a very long history," Mr. Waters and Mr. Meisel told The Chronicle in an e-mail interview. "However, our view is that it is more useful to analyze problems constructively and systematically rather than to characterize the system generally as 'in crisis.'"
Mr. Waters leads the foundation's scholarly-communications program; Mr. Meisel helps oversee its agenda for bolstering research universities and humanistic scholarship. In their essay, the authors follow a simple strategy: Remind readers of the unique (and uniquely challenged) role that university presses have always played. Recap 30 years of crisis and opportunity. Review previous attempts at improving the situation. Reflect on what has worked and be candid about what hasn't.
University-press output, the authors remind readers, amounted to just 5 percent of the total number of books produced by American publishers in 2005. "However, the significance of university-press publishing is far greater than its niche position in the larger publishing industry would suggest," they write. "For example, following September 11, 2001, when the public searched for understanding and context in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the three best-selling books in the United States were all published by university presses."
That doesn't change, however, "the steady decline in average sales of scholarly titles"—a trend that has fueled an equally steady stream of crisis talk. Here Mr. Waters and Mr. Meisel pick up another theme that has become popular lately: Take the long view. That's what the sociologist Andrew Abbott did in a plenary talk at the most recent gathering of the Association of American University Presses, held in Montreal in June.
As Mr. Abbott made clear in his talk, which drew on 80 years of data, university-press publishing has never been the easiest of businesses, and complaints about it have displayed "a stupefying, hilarious consistency" over the decades.
Mr. Waters and Mr. Meisel leverage that history to set up a discussion of the biggest challenge/opportunity to confront university presses so far: the digital age. Their analysis confirms what many observers have already concluded. The transition to e-books has not been as smooth and as rapid as Mellon (and many others) thought it would be.
In the 1970s, "circumstances appeared so dire for university presses" that the foundation jumped in with title subsidies for individual monographs, only to discover that such help "did little to change the presses' underlying financial and productive capacities." The foundation then decided, in the late 1990s, "that books would quickly follow journals into online distribution and access," so it put money behind two e-monograph projects, Gutenberg-e and History E-Books. The results were mixed, to say the least (The Chronicle, March 7).
The Gutenberg-e monographs "proved far too expensive to sustain," the report notes, and journal editors resisted reviewing them. (Mr. Waters and Mr. Meisel also note that review editors almost all wanted printed versions instead.) Gutenberg-e authors also failed to get as much professional bounce from the project as the foundation had hoped; so far, only 12 of the 22 whose books have been published in the series have landed on the tenure track.
The History E-Book project—now called Humanities E-Book—fared a bit better, but the report mentions that "after almost nine years, authors have produced only 55 of the promised 85 new e-books." At least that project has become self-sustaining—a goal that Mellon strongly encourages grant recipients to strive for—and its digitized backlist has proved unexpectedly popular with subscribers.
"Both projects have been extremely valuable in demonstrating the capabilities and requirements for publishing monographs authored specifically for electronic media," Mr. Waters and Mr. Meisel write, "but neither of them succeeded in establishing the core hypothesis that such books would be cheaper to produce and distribute than those designed for print media."
Collaboration Over Coercion
Mellon has steered clear of attaching digital expectations to its most-recent university-press grants. In their interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Waters and Mr. Meisel acknowledged that "these programs, in keeping with our understanding of the general needs, make no assumptions about the technologies of production and distribution." Instead, the foundation has opted to support interpress monograph-series collaborations and intra-university partnerships with a publishing angle—but it has imposed no digital requirements or expectations.
In the biggest grant made in the first category, five presses, led by New York University Press, will get $1.37-million over five years for a new series called the American Literatures Initiative (The Chronicle, January 18). In the second category, one finds entries such as "Publishing the Long Civil Rights Movement," coordinated by the University of North Carolina Press; it also involves the Carolina Digital Library and Archives, the university law school's Center for Civil Rights, and the Southern Oral History Program. Mellon awarded a three-year, $937,000 grant to that undertaking (The Chronicle, February 8). Such experiments "reduce the cost and risk of exploring new areas of collaboration," Mr. Waters and Mr. Meisel told The Chronicle.
But even a million-plus dollars of Mellon money can't change human nature. Put people from five different companies (or from different institutions on the same campus) in a room, and it will take some wrangling to get them to agree on anything.
"We knew the first year would be challenging because we have so many procedures and practices to set up," said Steve Maikowski, director of New York University Press, when asked how the American Literatures Initiative is shaping up. Mr. Maikowski's press heads the effort, which also includes the presses of Fordham, Rutgers, and Temple Universities, and the University of Virginia.
Almost every decision—hiring an outside managing editor to oversee the series, settling on an interior book-design template, agreeing on a copy-editing budget and standards—involved a debate. "I knew this was going to be the toughest part because you're asking presses to give up proprietary control and make compromises in some areas," the NYU Press director said.
But real work has begun on what Mr. Maikowski calls the "transformative elements" of the collaboration. For instance, the series' managing editor has begun to build "a very exciting Web-based production model where each of these manuscripts can be viewed by each managing editor" at each press. That may be operational by summer's end. And they're experimenting with how to tag content better, so that the presses can use it in a variety of ways later.
It took a while for the member presses to round up books for the series. About seven have been signed so far. (The goal is five a year for each press.) The partners are still working out a joint marketing plan.
"The collaborative learning curve is very steep in these first six or seven months," Mr. Maikowski said, "but it's flattened."
At the University of North Carolina, where the press leads a Mellon-financed, intra-university project on the "Long Civil Rights Movement," the collaborators have big dreams.
So far, enthusiasm has carried the day. "It's been a very open kind of conversation," said Sylvia K. Miller, the project's director. Ms. Miller came aboard in early June. The group's first goal is to inventory all the campus resources that could be included in the project. An interdisciplinary conference is in the works for next spring. There's talk of starting an online, multimedia journal.
"And on top of that—this is early days, so we're not sure what form this will take, but we all like the idea—some kind of publishing platform on which scholars in this field could do research, especially in some of the primary-source material that we would like to make available or at least discoverable through a search," Ms. Miller said. "This publishing platform would be an environment in which scholars could work together and converse about what they're doing and conduct formal and informal peer review."
As for how the press would benefit from all of this, Ms. Miller said that "we see all these ideas as feeding into developing ideas for the press. We're not necessarily going to leave print publication behind, but we have different directions in which we may move."
Hands On, Hands Off
Many who have worked with Mellon on the new grants describe the foundation as "hands on" during the application process. But after it accepts a proposal, the foundation does step back. "They made it clear that they were not micromanagers," Mr. Maikowski said. "Mellon is leaving it up to the presses to drive and direct and manage their projects and initiatives."
The Chronicle suggested to Mr. Waters and Mr. Meisel that Mellon's current grant-making strategy could be viewed as a sort of social engineering, with university-press culture as its subject.
"The phrase 'social engineering' suggests that the Mellon Foundation decides what should happen and somehow guides grant recipients to do something they would not necessarily do (or want to do) on their own," the foundation officers told The Chronicle in response. "Mellon's grant-making programs sometimes encourage change but not without extensive consultation with potential grantees and only with institutions that decide they want to follow a certain course by responding to an invitation to apply for a grant."
Mellon appears determined to stay the collaborative course, with program staff members authorized to "seek high-quality proposals in each area" through next year. Another call for proposals went out in May, with winners to be announced at the end of the summer.
Asked how the foundation would decide whether the collaborative grants had been money well spent, Mr. Waters and Mr. Meisel told The Chronicle that they would "be looking for evidence of improvements in the number and quality of monographs that are produced, as well as in the production and distribution of monographs." In the intra-university partnerships, they want to see "evidence of sustained capacity of the presses to support the academic priorities of their home universities."
Time, as they say, will tell. "It's been a learning process for a number of us," Mr. Maikowski said. "But in the end, the prospect of everything we can accomplish—that can create some sustainability—is what we're hoping for."
Mellon Foundation Assesses the State of Scholarly Publishing - Chronicle.com
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